How We'll Eat

Hello Friends,

A lot of people have asked what and how we'll be eating while we're in the woods. << A very fine question indeed! Well, to start off, weight is an extremely important factor in nearly ALL of our decisions, including food. Water is a lot heavier than many people realize. It's about 8lbs per gallon. And it's in EVERYTHING you eat; unless of course it's been dehydrated... Which is why we have a Dehydrator, but not just any dehydrator. We have the mothership of dehydrators, the Excalibur Dehydrator. This purchase was dual-purpose in the fact that Abbey started a mostly Raw Food Diet this year, and the dehydrator makes her eating much more simple and gourmet-capable. Fun fact about water: When Campbell's Soup started selling condensed (think: partially dehydrated) they saved over 50% on shipping, because water was the heaviest ingredient in their soups (plus it was 1899 and it took a lot of horses to get the soup from one place to the next...) Enough history, onto our food. We'll be dehydrating a very large percentage of our food, and then simply re-hydrating by adding water, and heating. Which brings us to our next topic, the Stove. We're 'Comfort Ultra-Light Hikers' meaning we are trying to carry as little weight as possible, but not at the sacrifice of our own bodily comfort (unlike the crazy hikers wrapping themselves in Tyvek housewrap and sleeping on the ground at night in lieu of a tent and sleeping bag).

But one area where we can be Super Ultra Light is our Stove system. We're using what's called a Soda Can Stove. Which as the name suggests, is a stove made from a soda can (or beer can). Here's a pretty comprehensive wiki link: Can Stove that does a good job of explaining.

Preston has been having fun designing and making these. They weigh about 0.4 of an ounce and we'll be using denatured alcohol as our fuel (which we can get at outfitters, gas stations, hardware stores...) and 1 stove can be made out of pieces of just two cans. We did the first test boil tonight with one of Preston's first designs. He's fairly happy with the result of a full rolling boil in just under 9 minutes but thinks with some tweaks to the design, and a windscreen, he'll eventually be able to get that time down to 5 minutes. Altogether not bad considering no windscreen, moderate wind outside, and a unfinished/unsealed first try stove. As far as our Cook-Pot, we're using a 1.3L Titanium Pot from REI. Here are some pictures!

Thanks to my buddy Richie for the PBR cans as I usually only have empty bottles hanging around :)

We will be trying different designs as Preston makes them, and then start nailing down our meals plans in the coming months. It will literally take us months to prepare, dehydrate, and package 6 months of food and drink. But for now we'll be taking a couple of these to test out in Mt. Rainier and Olympic National Parks this next week on our Annual National Park road trip.

Thanks for reading! As always we love questions and comments :)

Love and Hugs,

Preston and Abbey