CDT: Hiker fuel

Hiking 3,000 miles is a monumental task. Of course one needs to be physically able and have proper gear in order to succeed. Another important part of the journey is fuel for your body. Hikers tend to gravitate to the same foods - Ramen, tortillas, tuna packs, peanut butter, crackers, granola bars. These items are fine at times and will find thier way into our packs. For our thru-hike, we will try to use foods that are light weight and nutritionally dense. 

What does that mean exactly? Our process is to take the calories of a serving and divide that by the grams (weight of the item). The best options are a four or higher. A fellow thru-hiker put together an extensive spreadsheet of common backpacking foods which is a great help. We also spend a lot of time doing math in the grocery store. 🙃 

The main components of our meals will be protein, carbs and fat. We also want to be sure we get vitamins and minerals in our diet too. 

Protein will come from dehydrated (DH) meats, jerky and nuts.

Carbs will be Ramen, soy noodles, orzo, rice and couscous. 

To add fat to our meals, we will carry a bottle of olive oil and add a squirt to our dinner. 

DH vegetables and fruit will be part of meals to add a vitamin boost. We will also take a daily vitamin.

Before leaving Minneapolis, I assembled meals that The Conductor will ship to us along the route. I put together 67 dinners, 55 lunches and 31 breakfasts. Scoot made 18 sandwich bags of trail mix. We also included various snacks like bars and sesame wafers. We won't receive a box in every town so we will shop local and stick to our cal/gram guideline the best we can. For variety, several store bought DH backpacker meals will be added to the mix.

A typical day of food looks like this:

Protein bar in the A.M.

Breakfast - Granola with nuts, fruit, coconut milk, kreotene

Lunch - Honeystinger waffles with nut butter,  DH fruit 

Dinner - couscous with DH chicken, DH carrots, spices 

Snacks - trail mix

Other - instant coffee,  powdered sports  drink 

The pictures show DH carrots and zucchini (I DH 8 lbs of carrots and 4 lbs of zucchini), one day of food, and 14 days of food before we repackaged it. The video shows the meals assembled in Minneapolis.