Date: 2012-10-02
From: Stratton Pond Shelter 

To: Goddard Shelter 
Miles today: 19.3
Weather: overcast clouds

(In which I make it through another rainy day and talk about what I've learned about trail food so far) -Currently sitting in the shelter after dark. No tables this time...-The closest the sun came to full exposure was this morning just as I made it to the top of Stratton Mountain's fire tower (today's picture). About 10 minutes later it was back to a sky full of uniformly gray clouds. That makes 5 days in a row of this weather and tomorrow is supposed to be another wet one. Going this long with squishy socks and shoes can be a problem - trench foot isn't just a WWI phenomenon. The "Where's Karl" guy (trail people know who I'm talking about) failed to get the speed record (thanks for the correction Silvia) because of trench foot. I don't know how common it is, but after 5 days hiking with muddy, wet, blistering feet, I decided to be a little proactive. This afternoon I started to apply Bacitricin to every blister and hot spot on my feet and I did the same this afternoon. I'll keep doing this until I can get some dry feet. If the sun doesn't show itself in the next few days my best shot at dry shoes might end up being the new ones I pick up in Cheshire. They don't call this state Vermud for nothing.In between puddles of water today I thought about my experience with food on the trail so far and decided that I've just about figured out how much I need to carry and how often to eat. You might think that 6 weeks is a long time to take to figure something like this out, but it's not easy. You start off and you're not that hungry, then you loose a lot of weight and become ravenous, then you get most of the weight back but increase mileage before finally settling on food amounts. Here's how it breaks down: -->800-1000 calories for breakfast. This is 4 pop tarts or three snickers bars, or 3 bagels with cream cheese or some combination thereof-->500-800 calories for first lunch. This is about 3 hrs after breakfast and it's usually a few handfuls of peanuts and some sort of food bar - Cliff, Snickers or Oat bar. Sometimes a bunch of oreos will do.-->800-1000 calories for second lunch. This is 3 hrs after 1st lunch roughly. This is usually the cheese and summer sausage meal or the nutella/honey/peanuts on a flower tortilla meal. I take about 30 minutes for this. Throw in some crackers too...-->500-800 calories for third lunch. This is just like first lunch and usually consists of whatever is easiest to grab from the top of the food bag.-->1200-1600 calories for dinner. Three packages of ramen (don't worry, I don't use all the salt packets), or two packages of Lipton sides. Add a big package of tuna and heap of butter with olive oil and you're close to 1500 calories. A favorite of mine is an entire package of Velveeta Shells with Cheese - heaven. Add a generous amount of hot sauce and you have a stellar meal.All told, that's around 4,000-5,000 calories. If you average the calories per pound of the foods above, you get about 1500 cal/lb. That's roughly 3 lb of food a day, and that's what I've been carrying with me. It took a while, but I figured it out. If you're planning a long hike yourself, keep in mind that I'm about 160 lb and 5'11". Today's post was brought to you by sweet dreams of warm, dry feet.