To avoid shopping, cooking, dishes and any other signs of adulthood, there was a time when I found comfort at vending machines when I got hungry.
My dunderheaded ways faded quickly when I got to a place where my six quarters and a machine filled with white sugar and salt would not work any more. The back country.
I found jeffrey pine, granite, buck brush, tree frogs and creepy little ants. But I found no vending machines in the back country.
So I still sweat my diet for backpacking, especially for nine days on the JMT.
I confided my obsession to photographer and outdoor enthusiast Mark Crosse who is not a worrier. Crosse knows a guy who knows another guy who eats nothing but Snickers bars on the trail.
Which is no big deal on an overnighter, but this guy did it walking the Pacific Crest Trail. We're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles. Now he's walking the Continental Divide Trail. And at each food stop along the way, he picks up several dozen Snickers bars and makes every cavity in his head scream for another week -- morning, noon and night.
This won't do for me. If you collected all the fillings in my head, my face would collapse. Plus, I have a disagreeable stomach. Enough said.
So I'm stuffing my bear canister with other stuff. I'm trying to find freeze-dried grub that's light and nutritious. I'm thinking about a five-ounce dinner in a plastic sack that can hold boiling water. I'll bring a 3.5-ounce stove to boil water.
Voila! Shovel it down, pretending not to taste or smell it. And I've had a hot dinner at the end of a mosquito-ridden day, hauling a 35-pound pack over a 12,000-foot pass.
Egad, where will they find my body?
"Yeah, that's the problem," said Crosse, laconically stashing his photo gear. "After a while, you just kind of go crazy eating this stuff."
How crazy?
After he and I walked to the top of Mount Whitney a few years ago, we stopped at Denny's and ordered a mushroom omelette the size of Baltimore.
I don't remember eating it. I don't remember paying. I don't remember the song we sang afterward. The authorities assured us that we conjured a mad rendering of "Rocky Racoon," and the locals loved us.
If we did all that for a short jaunt to the top of the highest peak in the lower 48 states, just think what we will do after nine days and 75 miles? By all means, consider this a desperate plea of some sort.
