A Provisional Guide to Backcountry Food

"An army marches on its stomach."
Napoleon, (attributed) 1769-1821

My early wilderness adventures were noted for their culinary disasters. I did my first backpacking trips with my father in the days when backpacking food was simply dried. Not freeze-dried, mind you; just dried, dehydrated, in reality, fossilized. Resurrecting the dried food of that era into something palatable was about as likely as raising Tyrannosaurus Rex from the dead. I still remember boiling little chunks of dried carrot for hours and finally consuming them with a frustrating crunch. Then there was the time we set out to make an omelet and mixed up half a packet of dried eggs – but mistakenly used a full quotient of water, thus creating a nightmare version of egg drop soup. Even more memorable, because it was actually planned and therefore inexcusable, was the horse fodder Joe Kaelin and I brought along on for breakfast on an insanely windy Thanksgiving trip into Rocky Mountain National Park. (It's the only time I've ever been blown over flat while kneeling.) Joe, an impoverished college student with some misguided aspirations to healthy eating habits, thought he would relish oatmeal – raw oatmeal, briefly soaked in watery powdered milk instead of actually cooking it. To no one's surprise but our own, we ended up carrying half of our oatmeal back out again. That we ate any at all is a tribute to the victory of tyrannical stomachs over rebellious taste buds.

With such lessons under our belt, so to speak, my comrades-in-arms and I gradually learned what we could carry, what we could actually cook, and most importantly, what we would actually eat while far away from refrigerators, microwave ovens and telephone hot lines to Domino's Pizza.

One of the first things we learned is that beginners' eyes are much bigger than their stomachs. There is, quite naturally, a real fear of running out of food when the nearest supermarket is not minutes away, but rather many hours, possibly even days. The almost irresistible temptation is to bring far more food than even William "The Fridge" Perry could consume. Hiking out at the end of a trip with half your food supply still burdening your pack will quickly teach you how much food you actually need for a few days in the wilds.

The errors encouraged by the eyeball method of packing provisions are compounded by the difference between city foods and backpacking foods. In the city, much of our food already has water in it: fruit, vegetables, meat, soups, stews, milk, all canned foods, etc. In the backcountry, on the other hand, almost everything is brought in dry, and water from a lake or stream is added during preparation or cooking. Dry food, besides being lighter, is usually far more compact than hydrated food. A bag scarcely larger than a football can easily contain enough dry food for three days, yet it looks like it contains only enough for a three-course dinner.

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