April 10 The boxes are full!
Saturday, April 10th, 2010
Well, I can’t believe we’ve finished with filling all our resupply boxes with “stuff”! Our entire garage is circled with boxes labelled “Pack”, “Box 1”, etc. all the way to “Box 29”. Each box is full of all sorts of little bags of everything from food to laundry detergent , maps, stamped envelopes for mailing our journals home, and all sorts of other odds ‘n ends. The last things to go in were little snack bags of vitamins.
It is interesting how different thruhikers are about their approach to resupply. Bill “White Beard”, left to his own devices, would probably just do like he does on the John Muir Trail and live on peanut butter, cheese and jerky. Me, the hobbit, I like to eat FOOD. And I don’t like just throwing a bunch of food in a bag and then trying to guess along the trail how much to take from it each day. So as a result, all the food got measured, put in little baggies and vacuum sealed. That’s a LOT of little baggies!
Some thruhikers buy all their food as they go along–not me! When I am at a resupply, I want to at least take a nero and REST, not run around grocery shopping. Maybe it’s because I’m 62 and Bill is 70. We NEED our rest! In 2005, we just tossed all the baggies in the resupply boxes, and I had to do a lot of sorting instead of resting. Not this time–everything is presorted. All we have to do is put it in our food bags and we’re done!
Today, for the first time, I used my PCT pack for our 3 hour training hike. The pack I had been using all this time was really too big for me and with more and more weight in it, was increasingly uncomfortable. When I put on my PCT pack this morning, with 22 pounds in it, I felt like it was my good ‘ol buddy, familiar and comfortable on my back. The weather was cloudy, with occasional light rain and gusty wind. A group was out for a guided wildflower walk, and they were doing a lot of grumping about the weather. Bill and I have gotten used to this hiking in cold, rain and wind business….but we ARE hoping we won’t have too much of it on the PCT. We will see! I checked the weather report for Tehachapi today, hoping to hear “sunshine, 80 degrees”, but no, it was just like here–cloudy, drippy and temps in the 50’s. That doesn’t bode well for snow levels in the Sierras when we get there in late May or early June. We may have to take some zeros and revise our schedule, but at this point, we are still determined to stick to our plan.
I spent the afternoon sewing, but not for the PCT. I was making an “Isadora Duncan dance dress” for our daughter, who will be portraying Isadora at a “chautaqua” in June at the National Maritime Museum in San Francisco. She and I volunteer with the living history program there, and have a wonderful time every second Saturday of the month, reliving 1901 San Francisco aboard the several awesome old ships in the Museum. Each month, we try to recreate something that actually happened in San Francisco in that month in 1901, or if nothing noteworthy happened, we just demonstrate activities that people of all different social classes might have done at that time. (I didn’t go today, even though it was living history day, because I needed to finish so many things for the Awana Club and the PCT.) Our daughter portrays a very upperclass young lady from a wealthy family, while I vary between middle class ferry passenger, or upper middleclass lady, or on occasion, a maid. Bill comes only once a year, to play a night watchman on the pier for our “Christmas at Sea” program in December. It is a lot of fun, and especially for us, because we really enjoy history! When we are on the PCT, the official guidebook has tidbits of history in it that are fun to read and think about as we hike along. History is NOT boring!
How exciting that your journey is about to start! I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your blog!
Packing everything in your resupply boxes sounds like a good idea so you don’t have to deal with it in town. My question is do you find the food goes bad or gets stale (granola and things)? You mentioned earlier you eat cheese on the trail, do you buy stuff like that in town?
thank you
– wannabe thru hiker
For things like granola, crackers, cookies, etc. that do go stale, we have a vacuum sealing machine that does a good job. The one thing we learned was that since we vacuum seal our little baggies of powdered milk along with the granola, we have to be VERY careful not to let any of the powdered milk “dust” get on the “sealing zone” of the vacuum seal bag. Even the littlest bit of dust, and you lose the vacuum. But when the seal is tight, everything stays fresh and does not get stale!
Along the trail, we have found that no matter how tiny the little resupply “town store”, we can always find cheese of some sort, and so we do buy our cheese at each resupply. We often also get frozen burritos or chimichangas and carry them along in our packs till they thaw out, then eat them cold. I also look for fresh veges or fruit to bring for the first day out of a resupply. Yum!
I just wanted to second Eleni’s comments: a really enjoyable blog. Very inspiring. I will be retiring in a year or so and hope, perhaps, to do a section of the PCT; currently thinking about Tuolumne Meadows to Ashland. I hiked the JMT with a friend about 20 years ago and find Bill’s seven days elapsed time truly amazing.
Have a great hike!
Thankyou for your kind comments! I’d like to encourage you (and everybody else who’s getting ready to retire!) to plan on regular longdistance hiking trips. Bill and I found that doing the PCT gave us strength that (amazingly) is still with us. Everyone else we know who is our age are already on multiple prescriptions, are having knee and/or hip replacements, and are so out of shape that they huff ‘n puff just walking up a little hill. It’s so obvious that the human body is designed to MOVE–not sit and vegetate. Bill is 70 and feels great. And that’s not because he somehow just lucked out and “got good genes.” His dad died of a heart attack at a younger age than Bill is right now. It’s because Bill (and I) eat right (and by the way, NOT the stupid “PC” lowfat stuff that they push at you everywhere you look. We eat lots of butter, cultured whole milk, animal fat, meat, etc. and lots of organic veges & fruit that we grow ourselves. The best book I know on this subject is titled, “Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats” by Sally Fallon.) And yes, Bill is determined to “break 7 days” on the JMT. His best time right now is 7 days and 8 hours. He says he wants to get that down to less than 7 days (even if it’s 6 days and 23 hours!) and then he will go back to hiking at a more “reasonable” pace.
And I think your pick of which part of the PCT to hike first is a great choice! When we were hiking the north-of-Tuolemne section of the PCT in 2005, I said to Bill, “Why does everybody do the JMT, when this is just as pretty and in some ways even prettier? I guess it’s because it needs some sort of catchy name like the JMT has.” Also, that Northern CA section of the PCT includes some of our personal favorite places to backpack, like Lassen Nat’l. Park and Trinity Alps Wilderness. Hope you get to do it!