Berthoud Pass – Every five or six days for the past four months, Doug Walsh staggers off the Continental Divide Trail into a town.
While his pal Eric Wiese races into a burger joint and orders pretty much the entire menu, Walsh finds his way to the local grocery’s produce section.
“Cantaloupe. After six days of hiking, I crave cantaloupe,” said the tanned and lean 41-year-old.
Walsh has hiked 124 days and roughly 2,400 miles eating nothing but raw, uncooked, unprocessed food. His plan is to hike the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail this summer eating only raw food. He averages between 20 and 30 miles a day, nibbling on dried fruit, vegetables, nuts and a banquet of gourmet twists on that raw trio. He cooks nothing. But don’t think Walsh is eating like the birds and foraging critters he passes on the trail from Canada to Mexico.
“There’s a thinking out there that we have to suffer in order to be healthy,” he said as he dived into a box of raw food delivered by his brother Jim in the dirt parking lot atop Berthoud Pass. “That is simply not true.”
To prove his point, Walsh produces a pizza from the box. Carob chocolate mousse pie. Hemp kale salad. Meatless meatloaf. Falafel. Flax crackers.
The food is delicious, but a different kind of delicious. It’s a tastiness that goes unknown in our country, Walsh said, his pale blue eyes igniting on the cusp of his pending sermon.
“You don’t have to be deprived to eat healthy,” he said. “You can have your cake and eat it, too. Corporate food is killing us; food made by companies whose focus is to make a profit, not promote health. I want to help people get back to the earth and to do that. We need to recognize the earth in our food.”
Wiese, a gangly and chuckling 27-year-old adventurer from Chattanooga, Tenn., has been hiking with Walsh since the first day. He notes he ate 2 1/2 large pizzas in a cozy pizzeria after a particularly grueling stretch of trail.
“Doug is quality; I’m quantity. I can eat,” he said, cramming a concoction of peanut butter, crushed cookies, granola, honey and tortilla into his mouth faster than he can chew, leaving an ample supply of “flavor savers” hanging in his tangled beard.
“I must say,” Wiese warbles between chomps, “I’m jealous at every meal. I always look over and I’m like, ‘What you got there?’ His food is good. Really good.”
Walsh is proud to hear of his pal’s pangs. He reads the ingredients in his pie, which is made from a raw food company named Rawlifeline in Pennsylvania. Coconut, dates, avocados, agave nectar, carob powder.
“If you bought something like this at Safeway, it would have 20 ingredients and you probably could not pronounce most them,” he said.
The raw food apostle hopes his hike will help turn the palate of America away from unnaturally colored, mass-produced, overprocessed edibles. Since his first step on April 22, Walsh has been mounting what he hopes is a threat to America’s $500 billion retail food industry.
“It’s a crime what they are feeding this country,” he said.
A vegan since 1988 and raw food connoisseur since 1996, Walsh has lost a mere 5 pounds in more than four months of daily marathon-length hiking. He’s even a stream sipper, taking his water straight from high-altitude water supplies. He has not contracted any of the nasty parasites that haunt most filter-eschewing stream sippers.
There’s no question Walsh boasts a mighty constitution. Rather smelly and disheveled – as would be the case for anyone who has spent only seven nights in a hotel since beginning his long trudge.
“Eventually you get to a point in your life where you want to do something bigger than yourself,” he said, pouring water into a container of buckwheat and sunflower seeds, which, by the end of the day’s hike, will be paté. “This is my thing.”
Follow Doug Walsh’s dispatches at .
Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
