Logistical Planning for the Trip

Well since it is snowing like crazy in Virginia this weekend, it was a good time for me to finish going through our planned resupply locations for the trip, not to mention that the big day is coming up and we need to get it all figured out.

So using "The Thru Hikers Handbook", "The Appalachian Trail Food Planner" and the great articles by Baltimore Jack on www.whiteblaze.net (check the links on the right side), I developed a spreadsheet (sorry, I am an engineer and can't help myself) for all of the locations we want to use as maildrop or resupply locations. Basically I have went through and found the mile markers of the places we plan to stop and then figured out how many days it should take between stops to figure out how much food we need to carry out of each stop.

In general, we are attempting to limit the amount of food we carry at any one time to 7 days at the outside. Except, of course, for the last piece of the hike in Maine where about 10 days are needed for the final stretch. There is a lot of things that we have to consider here, including where we can receive maildrops reliably, what food purchase options are available in each location and how far off the trail we would need to go to get to the resupply point.

As far as receiving maildrops, we are attempting to use as few post offices as possible since their limited hours and non-availability on Sundays can cause delays and other complications. There are a ton of places along the way that are exceptionally friendly to thru-hikers and will hold packages for us to pick up when we get into the town. Baltimore Jack has great descriptions of many of these places in his resupply write-up on www.whiteblaze.net and the plan is for us to document the great people and places we run into right here as we go along.

For the most part, we plan on maildropping the majority of our breakfasts and dinners and buying most of our lunches along the way. But this could be an issue for locations where there are limited or over-priced food purchase options. So some maildrops may have to contain nearly all of the food for the next stretch, while other stops may be for purchasing food only.

Getting from the AT to the resupply location is another consideration. In some locations, we can resupply right on the AT where it goes through towns or at some of the outfitters and hostels along the way. Other places offer free shuttles from certain trailheads or road crossings to a hostel or motel. And in other places, we get to hitchhike from a trailhead into a town.

Overall, it is quite a process to figure this all out and it has been a lot of time in the making to have it all figured out. If people are interested, please feel free to contact us and I can send the spreadsheet to you for your own planning.

Eating on the trail

This is probably one of the first questions people ask when they find out we're planning to backpack for 6 months straight.  The most common answer is eat a lot of ramen, oatmeal and poptarts.  Little Debbies are very popular as well :-)  I'm a bit of a research junkie so I've spent the last 5 years reading just about everything I could about how to hike the trail and how to plan to hike the trail.  However, since the main motto of the trail is "Hike your own hike" everyone you ask or read has a different view.  When it comes to food the biggest choice to make is whether to do maildrops, resupply along the way or some combination.

I would say in general most thru-hikers will tell you not to do a lot of maildrops because you lose flexibility.  If you're doing maildrops, even doing only locations within a mile of the trail you confine yourself to a schedule and potentially end up racing to make it into town to make it before the post office closes or waiting until the post office opens on Monday.  This can be a fairly big drawback.  We have decided however to do the majority of our food via maildrops and here's why: nutrition.  When talking to people we've discovered that most people aren't putting much thought into the nutrition of the food.  Also if they do maildrops they're mailing things like poptarts, oatmeal, raman, etc, which is essentially what you can buy along the way.  Hence maildrops end up being more of a PITA than helpful.  We're hoping that by doing maildrops with a more nutrionally thought out menu we can enjoy the hike more despite the loss of flexibility.

For the past 7 months we've been (mostly) on what's called the Zone diet which is mainly about always eating protein, carbs and fats in proportion and together.  So our plan is to try and use the same nutrional principles to prepare dehydrated meals.  We've noticed such a huge difference in energy levels while on the Zone that we figured it should work (with some tweaking) to help us hike all day everyday. 

Since we were smart enought to register for a food dehydrator for our wedding (in 2005!) we are now in the process of testing out meals and then dehydrating large batches of food.  Last November we attending the Gathering which is an annual meeting/conference of the ALDHA and Matt attended some seminars on food for backpacking.  One of the seminars was run by a lady named Mary Holmes who printed and sold a booklet about backpacking food that is based on the Zone diet.  I love it when someone does the hard work for me!  And yes, Matt attended the seminar, because in our house Matt does all the cooking (he kicks me out of the kitchen) and hence is in charge of food for the trail :-)  Between her booklet and the book The Dehydrator Bible we sat down and chose 10 dinner recipies.  Today I started dehydrating small amounts of the ingredients for 4 of the recipies so we can test cook them.  We'll let you know how they are.

Since this post has become unreasonably long I'll write more on this subject later!