The Culinary Misadventures of the Long Distance Hiker
The year Wonder Woman and I hiked the Appalachian Trail, we were away from home for 156 days, from early May to mid-October. At the beginning of our journey, I weighed around 230 pounds. By the end, I had dropped to 180 pounds and was wearing medium-sized clothes for the first time since high school. For most long-distance hikers, the two overriding feelings are ravenous hunger and fatigue. The trail involves over 400,000 feet of climbing, stretching from Maine to Georgia and covering just shy of 2,200 miles. It’s almost impossible for hikers to carry enough food to sustain their weight, though some manage better than others for physiological reasons I can’t quite grasp.
In preparation for our hike, we spent a lot of time packing boxes of food for my daughter and son-in-law to mail to us at various hostels, outfitters, and general delivery post offices along the way. We bought cases of oatmeal, Pop-Tarts, energy bars, corn chips, and other pre-made food. We also dehydrated large quantities of sweet potatoes, black beans, and several London broils to make beef jerky. Since Wonder Woman has celiac disease and can’t eat wheat, we were concerned about finding adequate food for her along the trail. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have worried—or prepared so much food. We ended up giving away large portions of it when it became monotonous. To our surprise, finding gluten-free food wasn’t as challenging as we had anticipated.
A guy my size, carrying a 25-pound backpack and climbing mountains all day in hot weather, can burn upwards of 5,000 calories a day if he hikes long enough. We typically woke up around 5:00 AM to eat and pack our gear. My breakfast usually consisted of two large honeybuns thickly covered with peanut butter or Nutella. Occasionally, I’d indulge in a bagel. I drank instant coffee boiled over the beer can alcohol stove I packed. While hiking, I’d consume a Snickers bar or a couple of Nature Valley granola bars every hour. I also ate quite a few Clif bars, but I found they tasted progressively worse the more I had.
For lunch and dinner, I often wrapped my meals in a big flour tortilla. My fillings included tuna, cheese from a block I carried, dried beef or Slim Jims, hot sauce, and maybe some crumbled Fritos. I always had a second tortilla with peanut butter. For dessert, I enjoyed candy, usually Whoppers or dark chocolate. I also devoured countless bags of pork rinds—they weigh almost nothing and pack a whopping 900 calories per bag. Sometimes I’d eat a couple of family packs of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice or pasta dishes from Lipton. I’m proud to say that, unlike most of my fellow hikers, I didn’t eat any ramen noodles. I like them just fine, but they simply didn’t appeal to me at the time. After returning home, I discovered that I had royally messed up my electrolyte balance by not getting enough sodium, so maybe some ramen would have been a good idea after all.
Hiker hunger is truly on display at restaurants in the towns along the trail. Every few days, hikers need to find a place to buy supplies, wash their clothes, and grab a shower. However, they don’t do any of that until they’ve filled their bellies at whatever establishment they can find. There were times when I’d order a meal, quickly finish it, and then order a second meal before feeling even slightly full. Alongside the food, I’d drink entire pitchers of Coke, or, when we were in the South, sweet iced tea. We were always on the lookout for any AYCE (all you can eat) places, although I was asked to leave a Chinese buffet in Pittsfield, MA, after my sixth plate. In New Jersey, there’s a stretch of trail that allows you to hit quite a few delis in a short span, and I certainly took advantage of that. In New England, I savored a delicacy we don’t have in North Carolina: gigantic full-belly clams. Of course, in Maine, I enjoyed fresh lobster during a memorable meal in Millinocket, the town near the northern terminus of Mount Katahdin.
Most of the weight I lost came back within a year. To this day, I haven’t had another Snickers bar, and I went a decade without eating a honeybun. I’m not a Nutella fan anymore, although I still enjoy a fair amount of peanut butter. Whenever we travel to trail towns during hiking season, I always nudge Wonder Woman if I see a hiker come in, so we can watch them order the prodigious amount of food they typically get. It brings back such fond memories.
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