Trail Snacks

Story Break

Trail Snacks

Lydia Pudzer

I don’t know what all this packbacking stuff is about. I never went outdoors much. The church picnic on the 4th of July was always about good enough for me, and I don’t see why it isn’t good enough for the rest of them but some people are like that, mostly the boys. They got to have their outdoor stuff and hunting and all. Now some girls do it too if you can believe that, but none of mine they wouldn’t. The church basement was good enough for me.

I guess I had a good life. My sister Esther and I are twins. I married Reiny and then Esther got ahold on his brother Rex and she married him. Our maiden name was Schmidt. We didn’t want to change it especially to something like Pudzer. What kind of a name is that? I had to laugh at him the first time I met him. I never would of thought. Reiny and Rex came from a big family but there was only the two of us in ours, Esther and me.

I heard them others talking once, Reiny’s family, talking about Reiny and Rex, calling them the Schmidt brothers going around by the nose because they married my sister and me and we shaped them into line. Well we had to, they weren’t quite right at first. I don’t know what’s wrong with them people sometimes. Inlaws. None of them is quite right, I can tell you that, but we got the men and we bent them straight. We made good men out of them. We keep them shaped up. They couldn’t do it without us. I don’t care what they say.

Overall I guess Reiny has been a good husband. He listens. Sometimes I make some food for him to take along when he goes out to do his stuff. It seems to do him good and I want to keep him for awhile yet. He works hard all day and when he goes out hiking he works at that too. You won’t catch me out there like that, not even, but he needs good food when he’s out doing that whatever so I send him off with a little something every now and then.

One of his favorites is gravy. It sticks. All-American food, like you can’t find anymore in this country if you know what I mean. It’s all changing but my family still eats good. Here’s a good gravy recipe. Don’t forget it. You can eat it with crackers on on bread, hot or cold, or right from the Tupperware.

Handy All-American Gravy

• 1 cup beef fat
• 1 cup pork sausage drippings or bacon drippings
• 1 cup flour
• 2 cups skim milk
• salt and pepper to taste

Add salt and pepper to the fat and flour in a large skillet over medium high heat, stirring all the time. Continue stirring until brown. Reduce heat and add milk, stirring constantly. Stir until thickened. Add water as needed. Pretty good over just about anything except chocolate ice cream.

For snacks you can make this next stuff. I found it in a book for dogs, but I tried it on my husband and some kids, and they thought it was pretty good too. Anyway, now I make some extra for them too, every time around when I make treats for the dog. You can give them a little reward when they do good, just like the dog. Works for either one. I got them all trained now.

Apple Cinnamon Obedience Bits

• 4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 small apple, grated
• 1 1/3 cups water

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Grate apple and add, with water. Mix and make a dough. Turn out on a lightly floured surface and knead well. Roll out to 1/4 to 1/2-inch thick. Score dough horizontally and vertically to make a grid of 3/4-inch squares. Place the dough on a greased baking sheet and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 hour. Break apart for storage. Feed to husband or dog — they both like it.

This last one is a little bit special. I think I came up with it for hunting season one year. It makes you into a regular guy if you aren’t one already, and it’s kind of spicy too. All those men like the pepperoni sticks too. All of them.

Prune-Pepperoni Trail Bites

• 12 dried pitted prunes
• 2 beef pepperoni sticks
• 1/2 cup dark beer
• 1/4 cup water
• 12 slices bacon

Stuff each prune with a piece of pepperoni stick. Mix beer and water and pour over prunes in bowl. Let stand, stirring now and then, until prunes are plump, about 2 hours. Wrap bacon around prunes and pin with toothpicks.

Broil in electric oven about 4 inches from burner, turning once, until bacon crisps, 10 or 12 minutes. You can wrap each one separate and send them out with the boys for a quick snack on the trail or when they’re doing some kind of yard work or farm work or whatever.

Make sure they don’t eat too many though.

Solo Backpacking Issues

Solo Backpacking Issues

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad. — Samuel Johnson

So, you’re a loner then? Reminds me of my mother. Not her, exactly, but what she thought of me. Every time the news ran a story of another nice, quiet, law-abiding guy without a whole lot of friends who went nuts, took a gun to work, and murdered everyone, she said she thought of me.

If there’s time we can get back to mass murder a little later, but right now let’s think about some of the practical aspects of traveling solo.

For one thing, you have to carry everything yourself. You and you alone. You’re completely dependent on the integrity of your equipment and your skills to deal with any and all problems. Your pack may rip. You may spill fuel or food. You can fall and get hurt. You can get lost. Something big may bite you.

Then what?

Well, we always get back to the personal basics: smarts and experience. And equipment basics: weight, size, complexity, cost, mechanical reliability and repairability. And stove basics: heat output, durability, fuel availability, stability during use, toxicity of fuel, and general danger.

Traveling alone just means that you do it all. Cost might be an issue, but then again, if your life depends on something, you’ll buy the best you need, regardless of cost. For a solo hiker, weight, size, complexity and reliability become a lot more important.

Alcohol, solid fuel and wood stoves shine. You can’t get anything lighter or simpler, and if you make it yourself you can make a stove that’s at least as good as anything coming out of a factory.

When you’re out alone you need to be focused. You need a fumble-proof stove in the morning when you’re stiff and cold, an easy-to-use stove during the middle of the day when you just want a quick cup of something warm, and a hot stove in the evening while you’re settling in for the night. Because you’re carrying everything yourself, you need the lightest option available.

I counted all the items that I carry on a typical backpacking trip. There are about 55 of them. If I add just one ounce to each item (28g), my pack ends up weighing almost three and a half pounds (1.6kg) more. Add two ounces per item and it’s seven pounds (3.2kg). I can feel that. So can you. It doesn’t sound like that much until you heft it. I’ve gotten tuned in enough that I can feel the difference after filling a 25-ounce water bottle.

But go the other way. Cut your base pack weight down to 15 pounds, then cut an average of one ounce off everything, and your base weight is now down to 11 and a half pounds. That’s about a 23 percent difference. Do it again and you’re down to eight pounds. That’s about a 30 percent difference. The lighter you go the harder it is to shave off more weight, but the more dramatic the difference is, and the proportional change too, so after you start to lighten up, switching to a light stove and cook set can make a real difference in itself.

And when you’re 15 miles from the nearest road, halfway through your dream trip, all alone out there somewhere, you’ll have lots of strength and endurance in reserve. If something happens and you need to travel fast you can. You won’t be under a killer pack, groaning, leaning and stumbling with each and every step. You’ll be in charge.

Exercises

1. Get some more friends. You’re not really that ugly. “Things in mirror are prettier than they appear,” as the saying goes, but of course you may be an exception, so get a second opinion if possible.
2. Pick one of your new friends and have him or her climb onto your back. Then try to walk around. Yeah, right. Now you’re catching on. Humps become you.
3. Make a list of everything you need to take backpacking with you, under any and all circumstances. Since you’ve already weighed it, you can write the weight next to each item. Keep this handy as a checklist for your trips. You’ll find that it’s now a lot harder to forget things you need to take. Once you do this, you can give up some of your memory by removing unneeded parts of your brain, for even bigger weight savings.
4. Sure you’re going to die, but you need to do that every now and then to keep in shape. Don’t worry about it. Plan ahead, be smart, and you will delay that inevitable moment. Meanwhile you can relax. Breathe deeply. Everything will be OK. Use the time to scan overhead for incoming asteroids.

Story Break: Where’s The Esbit?

Story Break

Where’s The Esbit?

Joe “Dirty Maggot” Periwinkle

Lots of people use fuel tabs. They’re not all Esbit but that’s what people call them. I have to give it to them on the rock simple scale. Nothing simpler for outertainment than just sitting there and pounding rocks together. Good enough for some but not for me. Call me crazy.

Makes my brain hurt just thinking about Esbit. I mean what could be better than a pocket full of sugar cubes and you light one whenever you need some heat? Some day somebody’s going to get it right but I haven’t quite seen it yet.

Simplest stove you can think of — get a length of steel ribbon like they use to bundle together a load of two-by-fours or some other kind of lumber at the lumberyard. Or maybe you can find some at a construction site.

Say your pot is six inches across. Take a 19-inch piece of the steel band, measure seven inches in from each end and bend it towards you into a right angle bend, then measure two inches in from each end and do the same.

Now you have a square five inches on a side open on the front side (a one-inch gap). Your pot should sit right down on it and at each corner there’ll be a little gap where the square corner peeks out from under the round pot.

Cut a piece of sheet aluminum out of an oven liner and put that down on the ground then put the steel band on that. Light an Esbit tablet and put that in the center then put your pot on top, now you have a stove and a pot support and a reflector all in one. Just protect the stove from wind and chill with a wind screen and you’re set.

I heard about this. The Esbit people say that you need the pot down low to the flame, and this is the simplest setup I’ve ever heard of.

I tried some fooling around at home with fuel tablets but they didn’t do too well for me, even sheltered from the elements. One tablet sort of almost brought 16 ounces of water to a boil and two tablets together didn’t do any better, just burned faster.

Here’s why I left it there: number one it didn’t get the water hot enough, number two I got a thick gummy coating on the bottom of my pot that took about two hours to scrape off, and number three, these tablets cost about 50 cents each. I assumed one would be enough and for me it wasn’t, nor were two.

If alcohol is 20 dollars a gallon and you use an ounce for each meal (which is a lot), and you cook two meals a day, then you’re going to spend about 30 cents a day for fuel versus two dollars a day for Esbit, assuming you use one tablet to cook and one to make a hot drink with, every meal, and you can get it to work better than I did. Some people do.

Anyway, that’s how I see it. That’s why we’re not taking up fuel tablets here too much.

Using for Long Trips

Using for Long Trips

The westerner, normally, walks to get somewhere that he cannot get in an automobile or on horseback. Hiking for its own sake, for the sheer animal pleasure of good condition and brisk exercise, is not an easy thing for him to comprehend. – The WPA Guide to Utah

For some people a long backpacking trip is a four-day weekend. For others it’s a 7800-mile (12,558 km) walk across the United States on the Sea to Sea Trail. Just between you and me and just for right now let’s call it a trip between seven and 14 days. That’s about as far as a person can go without resupply. In other words, if you travel longer than that you won’t be able to carry all the food and fuel you need, and you’ll have to resupply.

That seems like a nice cutoff.

Think of time as distance. We don’t really care if you hike 300 miles in 14 days or just 25 miles. You’ll still be carrying your food and fuel. You’ll need to eat more if you really hoof it out there, but not a huge amount more, so the weights will be roughly equivalent. For most people food weight amounts to maybe one and a half pounds a day way on the low end to about two pounds per day (of dry food – zero water content). Given 14 days, you’ll be carrying roughly 21 to 35 pounds of food (10 - 16kg).

Assume that you use an alcohol stove and are frugal with it. You just heat water and add that hot water to your food. You heat some more water for tea or instant coffee. We’ll call it one ounce of fuel per day, with a quarter-ounce safety margin. For a 14 day trip we’ll round this off to 18 fluid ounces. A fluid ounce of denatured alcohol weighs 0.8 ounces, so this gives us 14.5 ounces of weight. Compare that to a three-ounce compressed gas stove with a four-fluid-ounce fuel container weighing eight ounces, for a total of 11 ounces. Throw in a quarter ounce for the alcohol stove and a hair for a pot support and you’ve got 15 ounces for alcohol versus 11 ounces for the canister stove.

Pretty close overall, with the advantage obviously going to the canister stove. It’s more convenient but larger. It has moving parts. Carrying a spare stove would add another three ounces and from $50 to $150 for cost. If the fuel canister isn’t full, you either leave it at home, or take it plus a full one, or two or three partially-full ones.

Take another alcohol stove as a spare, and add another quarter ounce. For a solid fuel tablet setup, you can throw in a few more tabs, and use rocks to support your cooking pot – no pot support needed. Wood fires serve as a safety backup for any kind of stove.

Speaking of wood, you can make a four or five ounce wood burning stove, or go all the way with one of Nimblewill Nomad’s Little Dandy stoves, at about six ounces, folds flat, too). Once more, the weight of fuel is nonexistent. You can burn as much as you want and don’t have to carry any fuel at all.

Any commercially-made stove with moving parts is subject to repair or adjustment, in case you need to be reminded again. If you have to field strip it and fiddle with anything, there is always the chance of losing a part or two. This isn’t likely, and it’s not common, but there is a chance there. This is yet one more reason why simplicity might pay off.

OK, going for two weeks with an alcohol stove requires a relatively large amount of fuel. One way to manage this is to divide the fuel between two bottles, so if one spills or gets punctured, the other is still intact. You will remain short of fuel, but you won’t lose all of it all at once. Since the fuel (for grain alcohol or ethanol, anyway) is almost totally non-toxic, a leak isn’t a health threat on top of an accident, and the fuel won’t explode. Methanol (wood alcohol) is a little pricklier but still relatively benign, especially compared to white gas.

Here’s the final point. Say you compare an alcohol setup with a canister stove using the numbers above. You have a total 15 ounce weight for alcohol and 11 ounces for the canister stove, as stated (425 v. 312g). But that isn’t the whole picture, because you’ll be using up fuel as you go. That picture is only a snapshot for the first day. By the end of your trip you can expect to be just about out of alcohol.

Say you have one ounce of alcohol left. The weight will be 0.25 ounces for the stove, maybe one ounce for the pot support, and 0.75 ounces for the fuel bladder, plus 0.8 ounces for the leftover fuel. Total: 2.8 ounces (79g).

Now the canister stove: starting weight, 11 ounces. Using 0.2 ounces of fuel per day, you cut off a total of 2.8 ounces over 14 days, leaving you with 8.2 ounces (232g) to carry all the way to the end. It’s a 5.4 ounce (153g) difference.Thinking in rough practical terms, it’s a half pound difference.

Big snorking deal, right?

But here’s another way to look at it. The 5.4-ounce difference is about half the weight of the canister stove/fuel combination, or about a 50% weight reduction. Apply that to some of your other gear, say shelters, for example. Instead of carrying a six pound tent you’re suddenly carrying a three-pounder. Same with your pack, or sleeping bag. Cut the four pound pack back to a two pound pack. Ditch your three pound synthetic-fill sleeping bag for a much warmer 1 ½ pound down bag.

Apply this thinking all the way through, and compare starting a long trip with a pack of 30 pounds base weight and 25 pounds of consumables (55 pounds total) to a 15 pound pack plus 25 pounds of consumables (40 pounds total). That’s a real difference. After learning your way into ultralight backpacking and making some careful food choices you could start with a 10 pound pack and 20 pounds of food, for a total pack weight of 30 pounds. Anyone can feel the difference between a 30 pound pack and a 55 pound pack. Even dead people. It’s a real difference. And it is possible. It might even mean the difference between going backpacking and not.

Is that not inspiring?

Exercises

1. Think about hiking the Sea To Sea Trail, 7800 miles east to west across the United States, or about the Appalachian Trail, or the Continental Divide Trail, or the Pacific Crest Trail. Buy a couple of Lynne Whelden’s videos. Read some books. Try not to sell your house and take off immediately.
2. Take a longer trip than you have before. Be careful. Plan ahead. Think. Get good maps, and preferably travel with some friends. Go light.
3. Weigh all your gear. Once you do that you’ll know where you are. You can’t improve unless you know you know where you’re starting from.
4. Take care, be kind, and try to live a good life. We’re in your corner. Don’t forget to buy a lottery ticket and put us in your will, just in case that asteroid comes visiting this weekend.