Date: 2009-10-08
To: Tips!
Miles today: 0.0

Here's a list of things I learned along the way that may be helpful to other hikers. Stay tuned for a gear review, a couple more post-trail lists (things I learned from the trail, fears, etc.), and my final entry. - Add Ramen noodles (just the noodles, not the spice packet) to any meal to bulk it up. Ramen noodles are deep fried and high in calories. I found myself adding Ramen noodles to Teriyaki noodles (with peanut butter to bulk it up even more) or other pasta side meals.- To filter out floaties in the water, use a small piece of pantyhose and stretch it around the mouth of your waterbottle when filling it up. I never had a problem with floaties except for a couple times, and the pantyhose worked well.- Use Gatorade bottles as waterbottles. They are lightweight, don't need to be cleaned, and can be thrown away and easily replaced in towns.- On cold nights, put your fuel canister in your sleeping bag if planning on making a hot breakfast in the morning. Or, just place the canister in your sleeping bag 30 mins to 1 hour before cooking in the morning. Cold canisters burn way more fuel than if they are warmed up.- Sleeping with slightly damp clothes will dry them overnight. I think this may only work with down sleeping bags.- Also on cold nights, activate one hand warmer and stick it in your sleeping bag. One handwarmer would keep me so warm that I'd end up tossing it out of my sleeping bag in the middle of the night. Also, I hiked with a handwarmer in my pocket on a couple cold days in the Smokies. It's hard to make lunch, sign shelter registers, and hold hiking poles with really cold hands - keeping an activated handwarmer in my pocket made it easy to warm up my hands really quickly if needed.- Use dryer sheets (2 to 3 work best) when drying clothes in town¢¦they make clothes smell SO much better. Without them, my socks would still smell awful coming out of the dryer.- Download audiobooks and podcasts onto your iPod, if bringing one. I stopped carrying a book in CT because I would only get through a couple pages each night before falling asleep. Instead, I put a few audiobooks and several podcasts on my iPod and listened to them in my tent at night, and sometimes while hiking. If craving something to read at night, I'd just flip through the guidebook and read about the upcoming town. The audiobooks I had were "A Confederacy of Dunces", "Me Talk Pretty One Day", and "A Short History of Nearly Everything". I downloaded all my podcasts for free from the iTunes store before leaving.- If carrying an iPod, the sleep timer works great. I would set my sleep timer for 30 minutes and put on an audiobook or podcast. I would probably fall asleep within 10 minutes and would wake up around 3am with my earphones still in my ears. If not using the sleep timer, the battery gets drained if you were to fall asleep while listening and the iPod will continue to play until you manually turn it off.- As a precaution, the first photo on each of my memory cards was of a note I wrote that said "If found, please contact Karen at karenamoore@hotmail.com. Thanks!". If for some reason I misplaced my camera and someone found it, at least my contact information was there for the person to contact me. Luckily this never happened!- I kept a basic photolog of all the photos I took each day. The log included the date, range of image numbers (the actual image number that would show up on the computer, not the photo number), and generally what I saw that day. This was helpful after I returned to organize my photos and know exactly what I was looking at. I didn't go into detail about each photo taken, just a general list of what I saw that day. For example, a line in my photolog would read "4/23 - 2274 - 2292 - Stone Mountain, 500 miles, campsite south of Hurricane Mountain". It became part of my nightly routine in my tent to go back through my photos each night, delete the obvious bad ones, and write the photolog.- Send maildrops to non-post offices. If you'd like a list of my maildrop locations, let me know, or you can look at my resupply information from my 9/13 entry. The two times I had something sent to a post office, I ended up rearranging my schedule a bit to make sure I got to the post office during business hours. Each maildrop I sent to a hostel/motel/outfitter worked out perfectly.- Each night, remove the insoles from your hiking shoes. This will help dry them out.- A block of cheese (I usually got Cabot Monteray Jack or Sharp Cheddar) generally can last up to 5 days, sometimes longer. Cheese is a great addition to most pasta side meals, grits, and chili.- Sending fuel canisters in the mail is no problem. Just write all over your box "Surface Mail - ORMD".- Always have backup batteries: camera, headlamp, steripen (if using one), etc. My headlamp ran out of batteries on a night hike, but luckily Hot Sauce had some spare ones. Luckily my camera batteries never ran out without having spares, but that would be the worst!- If the grocery store has a salad bar, pack out some veggies to add to dinner that night. I'd usually try to pack out an avocado (ripe), cherry tomatoes, and spinach and store them in my cookpot so they wouldn't get smooshed in my pack. - If keeping a trailjournal while on the trail, I highly suggest having someone at home transcribe it for you. I used a pocketmail (www.pocketmail.com) device (mobile email) and wrote my entries in my tent each night before falling asleep. When I got to a phone, I sent the entries to my mom and she would upload them onto trailjournals. Updating a journal while in town can be stressful because of all the town chores that need to get done in a short amount of time. Also, computer time is usually limited at the library, hotels, etc. and it can be difficult to finish updating the journal within the allotted amount of time. Rocket used a Peek (http://www.getpeek.com/) which was a small device that receives and sends emails. ***Speaking of pocketmail, the first 2010 hiker to email me gets my pocketmail for free. It was handed down to me from Kirby (GAME 08), and it was handed down to him from a 2007 hiker.