[pct-l] Who eats what on the trail??

[Don Billings]

Great information, Scott. Thanks for that.

Feel free to post other discoveries on your hiking food strategy.

Don



----- Original Message ----
From: Scott Bryce <sbryce at scottbryce.com>
To: PCT MailingList <pct-l at backcountry.net>
Sent: Wed, September 8, 2010 12:25:44 PM
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Who eats what on the trail??

On 9/8/2010 12:05 PM, greg mushial wrote:
> On the trail, I've been eating mostly finger foods, cliffbars and Mountain
> House dehydrated, bought in #10 cans...  but I must admit, they are getting
> "old", ie, eating has become something one does, not looks forward to. My
> question is: how many people are making their own trail foods (dehydrated,
> and/or, vacuum sealed)?

This has only been trail tested for 150 miles, but....

I made out an excel spread sheet that showed general categories of 
foods, average calories per ounce for that category, the amount I planed 
to carry per day, and the total weight/calories. I was shooting for 2 
1/2 pounds of food and 5000 calories per day. By putting this in a 
spread sheet, I could vary the amounts until I came up with a 
combination that worked. Each category included several foods for 
variety. I ate finger foods during the day, and had one home 
cooked/dehydrated/vacuum packed meal per day. I had a total of 10 
dehydrated meals on the menu, so I would not get tired of eating the 
same thing every day. I prepackaged 150 of these meals.

The break down looked something like this:

Dinner: 110 cal/oz 8 oz/day 880 cal
Cookie/Cracker: 140 cal/oz 10 oz/day 1400 cal
Chocolate: 140 cal/oz 4 oz/day 560 cal
Nuts: 160 cal/oz 8 oz/day 1280 cal
Energy Bar: 110 cal/oz 8 oz/day 880 cal
Gatorade mix: 110 cal/oz 1.5 oz.day 165 cal
TOTALS:        39.5 oz/day 5165 cal/day


Of course, this is flexible, and since the calories per oz are averages, 
the total calories would vary every day. Once could supplement from 
hiker boxes or grocery stores along the way. Or just leave the cookies, 
crackers and bars, etc. out from any resupply that is going to a place 
that has a grocery store.

There were some lessons learned.

If you vacuum pack cookies or crackers, they will break.

If you vacuum pack vanilla wafers, you will have one solid mass of 
cookie when you open them.

Vacuum packed fig bars are unappetizing.

Just because you like it at home does not mean you will like it on the 
trail. I bought 300 of one particular bar, and lost all desire to eat 
them by day 5.

Vacuum packed meals don't pack into a bear canister very well.

When you vacuum pack dehydrated meals, bits of the food are likely to 
puncture the bag. I weighed my dehydrated meals into zip lock bags, then 
vacuum packed the zip lock and contents. The idea was to rehydrate the 
meals in the zip lock. I discovered before I left that nearly every zip 
lock bag had pin holes in it and would not hold water. My only solution 
at that time was to toss in an extra empty zip lock for each day on the 
trail so that each punctured zip lock could be put into a new zip lock 
before adding water. This was a workable, but less than optimum solution 
to the problem.

HTH
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