This Makes No Sense At All

We are in our annual throes of packing and shipping off resupply food for our PCT hike. This is something I put off and put off, finally having a spending frenzy, getting all the materials, and sorting it out by days for each segment. I wrote about the resupply process last year. In the past we have always had a breakfast bag with all the breakfasts for the segment, a lunch bag, and a supper bag. We have three UrSacks (bear bags of bulletproof and hopefully bearproof material), labeled B L and D . For a normal 6 or 7 day segment, we can get all our food in those three bags. However, there is a lot of counting and measuring involved. Invariably we find some day or some segment where I have miscounted. Either I have been carrying more food than needed, or we end up going on lean rations for some segment. Usually one of each. So, we have stolen the daily bag concept from Ken and Marcia Powers . This year I have a bag for each day with everything for that day. It is much easier to ...

I've been slow getting to this point, but I've got to ship our resupply boxes soon. Since they have isobutane fuel canisters, they have to go ground usps or ups, so I need to allow a couple of weeks to get to Oregon & Washington. Picked up the freeze dried dinners at REI last night when we did a Camino de Santiago talk (see our backpack45.com camino page if that subject interests you). Today we had a long hike planned but Kaiser's dermatology had a cancelled appointment, so scheduled me at 11 to check a new black spot - turned out to be totally harmless - just a sign of aging, but that did break up the day. So, back home for a bag lunch (had already packed it for the hike) and then review the backpack food list and off to the first stop. The Food Mill - our local bulk food store where I can pick from a dozen kinds of granola. Settled on four choices, but still know that after the trip it will be months before I can stand to eat granola again. I check my list. No...

We're trying to start this year's backpacking season with less weight before we put the backpack on. The training regime is not doing it fast enough, so we have resorted to WeightWatchers. If you are not familiar with it, this system gives you points for various kinds of food, and you are limited to a certain number of points per day. The point calculation is a little complex, as the amount of fiber and fat grams in the food make a difference in the number of points. They even go so far as giving you a little sliding calculator, where the fiber grams in a serving reduce the total points, and the number of fat grams increase the points. I'm watching Susan as she is, after the fact, sliding the calculator and reading the horrifying values for the PopTart that we had used for a mid day snack on the morning's hike. My inspiration was, "what if it had more fiber, would the points be less?". That turns out to be true. Each gram of fiber up to 4 grams reduces th...

I'm just finishing up a planning effort, both polishing up our GR 653 Arles to Toulouse info based on completing that trip, and doing the initial Toulouse to Puenta la Reina planning. In all cases, the key document is the spreadsheet in the bottom center of the image. Normally I will use a Google Documents spreadsheet, as I share the info with others. I gather the appropriate guidebooks, and from them build the spreadsheet with names of the stops, and distances between points. To this I add the elevation for each point. Sometimes this is in the guidebooks, other times I have to pull it off of a topo map, or my topo software, or worst case, zooming google maps in terrain mode. I add cumulative distances to my spreadsheet, and with the distances and elevation can do an elevation profile chart with Google charts. Its a little easier to chart if I clone my original spreadsheet, and delete all but the elevations and cumulative distance. An aside, we've been getting some unattribu...