TWIN LAKES — Food? That stuff is heavy!
I’m a trail runner, and trail runners can run long distances on nothing but energy drinks, gels, shot blocks and bars, right? A guy walking a mere 15 miles a day on The Colorado Trail should be able to do the same!
In a fit of bad judgment last summer, I pulled the snack food, extra energy bars and heavier meals out of my pack to lighten the load at the beginning of a 75-mile-segment of trail, from U.S. 50 to Twin Lakes. By making my pack lighter I expected to be able to move faster. I figured I could get to my resupply load at Twin Lakes in three days.
It was an enlightened take on lightening my pack: Without the encumbrance of excess food, the great outdoors would become a form of nutrition, surely. Those amazing vistas. That supercharged high altitude air. And losing some body fat might actually help energy to flow, the chi to arise.
Delusional.
Oh sure, the trail energy flowed, until day five — and I still wasn’t to Twin Lakes yet. I was heading north from Clear Creek, cruising an easy stretch of single track on a chilly, rainy day, bound for my resupply, just 6 miles away. I thought I’d been eating enough, but my caloric gas tank simply tapped out. I bonked so hard I couldn’t take another step and had sit down beside the trail. I needed food, but due to my pack-lightening experiment, most of the food had mostly run out. The next six miles had to be the longest and slowest six miles in the history of The Colorado Trail. I bonked twice more before I reached Twin Lakes. By then, the thought of a hamburger and a cold beer had nearly driven me mad.
Trail nutrition is serious business. A backpacker on the Colorado Trail hikes a half marathon, or more, day after day for over a month, burning upward of 6,000 calories a day. The balance between calorie count, pack weight and distance to resupply is a calculation that has to be tallied correctly. Last summer I was barely meeting my baseline calorie needs, much less eating enough to carry a 27-pound pack all day every day.
As I plan my return this July, my favorite buzzwords are “nutritionally dense.” I’m experimenting with making pemmican, a light-weight, energy-packed American Indian food adopted by the frontiersmen of yore. In yonder days pemmican was made with dried buffalo meat crushed into a powder by rocks and blended with buffalo fat. The resulting mixture provides energy from fat and strength from protein. Stored in a cool, dry place, pemmican lasts forever. The Lewis and Clark expedition ate a ton of pemmican during their two year journey from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. Polar explorers Vihljamur Stefansson and Robert Perry (and their sled dogs) subsisted on pemmican, and little else, for months at a time.
To make pemmican I cut lean grass-fed beef steaks into thin strips, then slow dry them in the dehydrator. The meat is powdered in a blender and mixed with melted tallow and dried cherries, cranberries and blueberries. I put the mix in muffin tins to harden. One of my 4-ounce pemmican cakes contains between 700-800 calories.
Of course, pemmican’s an acquired taste, not for everyone. My first batch tasted like beef-flavored cardboard. Yummm. I’ve since added berries, and it’s much more flavorful now. But pemmican isn’t about taste, anyway — it’s about fueling the machine.
In addition to making pemmican, I’m dehydrating chili, various crock-pot concoctions, eggs (a dozen dehydrated eggs weighs only 5 ounces), pasta, kale, refried beans, apples, sweet potatoes, red peppers and more. I’ve vacuum sealed freeze-dried servings of macaroni, stroganoff and lasagna, and stocked up on muesli, hard cheeses, tortillas, almond butter, dried fruit, berries, nuts and … Snickers bars.
Yeah, food is heavy. Ray Jardine, the father of ultra light backpacking compared food to rocket fuel. Rocket fuel is heavy too, said Mr. Jardine, but it gets the space ship into orbit.
Dean Krakel: 303-954-1613, dkrakel@denverpost.com. On Instagram: instagram.com/dkrakel
Editor’s note
Denver Post photo editor Dean Krakel plans to spend a month this summer trekking the Colorado Trail — 489 miles from Denver to Durango that cross eight mountain ranges. This is the second in a biweekly series on his preparation for the big hike. See Dean’s photos from the trail last year at .
Reading up on trail nutrition
Check out “Pack light. Eat right” by Brenda L. Braaten for more on nutrition for long-distance hikers at thru-hiker.com/articles/pack_light_eat_right.php, as well as this interview with sports dietitian Tavis Piattoly at ryangrayson.blogspot.com/2013/07/nutrition-for-thru-hikers-interview.html.
Calorie-burn calculators: equipped.outdoors.org/2013/04/how-many-calories-do-you-burn.html
