Repackaging Backpacking Food, Our menu, and Pilot Biscuits

I've been busy getting our resupply box off to Crater Lake for our Oregon PCT segment in a few weeks. As long as I label it appropriately, I can include isobutane fuel. For the full story on mailing fuel, see Our pct page writeup.

We've also learned a few more tricks on lightening our pack and reducing the volume. For weight, we have replaced dried fruit with tasty but pricey freeze dried freeze dried fruit. The original brand cut the serving size. We need at least 20 grams for a snack. An equivalent is Brothers 7 Variety freeze dried fruit . Pricey, but good.. You can get them at a discount at Amazon.




We've gained space by repackaging the freeze dried dinners, the gorp and the jerky using Handi-Vac quart bags that we found in the supermarket. It is a hand sized vacuum sealer with special bags. About every seven bags or so, the seal fails due to some problem such as a sharp jerky point, or noodle point puncturing the bag, so check them a couple hours after sealing.

As long as I'm talking about food, some more tips. Those snack sized ziplocks used for kid's lunches are useful. I use them to prepare daily portions of breakfast cereal, Tang, etc. I don't like generating the extra trash, but the multi day bags frequently develop problems that cause leaks after several days of use. Having the daily portions already measured out saves quite a bit of time.

When we measure out the daily Tang (2 liters, 1 per person per day), we add 1/2 tsp. table salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp lite salt for electrolyte replacement, from Kaiser's 1994 health handbook. However, I just found out that they have withdrawn this recommendation and We switched to Nuun tablets. Too bad. The one above that we have been using and will use for this trip gives the Tang a fizzy zing and improves the taste.

Re breakfast - We use normal high density cold cereal - i.e. grape nuts, cheerios, granola - snack baggies hold one serving. Also use some instant oatmeal. One serving is two packets, one regular and one flavored. If you use two flavored, by the end of the trip you will never eat that flavor again. We don't bother to premix the Milkman, just dump the desired amount of powder on the cereal, stir & add hot or cold water. Most thru hikers just eat a bar and start walking, but we take the extra hour for a hot beverage, multivitamins and cereal.

Mid morning snack - A poptart wafer, i.e. one two wafer packet for the two of us. Sometimes we also have the freeze dried fruit packet. Otherwise the fruit at noon. Afternoon snack is the same.

Gorp - we munch about every hour at a break. The ratio is 2 mixed salted nuts to 1 raisins and 1 regular M&Ms, so for 2 people 8 days, 16 oz nuts, 8 oz raisins, 8 oz M&Ms. Sometimes we add sunflower seeds - shelled, etc.

Lunch - 1 cracker equivalent per person, 1/2 oz jerky, one bar. On the bars, we look for high calories per weight, but have a variety. The cracker equiv is about 1 1/2 oz and varies from canned potato chips, to stoned wheat crackers to cheese and peanut butter sandwich crackers. We get into food a little more on our backpack45 food page.

The cracker equivalent term came because about 20 years ago we used pilot biscuits, which were big, hard and almost indestructible. These are no longer available. You can order things called pilot biscuits from the internet, but they are flimsy imitations of the original.

UPDATE 3/4/2011 - finished the pct last fall. Some changes in above. Milkman not available anymore, but Nido can be found and tastes better. Instead of Tang, we just buy assorted electrolyte packets, chews, and EmergenC packets, just to get a variety of flavors.

An aside, we've been getting some unattributed taking of blog content so inserting © 2009 backpack45.com