[pct-l] Plea for Fire Safety 2014

[Diane Soini]

Stoveless works great. What you do is you start rehydrating at the  
meal before the next one. You can rehydrate mountain house and  
anything similar in this way.

For dried potatoes, you probably only need to rehydrate them right  
when you eat them. Otherwise they'll probably soak up all the water  
and leave your other stuff less hydrated.

You can start your oatmeal breakfast the night before complete with  
the milk and dried fruit. It comes out better that way, even if you  
end up cooking it.

For coffee, you can either make a coffee milkshake of some sort or  
you can eat chocolate covered espresso beans. But these will melt in  
hot weather and become chocolate covered espresso bean bark.

It's not just the dry weather you have to worry about. It's the wind  
and single-digit humidity. It's been single digit for weeks now. This  
means that a tiny stray spark can ignite the brush and instantly  
explode into a forest fire before you even know what's happened.

There were many times on the PCT when I could not cook even if I  
wanted to because my stove would have blow away. Sometimes I couldn't  
even set up a tent because of the wind and a few times, rain was  
being blown at 55mph from 3 miles away making finding shelter very  
difficult. TrailHacker and I slept under a boulder on San Jacinto one  
rainy/windy night. And one night I slept in my tent without poles and  
let it beat on me all night over near Mojave Dam. And one night our  
tent was completely disintegrated on Apache Peak so TrailHacker and I  
packed up and retreated down the Spitler Trail at 3am.