Trail eats

Our first big vacation and road trip together, and my first long backpacking excursion, was out to Utah in Canyonlands National Park. Zach has already mentioned what Canyonlands has taught him, but my biggest takeaway?

Never pack out a massive gallon bag of your homemade granola.

My granola was delicious. It was a healthy trail snack to boot. We ate a lot of it. But we literally carried a roughly FIVE POUND bag of granola around with us, and ate maybe 1/4 of it during the week. A three mile trek between sites in Canyonlands feels like 10 miles on flat ground, and it was miserable to be so poorly prepared and lugging so much extra weight. Obviously a huge priority for three months of backcountry and driving time is keeping food cheap and lightweight. We've gotten a lot better at managing our trail meals, though sometimes our food ends up looking pretty disgusting.



This was some dry package of jambalaya, I think?

There are some great resources out there for backcountry cooking, and I've taken a gander at a few books, but they frustrate me to no end. Many suggest that you take on complicated recipes that involve pre-trip prep in the kitchen and packing out small vials of truffle oil, roasted red peppers, or orange zest, etc, and I will. not. do. this. I can't imagine the chaos our packs would be if we had a whole section devoted to teensy little containers of condiments and spices. Not to mention that we won't have any sort of kitchen to do pre-trip prep in while we're on the road.

So we rely on some very no-frills meals. Who needs gourmet food when you're outside? At meal times, even with tent camping, I find that I'm grateful and ravenous for any food at all, and a standard package of red rice and beans feels like a total feast. If you're enjoying the same comforts and flavors of home while you're outdoors, I think you're doing it wrong. So does John Muir.

A three month trip is a special case, so I've been trying to poke around for some easy meals. Those packages of rice & beans might get boring after the first month. I turned to Backpacker.com and found a few helpful suggestions, like this simplistic Pad Thai knock-off. I don't know why we've never bought those little pouches of chicken or tuna before, that seems like an obvious choice for protein. I think I'll start compiling a list of ideas and have an experiment day to see what packs the most calories and protein while being the lightest, easiest to throw together, and cheapest.

Or we'll just have to forage.

Logisitics: Evolution of gear

In the three years that Julie and I have been backpacking together, we've managed to cobble together a pretty respectable collection of gear. We've got everything from sporks to stoves to headlamps to a spiffy little kit for spices and such in the backcountry. However, it was not always this way...

About 5 years ago, when I first started serious camping, I had nothing. On the first trip I went on without mooching off someone else, my friends and I headed to the Boundary Waters. We had no stove, no sleeping pad, and all our gear was packed into LUGGAGE. The kind of luggage with WHEELS. Also, there was about 3 times as much gear as we needed. It was a harrowing experience. We spent 6 hours portaging 2 miles, and when we finally got camp set up we were tired and starving, except with no stove we had to build a fire and slowly cook our food. And cooking over a fire takes FOREVER. We did bring a tent, which at least makes me better than Art.

I learned from that trip, however, and in future trips I made sure I had more than enough things to get me through a trip. However, this quickly lead to a critical mass of camping equipment that made me look like a very sad hobo:



Notice the 45 degree angle of my back.

So now, the key for Hobo Trip will be smart packing. We got two fancy new camp pads today (Thermarest ftw!) and a brand new pack for me (as my old pack cost 40 dollars, and worked about as well as you'd expect a 40 dollar pack to.) With a few more key purchases, we'll be set.

The inaugural post.

Hello & welcome! You’re reading this blog because you know and love me, and possibly even my husband, Zach. We’re opening up shop to share tales of our upcoming hobotrip, a 3 month adventure that we’ll be embarking on next summer. It’s essentially going to be like this: drive west for many hours, stop, spend a week or two in the backcountry, repeat. Eventually we’ll hit the ocean and then work our way back.

Why have we termed it hobotrip? Because we’ll be homeless, and though we won’t be riding any rails, we figure it’s fitting enough. And Zach has a hobo fascination.

Right now we’re in the planning stages and I thought it might be fun to start blogging it now, when we’re about 6 months out. This involves super-fun budget planning nights, asking for a solar shower for Christmas, and mapping, mapping mapping.

Our current hypothetical route will take us from Minneapolis through the Badlands, spending a couple weeks in Yellowstone, and then: Glacier, North Cascades, Seattle, Olympic, a coastal Oil City area hike, Mt. Rainier, possibly cramming in some Oregon coast and Crater Lake. After that we’ll head on down to Denver (to find an apartment for the fall), and back through Minneapolis to Ely for a few weeks in the BWCA during August, and perhaps a jog over to Isle Royale. Google maps makes it look like this:

View Larger Map

This has been a long time coming for us. We both grew up camping and have been on countless backpacking and canoe trips, but never any trips this long. And I haven’t had a summer vacation free of working since 2000, so I’m pretty excited for the trip, even if I have to boil water over a fire to wash my own underwear.

So… over the next 6 months we’re just going to keep up a blog about a variety of things. The planning, the changes to the plan, the parks we’ll be visiting, stories and photos of our past trips, probably some general backpacking features and a complete statistical breakdown of why I shouldn’t be worried about bear maulings. Stay tuned.