Some Backpacking Recipies & Gear Lists
Friday, 11. July 2008, 05:09:26
When I hiked the south half of the John Muir Trail (see my blog post archive) in 2003, my preparations included careful measuring & trials of various homemade backpacking foods. The following blog is a table of all the experimenting I did. I put it together rather quickly and my notes weren't good enough to know which recipies were the best and which needed improvements. So, you'll need to do some experimenting on your own, but these should give you a place to start. For all my recipies, all you need to do is add about 2 cups of boiling water & let it sit, covered, for a minute or two. All the recipies were made from items that can be bulk purchased, so are much less expensive than pre-packaged, freeze-dried backpacking foods. I have to admit, the calorie intake for these foods is pretty low for the amount of activity required, so if you're trying to loose weight it'll be good, but if not then take more or maybe take a stick of butter and add a spoonful to each meal. I was hungry & lost weight, so I prolly should have taken more food.
This was a 10-day trip over 140 miles at high elevation (started south of Mount Whitney and ended at Florence lake). My hiking partner and I split the meals, so we each made 5 dinners each. The quantities listed in my recipies are for 1 person. Read the "General Info" section for some other details.
The second part of the blog below is a nearly complete list of stuff I took, including some item weights. This was a fairly light weight trip, but not the crazy lightweight that's popular these days. We took a tarp instead of a tent and fortunately had good weather so we didn't even use the tarp.
Please let me know if you find anything good here, if you have any improvements or suggestions, or if you have trouble reading the table below.
This was a 10-day trip over 140 miles at high elevation (started south of Mount Whitney and ended at Florence lake). My hiking partner and I split the meals, so we each made 5 dinners each. The quantities listed in my recipies are for 1 person. Read the "General Info" section for some other details.
The second part of the blog below is a nearly complete list of stuff I took, including some item weights. This was a fairly light weight trip, but not the crazy lightweight that's popular these days. We took a tarp instead of a tent and fortunately had good weather so we didn't even use the tarp.
Please let me know if you find anything good here, if you have any improvements or suggestions, or if you have trouble reading the table below.
For two years, fellow Socorro-ites and friends Tanja and James had been telling stories about their cave discovery and exploration trips in the mountains of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. This most recent discovery began when their caving team, incuding Yvonne, Mark, and Adam, were led by some sheep herding girls to a furiously blowing hole as big round as a grapefruit. They were excited by the blowing wind, which normally signals large volumes of underground spaces, and they excavated it to a 2' by 2' opening. Their team descended a few drops and ran out of rope, eagerly peering down the continuing shaft. The following year they returned and droped the cave to approx. 420m (1,345') depth and again ran out of rope.
This year, carrying in over 600m of rope (for rigging safety lines and rappels and replacing old rope), we added an additional 40m of depth to a total of 459.1m (1,506'). From the inauscpicious, grapefruit-sized original entrance hole, the cave, called "Soplo del Toro" (Bull's Breath, or "Soplo" for short) is now the 3rd deepest in the Purificacion area (covering a large karst mountainous area where the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosi converge), and only 6m away from being the 2nd deepest. A typical "pushing" trip into the cave took only 2 hrs of descent time; 8-9 hrs of exploration, hammering, drilling, rigging, and surveying; and 7 hrs of climbing back to the surface. The photo to the right shows James ascending the rope. Everything brown in the cave is sticky mud. Half of everything colored white is stickier mud. Ascenders became unreliable when turned into big mud masses.
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