Adventures in resupply...Part One. The Madness Begins

Resupply boxes...???

After more than a year of reading blogs, watching Youtube videos and talking to other hikers we have finally started to put our food together. We went to Costco and bought $600 worth of crap.

From Josh's research about nutritional needs of thru hikers found here, we should be eating high fat, high carb, and moderate protein. This is totally counter-intuitive to the way we eat at home, which is low carb, high fat and moderate protein. To us, carbs are baaaaad so it was equally fun and nerve wrecking to buy $600 worth of candy, Poptarts and potatoes.

Holy crap, that's a lot of crap. It is going to be hard to not eat this before the trail.

While we tried to make sense of the madness in the living room, my cats decided to assist us in unpacking the boxes. They tried to commandeer the beef jerky so we set up "cat traps" to keep them entertained. 

I employ this strategy often when they fight which results in them glaring at each other from their respective boxes as if to say "If I could get out of here, I would kick your ass!"

If I fits, I sits. 

My furry kids: Nova (left) and Joey (right)

Our first order of business was to dump out all of the candy and roll around in it. Of course.

Followed by blank looks of how to start organizing it into meals.

We took ziploc bags and made breakfast/snack packs suitable for one day. Poptarts, coffee, Carnation instant breakfast, and random candy snacks for the day. We have no idea if this is the right way to do this but we have enough time to rearrange if it's not.

Josh read a trail recipe for no bake cheesecake using Jello packets and instant milk. We decided to try it out  with Nilla Waffers, you know, for science. Joey was very impressed and stalked the bowl.

With the breakfast/snack packs finished we set about making epic trail mix. We dumped peanut M&M's, pistachios, dark chocolate Acai berries, Chex Mix, Gold Fish, Reese's Pieces etc. etc. into a large box and mixed it up.

Here, Josh realized the Gold Fish were in indivudual packets...Somebody didn't think this through...

The finished product! Now to vacuum seal this stuff so it will last until we need it.

We cut bags large enough to fit two cups worth of trail mix. This is what we anticipate will get us through a day or so of hiking.

After the trail mix was sealed we made vacuum packs suitable for one day. We repackaged Mountain House meals into Ziploc freezer bags, as they are less bulky that way and vacuum packed our breakfast/snack packs with it. This paired with the trail mix should be enough to get us through one day on the trail...we think.

We still have a lot of vacuum packing to do but decide to set things on hold until we can test out our packages on the trail. Next weekend BACKPACKING FOOD TEST! 

YAY!

This is where we got the vacuum packing idea.

Thanks Spitfire!