March 19 Hot weather challenges
Friday, March 19th, 2010
The weather here in the San Francisco Bay Area has suddenly gone into “summer mode” for the last two days. It was 86 degrees in the shade at our house yesterday afternoon! After weeks of weather in the 50’s, that sun feels good! We had a great time for 2 and a half hours today, hiking up hills with packs around 20 pounds, and had the fun of meeting several of our friends from church out for a hike, too. They all cheered for us as we breezed by them in our “hiking garb” with trek poles, packs, etc.
Meanwhile, our garage has gone into “PCT Prep” mode. We are collecting boxes, and they are sorted into which box goes where, and soon we’ll start filling them. I just finished figuring out all our food so that we know what we need to buy. The numbers get a bit scary, though–how does “474 Snickers” sound to you? Or “35 granola-with-apricots-&-almonds”? Our vacuum sealing machine is now out on the counter in the kitchen, and Bill is experimenting. Last time, he gave our food a minimum amount of “seal” on the machine, and some of the seals failed. This time he is going to give everything more “sealing time.”
Meanwhile, the permits and paperwork are getting lined up. We have our thruhiker permit, campfire permit, Canada paperwork and passports. Exciting times!
Well, the hot weather reminded me that it would be good to mention how we handle hot weather challenges on the trail. When we hiked in 2005, we made some mistakes on this. Hopefully we won’t make any this time!
Mistake No. 1 “In the middle of the day when it is horribly hot, we will stop and put up our tarp and wait till it’s cooler to hike on.” NOT a good idea when your tarp is a superlightweight, WHITE spinnaker cloth tarp! The heat went straight through it, and it actually got hotter under the tarp than it would have been if we just kept going. I guess if you can find a nice tree to wait under, you would be OK, but the places that get horribly hot are also treeless. We learned that it’s better to put up your BLACK or SILVER hiking umbrella and keep on truckin’. When we were climbing up alongside Mission Creek, it was HOT and we stopped in the middle of the day in the shade to wait for cooler temperatures. But duh, we were hiking right by a CREEK! Now, what we would do is periodically just take off our packs and lie down in the creek, clothes and all, for a couple of minutes, then hike on, all nice and cool.
Mistake No. 2 Not having shoes BIG ENOUGH to cope with the large amount of swelling your feet experience in very hot weather. This was a problem for Bill, and he ended up with horrible blisters because his feet swelled so much. I managed OK, by switching my shoes to “desert lacing” (more on that in a minute).
So here’s what we DO know.
1) Protect yourself from the sun. For us, this means long (but loose) pants and longsleeved (loose) shirts of “sunrepellant” fabric. This literally keeps your skin cooler than when it is exposed to direct, very hot sun. We carried umbrellas to provide our own portable shade. Make sure your umbrella is BLACK or SILVER-coated. White or light-colored umbrellas do not protect you from the heat. I wear a double layer of socks all the time, and I noticed that in the desert, this did help protect the bottoms of my feet from the heat of the ground.
2) Switch your shoes to “desert lacing” to allow your feet to swell. Basically, you pull the laces out till you are about 1/3 of the way down, then really loosen the bottom lacing so your toes have the maximum room possible. TIE A KNOT in the laces, then re-lace them back to the top. That way, you can have the laces tight around your ankle for support, but very, very loose lower down where your feet swell up. The knot totally separates the two “zones.”
3) Start hiking really early, by headlamp (we used to start at 4:30 if needed) so you have more time hiking in the cooler temperatures. You can also hike at night, by headlamp, but then you have a much higher risk of running into rattlesnakes out hunting. (They like to go out when the ground is warm, but the air is cooler).
4) Rest whenever you need to (I need to rest much more often when I’m hiking in heat). Drink plenty of water BUT ALSO GET ENOUGH SALT/electrolytes with it! You can actually make yourself dangerously sick in hot weather by drinking too much water and not getting salt. We carry a stash of salt tablets for this purpose. It is NOT an “old wives’s tale” that salt is important. If you are semi-crazy hikers like us, and you do like we did and go “rim to rim in a day” at the Grand Canyon (despite all the warning signs not to do it!), you will find bottles of saline solution at every water hole, with warning signs about drinking some saline if you start having symptoms of serious electrolyte imbalance. People have DIED from drinking loads of water and not getting enough salt with it.
5) If you do come to a water source that’s not a water cache someone labored to bring in, pour water all over yourself, clothes and all, to cool down. We did this at Snow Canyon faucet (San Gorgonio Pass) and Walker Pass Campground, plus various other places. We have learned when hiking in heat, if you come to a pond or lake, take off the pack, take off your shoes and just jump in, clothes and all. Your clothes get the sweat and dirt rinsed out of them, you get a bath, and it feels WONDERFUL! You then put the shoes and pack back on, and head down the trail, dripping wet and comfortable!
6) We normally cook dinner at noon, but in hot weather, we wait till late afternoon, when it’s much cooler, and cook then, before putting in a few more miles and making camp.
Last but not least, dealing with hot, hot weather is a good chance to practice the skill of being cheerful no matter what, of looking for the beauty that is all around you (hey, in triple digit temps going up into the San Felipe Hills, I got to see an ocotillo IN BLOOM! Awesome! It looked like the bush had flames coming out the tips of the branches! ), and gives you a chance to rejoice at every bit of breeze that comes your way. “Hey, it’s a breeze!” we would cheer, and keep on going with smiles on our faces. Yes indeed, coping with the heat DOES build character!
Wow 474 Snickers! Your comment on the food preparation sounds like you pack and ship your food rather that buying as you go. Or do you do both? Do you cook or use FBC (freezer bag cooking)? What do you vaccum pack? I have switched to dehydrating much of my food and prepping meals that just use boiling water. I mix it up with some purchased freeze dried meals. Did you have any problems purchasing alcohol for your “stove” on the last trip? I will try a alcohol stove this summer in preparation of next years trip up the PCT-California.
You guessed right–we do pack and ship our food, rather than buying it as we go. The reason for this is that the little towns and resorts along the PCT are no good for finding trail food. They sell fisherman food–soda, beer, chips, etc. The only way to find decent trail food is to hitch hike way off the PCT to a larger town. Well, that works for folks who hike as fast as they can on the trail, then spend DAYS messing around in town. We prefer to spend our time on the trail, so we want to just drop by the post office and pick up our box of food, then get back to the beautiful PCT. We haven’t PLANNED more than 4 “zeros” (though if we get really, really wasted, we know that a zero will get us back up to speed, so if we need more, we’ll take them.)
The only things we buy ALONG the trail are restaurant meals, plus I usually pick up some “fresh” food for our first day out of a resupply (things like tomatoes or apples or frozen burritos, which we eat after they have thawed), and also some cheese.
We eat cold food, except for once a day, when we get out our little 1 1/2 liter pot, boil some water, and toss in either a freezedried (like Mountain House, etc) meal, or instant mashed potatoes or Lipton sides. Mostly I stick with things where all you do is add the “ingredients” to boiling water, then cover it and let it sit for 5 minutes. That way, you save on fuel, since you only need enough fuel to bring your water to a boil.
At home, we measure out the components for breakfasts (granola, freezedried fruit, nuts, seeds, powdered milk), bag each “complete breakfast” in a plastic vegetable bag, then put the needed number of breakfast bags (only a few for short hauls, and as many as 9 for long hauls like out of Kennedy Meadows) into a vacuum bag, and seal the lot of them up together, so that they will ship well and stay fresh till we open the vacuum bag at our resupply point. We do the same for the freezedried veges and meats for our dinners, and the crackers and dried fruit and nuts we eat for our suppers.
In 2005, I did dehydrate stuff to bring to eat, but discovered that 1) It is heavier than freezedried 2) It takes time to rehydrate before it becomes edible. So this time, though it does cost more, we are mostly going with freezedried, which we buy in bulk and then measure out ourselves. Besides the freezedried, we also use good ol’ Idahoan instant mashed potatoes, some of the Knorr/Lipton sides (only the ones that cook quickly), and some StoveTop stuffing. Since we normally eat very healthy food, the ingredient list on some of those makes us cringe, but oh well.
Fuel–we love our alcohol stove, which Bill made from the bottom of a beer can. It is light as a feather, and works very well. We use “HEET” as fuel (you can get HEET at auto supply stores, or even better, just go online and there you can really find it cheap!). Then when you ship the fuel to yourself, you should be good law-abiding citizens and follow the USPS rules about shipping such things. Some thruhikers totally disregard the rules, throw the fuel bottles in their resupply box and say nothing to the post office, but we don’t operate that way. The rules are basically two: The bottle containing the fuel must have a cap that does at least a couple of full turns before sealing, and you must enclose the bottle in enough absorbent material that if it leaked, there would be no problem. (We use disposable baby diapers for this).
The only other issue about packaging everything ahead of time is that you need a friend to mail the boxes to you!