Wilderness backpacking eat · Eating in Wilderness backpacking
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Eating in Wilderness backpacking
Eating in Wilderness backpacking
You'll want "light" meals, not in the sense of fat or calorie content, but in terms of how much the food weighs in your pack. In fact, you may want to lay off a lot of your "healthy diet" habits for the duration of your trip, because you'll want those extra calories, and fats are a good compact source of all-day energy. Wilderness camping is the very kind of lifestyle that led homo sapiens to develop a fondness for that kind of food. Depending on the length of your trip, food could make up a substantial fraction of your pack weight (figure at least a pound per day). Since water makes up a large percentage of the weight of most foods we eat, and presumably can be found along the way, the obvious solution is to pack foods you can "just add water" to.
Breakfast - Oatmeal is a good option: inexpensive, lightweight to carry, and easy to prepare. Measure portions ahead of time into zipper-sealed baggies for more convenience. Add a spoonful or two of brown sugar to make it more tasty.
Lunch - You might welcome lunch as an excuse to stop to eat during the day, but preparing food on the trail can be a nuisance, so on-the-go foods like trail mix, granola or energy bars, or peanut butter are handy. For short trips, or for the first day or two of longer trips, you can bring semi-perishable foods such as fresh fruit or bagels.
Supper - To restore your energy at the end of the day, freeze-dried foods are your most practical option. All sorts of pre-prepared dishes are available, mostly combinations of noodles, rice, chunks of veggies and meat, and sauce. Many can be prepared in the packaging they come in, making clean-up easier: just add boiling water, mix, and wait a few minutes. Especially with the sauce of hunger added, they can be quite tasty.
Some campsites have fire pits or grills available for cooking. If you use these, limit the wood you gather to small branches taken from the ground, not anything broken from trees (living or dead). It's not as folksy, but it's more considerate of the environment to bring a small gas-powered camp stove with you: they're safer, more efficient, and don't require scavenging firewood from the wilderness you're there to admire.
Other options include multifuel stoves. For longer trips, (where you would require more than one gas canister) provide better weight efficiency. They can also be refueled much more places, like a regular gas-station. If it is allowed to make backcountry fires in your area, skipping the stove may be an option. In general, there is plenty of wood in a forested backcountry area which is not heavily visited. A lot of food can be eaten without cooking also (like oatmeal and freezedrieds), if need be. When there has been rain, the only regular way of collecting dry wood for making the fire start is to break of dead branches on the bottom of pine trees. Birch bark is excellent to make the fire going, otherwise paper is a good alternative (do not burn plastic it creates a toxic smoke).
Keep pots and pans to a minimum, both for weight and clean-up reasons. If camping with someone you're in the habit of kissing, sharing a pot of food instead of dishing it out onto plates isn't a hygiene issue (but may become a relationship issue if you don't share equitably). In fact, if you mix and eat your freeze-dried meals in the packages they came in, and your oatmeal in the baggies you packed it in, you can get away with just a single pan for heating water, which won't even have to be washed. Stick to stewy and spoon-able entrés, and you may not even need to bring a fork or dinner knife.
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Wilderness backpacking Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.