Doomsday Preppers

This post is in response to our first request, related to preparation and packing. I love a good, complicated spreadsheet, so the obvious answer for us was spreadsheets, lots and lots of spreadsheets. 

There were three critical lists: a gear packing list, food packing and staging list, and a daily itinerary.

The gear list sounds simple enough, but since we have chosen to take advantage of alternate forms of travel where long sections of the trail are on roads, we actually needed three gear lists: one for backpacking, one for biking/bikepacking, and one for paddling our canoe. There is a lot of overlap, but each list is unique to make sure you have the correct gear, repair kits, etc.

Backpacking gear prior to departure.

The daily itinerary actually came first, cooked up while I was stuck on the couch for the bulk of the Summer of ‘17 mending a broken ankle. The plan relied heavily on the detailed trail guides published by the Friends of the Mountains to Sea Trail, but that three volumes of books had to be put in a format we could digest. The plan is also broken down by our three chosen disciplines, backpacking, cycling, and paddling, and the plan for each day included our starting location, primary water source, proposed destination for camping that night, number of miles covered that day, total accurate miles to date, and contact information for our trail support person for that segment of the trail.

If you have been following along, you know that the itinerary went out the window on about Day 7 due to tough weather conditions that led to injuries that had to be healed before continuing with the hike. Even so, the plan has remained invaluable as we tackle the trail segment by segment in non-linear fashion. We would have been lost without it.

The final piece was the food preparation plan. This was probably the most difficult and most critical piece. Debra took the lead on this piece and did a truly incredible job anticipating our daily needs for calories with a huge variety of food choices that we have not become bored with any of the food purchased in advance - and there was a lot of food purchased in advance. Each day includes breakfast (with instant latte for Debra), morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and sometimes dessert. The amount of food we planned and staged ahead has been spot on. We overdid it on staging some things we thought we would consume more quickly, namely toilet paper, contact lens solution, baby wipes, stove fuel, toothpaste and other non-food items.

Staging was done on our drive across the state to the trailhead at the Tennessee border. We prepared a number of boxes of food for the hike from Tennessee to Raleigh - about 50 days and 667 miles - each with 4-7 days of food depending on the location and distance to the next resupply. We planned to mail 2 of the boxes to ourselves at post offices along the trail. Two boxes were staged with friends in Asheville, and two boxes were staged with a friend covering us from Elkin to Greensboro. Two were left at home in Raleigh to be shuttled to us as we neared home at the end of the hike. That left just a couple of grocercy store resupplies required where the trail runs through towns.

One other interesting nugget was Debra’s find that packaged food available on doomsday prepper websites is much less expensive than on outdoor gear websites. Who knew?

I know, I know, lots of processed food.