Anything and Everything: Trail Foods

Here’s a list of foods that I really enjoyed (at one point or another) while hiking the trail. I tried to break them down between breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner. Remember, when in doubt, think high calories and high fat!

My favorite breakfast items:

• instant coffee
• peanut M&M’s
• cake frosting (my favorite breakfast/snack on the trail!)
• Reese’s Cups
• Pop Tarts

Some lunchtime deliciousness:

• pepperoni (pre-sliced in the pizza prep section)
• peanut butter, Nutella, and butter sandwiches… yum!
• summer sausage
• Parmesan cheese wedge
• Triscuits with cream cheese
• Tahini sandwiches (straight-up sesame tahini on a flat bread…yes!)

Snacks:

• homemade trail mix including Gold Fish crackers, dried sour cherries, honey roasted peanuts, and butterscotch chips
• Combos snack crackers saved the day!
  
• Sour Patch Kids
• Sunbelt granola bars (available at Dollar General stores near the Little Debbies) like coconut fudge and chocolate chip!
• peanut butter
• Nutella
• Little Debbie snack cakes (taste great, lots of fat, be careful how you pack them)
• sandwich flat bread (available on the bread isle; they keep nicely inside the pack)

Favorite dinners:

• Pasta Sides from Knorr (all of them were delicious and they cooked really easily)
• Ramen Noodles
• Kraft Mac’n’Cheese
• Bear Creek Soup–these are dried soups; potato is the best!
• Old El Paso Tortilla Stuffers– SO AMAZING, HEARTY, and DELICIOUS! Who doesn’t want to eat steak on the trail?
• Idahoan Instant Mashed Potatoes
• Stove Top Stuffing (mix it together with mashed potatoes, so good!)

Miscellaneous:

• Gatorade G2 Single Serve powder mix
• hot chocolate packets
• Mio drink mix, really any powdered drink mix is a blessing!
• McFlurry spoon from McDonald’s…yes a McFlurry spoon. Don’t waste money on stupid trail spoons–they all break and are expensive!
• butter- yes, sticks of it! (This is dependent upon the weather–use caution in summer months)
• cream cheese-                               ”                    ”                   “

Just Plain Desperate (Foods I started to carry towards the end of my hike…just because I could!):

• McDonald’s McDoubles keep nicely for up to 3 days.. a nice hamburger on the top of a mountain summit is amazing.
• frozen pizzas cooked in town or leftover pizza from dinner; these keep very nicely for a few days.

What other hikers were eating:

• Lilly, my hiking buddy, carried a wheel of Vermont white cheddar. Lilly is a vegetarian and this was a major source of protein for her.
• Tuna; the stuff in the aluminum packets (I just hate tune!).
• Quinoa was very common on the trail to be mixed into lots of different meals.
• Hummus mix, just add water!
• oatmeal; I never really craved this though
• Jelly for PB&J sandwiches

A New Challenge

Not 10 days ago, marked the 3rd anniversary of the completion of my 2011 Appalachian Trail thru hike. In the last 3 years I have accomplished a lot; I had officially moved out of Florida and settled down in Asheville, completed a 3rd college degree, and slated myself into a new full time career as a paramedic. It’s been a busy 3 years! Although, I must admit…that I have been closely watching my fellow hikers from the AT class of 2011 going out and accomplishing some amazing things! I have watched several hikers complete the coveted Triple Crown (AT, PCT, CDT), go on to hike the Florida Trail, and just for kicks–get another PCT thru hike in. It’s been agonizing to say the least, watching enviously as my friends continue in their adventures while I have sat at home studying for countless hours. I am grateful for the new direction my life is going in and very excited to have found my calling in paramedicine, but the call of the long-distance hike is making me ravenous! I have been longing for the day when I quit my apartment lease and put my few prized possessions in a hiking pack just to embark on another multi-month-long journey through the wilderness.

Fortunately, my moving to Asheville has helped in staving off some of this “wander lust.” Living in Asheville puts me within distance of several amazing trails, national forests, and of course, the Appalachian Trail. Come weekend, you can ask any of my friends or coworkers where I am…not at home they’ll tell you, but out in the woods! I am very fortunate to have so many great trails so close to home. I am even lucky enough to get in a few mulit-day hikes every now-and-then. Still, my desire to throw it all away and leave the complexities of the real world haunts me! And…I’m running out of new trails to explore! It gets a little tiring to hike the same stretch of trail over and over again. That being said, I have been looking for new ways to fulfill this desire to get into the woods and spend a little time in the solitude of the wilderness. Just when I thought I had reached the end of my creativity and local tails to hike, I discovered something interesting!

Just this week, my family and I went on vacation to Townsend, TN; it’s a favorite spot of ours just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We have been going to Townsend for years now and exploring the National Park with great interest. On this particular vacation, we would drive to-and-fro throughout the park and I was amazed at how many trails there are. Everywhere you go there are trails leading all over. Even on the side of the road, a driver must pass 30-40 trails. I was blown away by the amount of footage one could explore. It occurred to me that I had only just scratched the surface on exploring the true depth and beauty of the park. Even my thru hike on the AT showed me a side of the national park that most people will never see, but there was so much more waiting beyond that. My curiosity grew each day as we passed all the different trails; some of them almost looked abandoned and forgotten. Each trail was a gateway to a mysterious place just calling for exploration. One day, I asked my parents to stop at the Sugarlands Center so I could find out just how many trails existed inside the park. I was amazed when the ranger replied “too many to count!” He did, however, give me a detailed map with every, single trail in the park. Oh man!!! That map was incredible and just enough to give me some new ideas. 

Later that night we were relaxing in the hotel. A quick Google search of “how many trails are in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park?” revealed something very interesting. The first link to pop up was for the Great Smoky Mountains 900 Miler Club. Intriguing! A little exploration revealed a group of individuals that had made it their goal to hike all 900 miles of designated trail located within the park. 900 miles of trail you say? Wow! That’s a lot of unexplored territory for a girl who really likes to hike! I think this is something I might have to take on!

That was it–my new goal! I am excited to announce that I will now be working away at the 900 Miler Club. With the aid of my sweet MSR tent and the ability to sleep in the back of my truck, I will be spending my free time at the GSMNP chiseling away at this great goal. Each stretch of days-off, I will head towards the park, setup camp at one of the designated camps, and take-off and up the trail. I’m not sure how long this will take, but I am looking forward to every moment of it. I’m excited to truly understand that beauty of the GSMNP, beyond what the average tourist sees each day. There’s also that whole weight-loss and getting back into shape thing…that’s not so bad either!

It occurred to me that I had already polished off several miles of trail on the list when I thru hiked…71 miles to be exact! So for now, I have exactly 829 miles left to go!

So come back and visit my journal for updates and stories of my next long-distance, somewhat segmented endeavor into the wilderness.

Regards,
Fuzzy Navel

 

Feeling the Affects

For several years, I dreamed of the day that I would leave to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. I remember plotting and planning, waiting in excitement for the moment that I would begin walking north from Springer Mountain, GA. My hopes and dreams  for this tremendous journey did not stop there, but continued to grow and evolve as I journeyed north for 4.5 months towards Maine.

I encountered many things, some good, some bad, but never did I come to the point when I could go no further–when some outside force would step-in to say “Sorry! Proceed no further! The Appalachian Trail is CLOSED.” Well folks, as of yesterday,  sections of the the Appalachian Trail (as well as, CDT and PCT) will be closed because of the government shut-down.

One of my favorite aspects of hiking the AT was the utter solitude and obliviousness from the world around me. I have never been a fan of watching the news or reading the papers, so the AT only provided me with an even greater blanket of security from the shambles of the political world. But, today I realized that the impact of this governmental shutdown affected me in more ways than I had first thought. It taught me that even the government and politics could impact the area of my life that I thought was free and secluded–my place in the wilderness. I remember a time when I was very early on in the trail. I was resupplying in Helen, GA. When a friend came to pick me up from Dick’s Creek Gap, she told me of the horrors of the tidal wave in Japan and the subsequent nuclear meltdown; she told me about the capture of Osama bin Laden. I listened in horror as she detailed all the chaotic events that had taken place during my first week in the woods. I remember thinking how grateful I was that I could hike and be oblivious to all those crazy events.

I share all of that to say this– Imagine that you, like me, have been waiting and planning to thru-hike one our nation’s beautiful long-distance trails. Imagine that you are weeks and months into your amazing journey and you arrive to a place that is barred, closed, off-limits. Right now, hundreds of South Bounders are making their way to GA from ME. Many of them will never get to experience the beauty of Shenandoah National Park or The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They won’t get to see the beauty atop Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies or see families of black bear rolling around the countryside in the Shenandoas. Instead, they will be forced to find alternate routes, arrange shuttles, and spend exorbitant amounts of money trying to navigate their way around these massive sections of the AT.

We cannot forget the nation’s other long-distance trails: Pacific Crest Trail and Continental Divide Trail–they too meander through many of our nation’s spectacular national parks. Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite are just a few of the parks that will affect these other trails.

People hike these long-distance trails for many different reasons, but the one thing that unites us is sought in the solitude and quiet of the wilderness. There is a freedom that one experiences when they roam about on no-man’s land with few possessions on their back and no worries about paying bills, keeping the gas-tank full, or running to appointments.

However, in the next days, hikers will be moving about the trail and will at some point reach one of these pivotal “road blocks” that will impact them in more ways than they realize. The government shut-down will have then reached the farthest, most remote corners of the wilderness. Even without internet, electricity, radios, or mass communication channels–the shut-down will have made its case all-the-way out in the deep, quiet of the woods.