Date: 2004-02-27
To: Food Drops
Miles today: 0.0

Some people have wondered how we are going to supply ourselves with food. There are two basic ways that people get food on the trail. The first is you buy it in a town. The trail crosses a road about every 4-5 days on average. From this road crossing the nearest store can be right there or it can be 10 or more miles away. If you walk or get a ride to the town that will be 20 total miles that you go out of your way for and they are not getting you any closer to Maine, but you are getting the vital supplies that you may need to complete the journey. The second way to get food is to mail it to yourself. There are about 30 post offices along the trail, again anywhere from right on the trail to 10 miles away. We will be using a combination of these two methods. We have talked to a few people that have hiked the whole trail in the past and they all recommended going with less "mail drops" and relying on towns to buy food. The reason for this is they felt the mail drops forced them to visit a town that they might normally have skipped. You also have to deal with holidays and post office hours. Imagine getting into a town on Saturday afternoon, just missing the post office hours and having to stay until Monday morning to pickup your package. So, we sat down and over the course of several weeks created a database with all the hut, shelters and towns in it. We used this database along with the trail elevation profiles from maps to get a general idea of how far we wanted to hike each day, were we would sleep, and were we could resupply. The basic idea was that if the town is within 2 to 3 miles of the trail we would walk or hitch into town to resupply. If the town did not have a good store for long term resupply then we would mail a package there. From the trail books and website research we found that we should be able to buy most of our food along the way. There are a few places that only have a post office and a few vending machines. We like snickers and doritos but I don't think we could make it 6 days on just that for breakfast lunch and dinner. Plus we don't plan on carring ten pounds of quarters for use in the vending machines. So, we came up with 6 food drops and 1 clothing drop. Since we are starting in the early spring we will have winter gear with us until Pearisburg, Va. In Pearisburg we will send home the winter gear and pickup a package with summer gear. From then until we hit Hanover, NH we will be in summer gear. In Hanover we will pick up our winter gear again to prepare for spending cool nights up in the White Mountains. For you veteran thru hikers our locations for summer and winter gear may seem a little off. We are using those stop because we have friends and family close to those locations that we plan to take a day or two off to spend time with and it seemed like a good place to transition from one season to another. However, this could change if we end up drenched in sweat for too many days while hiking in long sleeve shirts and full length pants.Oh yeah, I forgot one other method, probably to most welcome and spirit lifting methods of resupplying...trail angels. These are people who out of the kindness of their hearts leave little packages along the trail, usually close to a road, with anything from candy, sandwiches and soda to the occasional beer. This can come at a really good time when you have been hiking for days after eating your final peanut three miles ago with yet another 8 miles to get to town. Keep up the great work and hurray for the trail angels!!