Colorado Rocky Mountain High

We had a fantastic trip in Colorado last week and in Outing Club fashion, we decided to do Highs, Lows, and Angels and share them with you!

Sunday, August 12^th

Highs: Seeing a Pine Marten, Peanut Noodle Soup.

Lows: Lack of sleep due to delayed flights and lost baggage, adjusting to high altitude.

Angels: Peca (the dog) for being excited about chipmunks and birds.

Monday, August 13^th

Highs: The curious bird at breakfast time, climbing Mount Massive in rain, sleet, and snow.

Lows: Descending Mount Massive in cold, rainy conditions.

Angels: Danica’s parent’s for making a charcoal “campfire” to help us warm up.

Tuesday, August 14^th

Highs: Slackpacking Mount Elbert, sitting at the top of Mount Elbert (the tallest mountain in Colorado and second tallest mountain in the contiguous United States).

Lows: Doxycycline causing nausea and sunburn, multiple false summits.

Angels: The hiker who told us we were impressive because we were doing the same route at the Leadville 100 running race.

Wednesday, August 15^th

Highs: The llamas.

Lows: We didn’t get to use the llamas to carry our stuff.

Angels: The inspirational trail runners participating in the TransRockies race and the forest service dude.

Thursday, August 16^th

Highs: Elkhead Pass and the view of the collegiate range.

Lows: Fatigued muscles.

Angels: The woman who told us the climb would be worth it, which encouraged us to push on. And the pikas.

Friday, August 17^th

Highs: Orienteering our way to Rainbow Lake, hiking with only our “brains.”

Lows: Sore knees.

Angels: Each other for helping carry out an awesome trip!

 Happy hiking everyone!

Granola Bars (Recipe Included)

Hey folks,
This evening we made the granola bars that we're planning on eating for many of our breakfasts on the trail. We made them up as we went along, but they came out so successful that it's a "recipe" worth keeping (read: we should actually remember what we did).

In case YOU would like to make something delicious, here's what you do:
In a bowl, combine:
~4 cups oatmeal (we didn't actually measure this, but it looked about that much)
~1/3 cup raisins
~3/4 cup pumpkin seeds
~1 tsp. cinnamon
~1/8-1/4 tsp. salt


In a pot, combine:
3/4 cup maple syrup
1 1/4 cups almond butter


Stir the syrup and almond butter until homogenous and then heat, while stirring vigorously, until bubbling and the mixture easily pulls away from the pot. (Basically you want to heat the mixture to the "soft ball" stage in terms of candy making, but we didn't have a candy thermometer.)
When the mixture has reached this stage, remove from heat and pour immediately over the oatmeal mixture. Begin stirring with a wooden spoon or other stirring device. As soon as the syrup/almond butter mixture is cool enough to not burn your skin, use your (clean) hands to make sure the mixture is well dispersed among the dry ingredients. Next, shape the mixture into bars/nuggets/balls or whatever shape you want. It helps if you spray your hands with Pam/cooking spray before shaping your treats so that it won't stick much to you and will stick to itself.
Lay on a tray or plate and let sit so they become more firm.
Another tip, do this with friends. It's more fun that way. :)

The Food Prep Begins!

With the two of us back in the same state, we've begun preparing the food we'll be carrying with us. We started with dehydrating sweet potatoes and onions, followed with a "Hannaford Expedition" to buy all the non-perishable foodstuffs we didn't have, and continued with drying tomato paste, mushrooms, apples, and blueberries. There is, of course, much more to dry, but for the time being, here are a few photos of what we've been up to...

Onions

Sweet potato for dinner

Sweet Potato "Jerky"

Success!

Loading the groceries into our packs. (We brought our backpacks along to add to the atmosphere of the expedition.)

Spreading the tomato paste

Apples!

Tomato paste that will become tomato sauce on the trail.

On an exciting side note, the maps came today!!!

RE: An exceedingly delicious meal plan

            Food. It’s important. The awesome endeavor of hiking can become a drag if one’s body is not well fueled. So planning food for a backpacking trip—especially one in which you have no options for resupply partway through as you do with such trails as the Appalachian Trail—needs attention toward bringing the right kinds of foods—getting enough carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, as well as bringing food that you will find appetizing when the increased physical activity and higher altitude will inevitably kill your appetite—and the right amounts—as in, you might need to first force yourself to eat, but later might get the hiker hungries and become ravenous. As avid home chefs, we have the additional requirements that whatever we cook is fantastic rather than mediocre and is creative.

            Our itinerary indicates we will have 6 on-trail breakfasts (since our first breakfast can happen before we start hiking), 7 on-trail lunches, and 6 on-trail dinners (since we will be able to eat dinner after we get picked up).

            Breakfast is probably the hardest meal to figure out. First, for some reason eating early in the morning tends to be especially unappealing when hiking, even though it’s a time you need it most. Second, there is always the question of cold breakfast and get hiking quickly versus hot breakfast and get a slow start. What a conundrum! On the one hand, getting out early can set you up for covering ground before the potential afternoon thunderstorms hit. On the other hand, hot breakfasts tend to be slightly more appealing. We ended up choosing 3 cold breakfasts and 3 hot breakfasts to be able to take advantage of both those benefits at different times. For our cold breakfasts, we’ll eat homemade granola bars (recipe to come) on two mornings and bagels with peanut butter and jam on one morning. For hot breakfast, we’ll have a morning of oatmeal with dried fruit and peanut butter and a morning of blueberry pancakes and peanut butter. (Hopefully we will not tire of peanut butter. :P) Finally, we’ve planned a morning of hot chocolate protein shakes (mixing milk powder and protein powder in hot water) that can become a cold breakfast if necessary.

            “Lunch” can be a loose to nonexistent event out on the trail. Having a single, long lunch in the middle of the day can leave your body feeling under-fueled in late morning and lethargic in the early afternoon after a big meal. A big lunch can be accompanied by snacks, or some people even do away with lunch all together and snack all day long. A nice middle-path is taking first and second lunch. (Alternatively, you could take first and second breakfast and a late lunch.) These lunch breaks involve a real stop—sitting down to get off your feet, taking off your pack, removing your shoes to dry out your socks if necessary—but spread out the quantity of food you might eat in one big lunch across the day. First lunch usually happens around 10:30 am, while second lunch tends to crop up around 2:00 pm. Of course, it’s we’re not set on any given time, and it’s more up to how we’re feeling, what the weather is doing, and where there might be lunch spots with fantastic views, but we’re going for the “four meal day” approach. We’re not dividing out specific lunches but calculated how much of different items we wanted to bring by estimating such things as 1 bread product (a bagel or caloric equivalent) per meal for 7 meals, 5 ounces of cheese for two people for X number of meals, ½ cup hummus for Y number of meals, and so on, as well as added some all important staples like Nutella (!!!) and Trail Mix.

A glance at some of our lunch foods:

1^st and 2^nd Lunches:

Bread Products (7 normal people, 7 glutard)

Cheese (20 oz)

Hummus (~1-1 ½ cup when hydrated)

Carrots (1 1 lb. bag)

Trail Mix: Almonds, Cashews, Pumpkin Seeds, Apples, Raisins, Rhubarb, M&Ms

Nutella (1 jar)

Tuna packets (2)

 Chicken packets (2)

Apples (4)

Snickers (14)

Pretzels (gluten free and regular, 1 bag of each)

            After a full day of hiking, a hot meal becomes one of the best things in the world. It becomes even better when it’s delicious and varied. Dinner is the most exciting meal of the day, because we’re not trying to go anywhere so we can really enjoy making and eating it, and there are so many options for what to cook. Since we’re carrying all of our food for a seven day trip, we’re going to dehydrate anything that is dehydratable for our dinners to lighten our packs. (Also, food dehydration is a cool skill to develop…more on dehydrating in a later post.) Below are the 6 meals we’ve planned. Beyond the fiesta night, which we’ve planned for the first night since it will involve heavy (but delicious and worthwhile) things like salsa and guacamole, we’ll choose what we want to eat on any given night based on what we feel like, what kind of miles we did that day, and what the weather is like (split pea soup is often kept in reserve for rainy days).

1.     Fiesta Night: We’ll cook brown rice, black beans, and bell peppers ahead of time and dehydrate them. Come dinnertime, these rehydrated will be combined with cheese, salsa, and guacamole.

2.     Non-Ramen Bombs: Ramen Bombs—ramen noodles with instant mashed potatoes—are an Outing Club Classic, but given D$’s poor relationship with gluten, Ramen is out. No worries, though—we’re using mung bean noodles instead and adding (dehydrated) Brussel sprouts, spinach, broccoli, bell peppers, and spices to make the meal more interesting.

3.     Split Pea Soup: The soup is made ahead of time and dehydrated until it’s crumbly. Carrots are sliced, cooked, and dehydrated. These are combined and reconstituted after a long, cold, rainy day to make one of the best backpacking meals of all time.

4.     Peanut Sauce Noodles: We’ll first cook, then dehydrate, some gluten free noodles (rice or quinoa pasta). In camp, these will be rehydrated with broccoli and will be combined with a delicious peanut sauce that involves peanut butter, soy sauce, and lots of garlic.

5.     Pizza Casserole: A blend of polenta, tomato sauce, mushrooms, and cheese. Tastes just like pizza but comes in a pot and is eaten with a spork.

6.     Our last dinner plan is debuting on this trip, and thus has no title yet. A combination of a hearty quantity of sweet potatoes, black beans, red peppers, and yet-to-be-determined spices will likely satisfy the two of us and potentially become a popular, repeatable vegetarian backpacking meal. In perfect conditions, this meal will occur at a moment and/or in a location that ties the meal to fond memories that we will easily recalled when we cook the meal in the future.

In addition to our meals, we’re bringing tea and hot cocoa for the chilly mountain evenings and mornings, as well as a batch of gluten free brownie mix that will provide multiple nights of after dinner delight.

Keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for a little “how to” on dehydrating food!

Do YOU have any food ideas for backpacking? Let us know in the comments!

"I guess we'd rather be in Colorado..."

If you get the John Denver reference in this post's title, 5 bonus points for you!

As we have gone about our respective summer jobs, the day we get to GO WEST draws closer and closer! Over the next couple of weeks we'll be finalizing which gear we'll bring and what deliciousness will make it onto our menu, which we'll share on this blog. In the meantime, here is the rundown:

Unlike the poor fellow in John Denver's song, "I guess he'd rather be in Colorado," we are not stuck in the city. Thanks to the Beyond the Pines Fellowship we'll be doing a week-long backpacking trip in the Colorado Rockies. Our trip begins on a section of the Colorado Trail, where we will have the opportunity to summit Mt. Massive and Mt. Elbert, two of Colorado's tallest 14,000-footers. As we head further south, we'll jump on the Continental Divide Trail for a brief period so that we can reach another local trail that will allow us to summit Mt. Missouri, Mt. Belford, and/or Mt. Oxford, three mountains in the Collegiate Peaks. Being college students, we thought a trip to the Collegiate Peaks seemed fitting, and since these mountains are some of the tallest in Colorado, we're expecting some fantastic views.

Backpacking in this area provides several opportunities for applying knowledge and skills that don’t usually apply when we hike in New England and opens up many avenues for learning new things:

·      Orienteering: Though we, of course, learn map and compass skills in Leadership Training and sometimes have to orient ourselves using the map and compass if we’re “lost” (although, Mike tells us we’re never really lost, we just sometimes don’t know where we are), our itinerary takes us through areas where we’ll have to rely more on our orienteering skills. Many sections of the trails we’ll be following lack clear signage (sadly, in part due to vandalism of signs that were posted), areas with less foot traffic won’t be so obviously worn as such places like the Appalachian Trail, and the rocky ridges above treeline are not conducive to having paths worn into them. Instead of always following a well-marked trail, we’ll be breaking out our topography maps and compasses! In the Fall semester following this trip, we plan on teaching an orienteering class that will bring students from the very basics (How does this compass thing work anyway? What do all these lines mean?) to being able to find themselves and go places using the map and compass.

·      Altitude: Our hike begins around 10,000 feet above sea level. From there, we will traverse everywhere between about 9,500 and 14,433 (that’s Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado and 2^nd tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S.). While the effect of higher altitude won’t be anything like a jaunt up to Everest Base Camp, we do expect to feel some effects. Hiking in these elevations—particularly after having just flown to Colorado—may make us feel fatigued with less effort or may give us headaches. Of course, if either of us shows signs of legit high altitude illness, we will move ourselves to a lower elevation (and in fact, we have an alternative itinerary on the Colorado Trail at lower elevation in case either of us become ill in the first couple days of our trip). But there are things we can do to prepare for and deal with hiking at these elevations. First, training: it’s a bit hard to “train for high altitude” when we’re living near sea level, but by focusing on cardiovascular fitness through running, biking, and swimming (including hypoxic swimming, a workout designed to train for being active with less oxygen), we hope to be more able to deal with the added challenge of hiking where there is less oxygen—essentially, we hope by starting the trip rather physically fit, our bodies can focus on adapting to the higher altitude rather than trying to do that and adapt to vigorous physical activity. Because we expect the altitude to effect our perceived effort as we hike but are not sure how much it will wear us out, we’ve set up an itinerary with smaller base miles (the miles we’d have to do to get to where we can be easily picked up) than we’d normally expect ourselves to do but have all sorts of side trips (like summit trails) and optional ways to turn the trip into a loop if we find we can go further. Having this flexibility with how many miles we hike in any given day will help avoid the stress and pressure of having to hike an unrealistically big day that was planned before we knew how we’d feel hiking at higher elevations. We’ll also need to pay attention to hydration, as it is easier to become dehydrated at higher elevations, and to preventing nasty sunburns. High altitude nutrition will also be important to consider, but more on that later when we write about our menu planning.

·      Science Nerds for Life: As we hike through the landscape, paying attention to what is around us will reveal all sorts of awesome knowledge and histories.

o   Geology: We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for glacial moraines, glacial striations, and other neat features that will help us read the story of the area’s past.

o   Flora: Hiking up and down through a span of about 6,000 feet will take use through many different kinds of forests, providing the opportunity to explore what kinds of plants grow at which altitudes, with which other plants, and under which conditions (i.e. which direction the slope is facing and so on). Figuring out how different biological, topographical, and weather characteristics are related is a fun puzzle.

o   Fauna: We hope to see animals! Some animals found in the Colorado Rockies include bears, lions, various ungulates (elk, deer, etc.), marmots, birds, and, hopefully, more.