alpine lake, high sierras

Earlier in this blog, before Rick and I left for the west coast, I wrote about planing the hike.  I described calculating our caloric needs to determine how far we could go between re-supplies.  All of my information about our food needs, prior to the hike, came from reading the blogs of others.  Neither Rick nor I had been ‘big hikers’.  (NOW we are!)  There had been a  prophetic hike in the White Mountains in New Hampshire in October 2009.  It had been cold; snow flurries during the day and a hard freeze at night.  One night we didn’t bother to cook, stopping after dark, cold and exhausted when the lean-to marked on our map turned out to be a pile of boards with nails.  Dismantled.  So I didn’t think too much of it when we each lost 5 lbs over 3 days.  If I had been looking for clues about the difficulty of consuming enough calories,  there was also a You Tube video.  Two young women were discussing the PCT, their hike recently abandoned after some weeks.  ”At least the trail was good for weight loss, if nothing else.”  They laugh uncontrollably.  It was one of those moments that ‘you had to have been there’ for it to make sense.

I can now say that Rick and I did not plan the food very well.  I had a cavalier attitude about getting enough calories.   Who wouldn’t in 21st century America?  It took more than a month on the trail to learn from other hikers the sheer quantity of food they found necessary.  And every time other hikers described what they ate (and how much) my thought was: I can’t do that, I don’t want to do that.  I’ll just lose the weight.

At the beginning, Rick and I chose not to pre-plan the food; we would buy food at supermarkets in trail towns (we chose these towns at home).  When we stopped for five days in Santa Clarita, CA at the home of my aunt Po, we decided to box up food for the next month and have it mailed to us at Post Offices  in towns nearest the trail.   This is a great system, except we were sloppy.  In the comfort of Po’s dining room we laid out the boxes, marked 7 days, 8 days, 9 days, depending on number of miles between Post Offices.  I suspect that when we shopped in Santa Clarita, I had not been vigilant.  My math must have been vague because I was overwhelmed by the numbers.  I thought, on some general level, we can’t carry this much, so I’ll eat less.  And when it came time to fill the boxes, I lacked precision as well.  I tossed in the same package of tortillas, box of crackers, jar of peanut butter, in every box, whether 7 days or 9.  For our 13 day stretch between Kennedy Meadows and Red’s Meadow, we increased the amounts only slightly.

The point at which we first realized we had too little food was early in the High Sierras when we contemplated a side trip to Mt. Whitney.  It was clear we didn’t have enough food to take an extra day (make a 13 day stretch, 14 days).  We didn’t even have enough food to make it to Red’s Meadow without seriously cutting back.  The nature of carrying all one’s food for a given number of days involves rationing by definition, we weren’t just rationing here, we were deliberately eating less.  Days after we’d chosen not to climb Mt. Whitney, we stopped and counted out every tortilla, every handful of trail mix.  We needed to increase our food supply.  We were fortunate enough to be offered, on several occasions, ‘extra’ food by other hikers. Had we not received these ‘donations’ and picked up unwanted food from hiker boxes, we would have had to get off the trail by hiking many, many miles to obtain more food.

burning calories

Were we ever excessively hungry?  Rick would answer this differently from  I; he was hungrier.  I was hungry only a handful of times, during the week or so when we climbed the high passes starting with Forester Pass.  We knew we had less food than we should have had, so, curious, we began to add up the calories.  There were days when I ate between 1200 and 1700 calories.   Half of that supplied by dinner, at camp. Hiker wisdom says that number should have been 3,500 or more.

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