Date: 2017-12-06
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Miles today: 0.0

If you were to eavesdrop on long-distance hikers in an Appalachian Trail shelter in the evening, after people have scarfed down their ramen noodles, pasta, rice, freeze-dried dinner, or instant mashed potatoes, but before the twilight has faded to hiker midnight when all that you would hear would be snores, grunts and the occasional fart, the conversation will invariably turn to food. Do you recall the lyrics of Food, Glorious Food, from Oliver? It could be the hiker anthem:   Is it worth the waiting for?   If we live for eighty four   All we ever get is gruel!   Every day we say our prayer --   Will they change the bill of fare?   Still we get the same old gruel!   There's not a crust, not a crumb can we find,   Can we beg, can we borrow, or cadge,   But there's nothing to stop us from getting a thrill   When we all close our eyes and imagine   Food, glorious food!My dreams on the trail are filled with food, not the beer and pizza of the illustration, but a fresh green salad, an off-the-menu sushi roll made especially for me by Bob at Utamaro in Sarasota, a luscious peach, buttermilk fried chicken, a fluffy cathead biscuit dripping with butter and honey, a Willamette Valley Pinot Noir . . .  You get the idea, and by now, probably have culinary visions of your own dancing in your head. We lust for, we covet that which we do not have, and for a long-distance hiker, that means food, both in quantity and quality. Sometimes as I¢m hiking along, I¢ll fantasize about coming upon a picnic with all of these things and more, and being invited to join in the feast. Surely some kindly soul will be at the next trailhead to offer me a hot breakfast sandwich and a cup of real coffee. Those things rarely happen, and never when I¢m expecting them.  It¢s usually not until sometime during the second week, after my hiker appetite kicks in, that the dreams and visions begin. I call it The Hunger, always capitalized, a real living being, looming and hulking over me. The Hunger is not easily propitiated and never for long.Why is this? The Mayo Clinic has a handy chart of calories burned during various exercises at http://diet.mayoclinic.org/diet/move/fun-ways-to-burn-calories.  Interpolating for my weight, I burn 524 calories per hour of backpacking. Even limiting my distances for the first couple of weeks, I still burn 3,000 calories hiking, plus my basal metabolic rate of 1,468 calories, for roughly 4,500 calories per day. Initially, my appetite is suppressed and I can¢t eat more than about 3,000 calories.  Accordingly, I start with a daily calorie deficit is about 1,500 calories. It takes cutting 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat (Mayo Clinic again), and my own experience is that I actually lose about 1/2 pound a day. It doesn¢t take long for me to fall below my ideal weight, at which point my body starts screaming, ¢Eat, eat! Mangia, mangia!¢ and The Hunger materializes.After a few weeks, when I¢m up to hiking eight to ten hours a day, my calorie need is closer to 6,000 per day, yet my consumption rises only to about 4,000. What do I actually eat? I¢m ashamed to admit that the following is a typical day¢s diet:Breakfast: 6 slices of pre-cooked bacon on a flour tortilla ¢ 370 caloriesLunch: 4 Tbsp peanut butter and 15 pepperoni slices on a flour tortilla ¢ 730 caloriesDinner: Knorrs noodle side with pouch of tuna in oil ¢ 670 caloriesSnacks: 1 C dried apricots, 1 C peanuts, 4 pieces jerky, 2 Little Debbie Oatmeal Cakes, 1 Snickers, 2 sticks Cheddar cheese ¢ 2,523 caloriesThis totals 4,043 calories, including 205 grams of fat, 156 grams of protein, and 375 grams of carbohydrate. The calories from fat contribute 46% of the total, which is fairly efficient, considering that a gram of fat generates 9 calories, while a gram of protein and carbohydrate each contributes only 4 calories. Sounds pretty awful, doesn¢t it? Let¢s compare it to a McDonald¢s caloric equivalent ¢ Three Big Macs, Three Fries, and Three Chocolate Shakes ¢ a whopping 3,870 calories, 162 grams of fat, 120 grams of protein and 429 grams of carbohydrate. The calories from fat in this belly-busting McDonalds meal is only 40%. There are many variations in my trail diet. A favorite dinner item is half a bag of cheese & spinach tortellini (three portions), with a shaving of cheese and a sprinkling of olive oil. Stove Top stuffing with a can of chicken actually tastes good on the trail, but nowhere else. Teriyaki Rice with Spam is strangely edible. One of my favorite breakfast items, French Toast Pop Tarts, appears to have been discontinued. Bagels and pita, in addition to tortillas, keep well on the trail, but loaf breads are easily crushed. In cooler weather, a tub of cream cheese lasts several days. In general, the harder the cheese, the longer it will keep without refrigeration. A pouch of tuna salad make for an exciting lunch.  I don¢t care for many nutrition bars, but I make an exception for Lemon Zest Luna Bars. Occasionally I buy freeze-dried dinners for variety, and there¢s no limit to what I will carry out of town for that evening¢s meal. I also supplement my diet with certain edible plants, including dandelion greens, ramps, wood sorrel, and stinging nettle leaves (all as potherbs), and I enjoy snacking on the young shoots at the ends of greenbrier vines. They taste like baby asparagus, and if you¢ve ever been caught in a brier thicket, you¢ll appreciate the feeling of taking revenge on a very thorny plant. Wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries are special treats. I personally avoid gathering wild mushrooms, even the ones without poisonous lookalikes.  Food weighs about 1-3/4 to 2 pounds per day, stripped of unnecessary packaging. Along with water, it¢s the heaviest thing in my pack, but quite indispensable. It¢s rare for me to carry more than five days of food, which fits very nicely in my 750 cubic inch bear canister along with my cook set and toiletries. My cook set weighs just shy of one pound, including a four-ounce gas canister with a screw-on stove and a piezo-electric lighter inside a 900-milliliter titanium pot and lid. Especially with the increasing hiker and bear populations, carrying a bear canister seems to me to be the epitome of the sixth and seventh Leave-No-Trace principles: Respect wildlife and be considerate of other visitors. Except for one five-mile stretch in Georgia, bear canisters are not currently required on the Appalachian Trail, but bear-hiker interactions are becoming more common. Many shelters now feature bear boxes, cabling systems, or bear poles, but it strikes me that the onus should be on the hiker and not the maintaining clubs. Bears are very much like us ¢ lazy, opportunistic, and creatures of habit ¢ and no food tastes better than someone else¢s. Please don¢t become a food delivery service for bears!I have tried going without a stove, but I am not happy without a hot meal at the end of a day. After Labor Day in 1997, I hiked stoveless from Harpers Ferry south to Waynesboro, Virginia, to complete Virginia. I took advantage of every wayside (like a drive-in) and resort in Shenandoah National Park, but I was still seriously hungry at the end of my hike. I celebrated in Waynesboro by going to Scotto¢s Italian Restaurant. I lied and told the server that I had been eating nothing but peanut butter and chipmunks for two weeks and asked her to start bringing me food of her choice and not to stop until I did. They were not very busy and she consulted with the kitchen. Garlic bread, stuffed jalape±os, antipasto salad, and eggplant parmigiana with spaghetti quickly vanished down my gullet, helped along by beer and wine. They finally defeated me with an excellent veal saltimbocca over linguini, but still brought me a little spumoni. The entire staff came out, applauded me and presented me with the check ¢ for $25! I was in ecstatic agony walking back to the Quality Inn.  The average weight loss for a male thru-hiker is 30 pounds. With my daily calorie deficit, I would reach that in only two months and be nearing my high school graduation weight. Finding a solution to weight loss is critical for me. I plan to take advantage of every food opportunity near the trail, whether gas station/deli, restaurant, or hot dog stand, and getting into town at least weekly. There are over 500 roads crossing the Appalachian Trail, and each leads somewhere.  Towns represent the chance to clean myself and my clothes, and to sleep in a real bed, but the true joy of visiting a town is to eat and eat and eat, like a hobbit: first breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner and supper.  There are more dining choices now in Gorham, New Hampshire, but in 2000, Friendly¢s was the preferred option. I had an early lunch (elevenses) of a Big Fisherman¢s Platter, a huge mound of fried fish, shrimp, scallops and clams atop french fries, with a dab of cole slaw. As I left the restaurant, a friend who had just hiked in hailed me from across the highway, ¢Have you had lunch yet?¢ I answered, ¢Yes, but I can eat again,¢ and proceeded to order a second seafood platter. Each was merely 1,560 calories. Judicious use of town food serves to limit my weight loss.  Most towns have either a grocery store, a general store, a gas station with a small grocery section, or some place where a hiker can find food to reprovision. Sometimes the pickings are slim, especially if a hoard of hikers has recently passed through, but I¢ve always found sufficient to get me to the next town. I left the unincorporated town of Groseclose in Southwest Virginia with little more than a loaf of Wonder Bread, cans of Spam, Slim Jims, potato chips, and the most wonderful individually-wrapped Little Debbie Oatmeal Cakes, with three layers of cake and two of creme, the size of a large moon pie, and over 900 calories each! To avoid this fate or because of dietary restrictions, hikers can mail themselves parcels, known as mail drops, via general delivery to the post office or to a hiker-friendly business like a motel, bed & breakfast or outfitter. It¢s polite to phone for permission first and then to patronize that business. I prefer to risk shopping locally, since my tastes change from week to week. Vegans, in particular, will often dehydrate their own food and mail it to themselves.In reading over this entry, I find myself thoroughly disgusted with my trail diet. I will try to do better on this hike, really, but I learned many years ago that carrying food that I think I ought to eat, like the pemmican bars on my first hike, does me no good unless I actually eat it. Perhaps I will substitute Fritos for the Little Debbie Oatmeal Cakes. Fritos make dandy fire starters, and the same weight of Fritos is 50 more calories!