A Very Long Walk in May, Chapter 7: Frequently Asked Questions

I realize that many of you reading this series are not backpackers and are therefore unfamiliar with the whole process. So, I decided to dedicate this chapter entirely to “Frequently Asked Questions”.  I queried Tess on this subject since she has done more long backpacking trips than me, and she contributed the following: (all of these are actual questions that people have asked about these unique adventures.)

I will resume the tale of our Very Long Walk in May in Chapter 8.

Q. Do you sleep in a tent?  

A. This is our very most frequently asked question, and I find it strange. YES. We sleep in a tent EVERY night. Exceptions: occasionally we will hitchhike in to a town and stay in a hotel or come upon a 3-sided shelter built for trail hikers.  Shelters are more common on designated thru-hike locations like the Appalachian Trail, but often they are crowded with people who move around in their sleep or snore like freight trains; tenting is frequently the more appealing option.

Tess and Jet sleeping in our tent.  Tess hates this picture because she thinks she looks like an ancient relic here.

Q. Do you carry everything? 

A. Yes, we carry everything—including our tent—that we need for our trip, in our backpacks. However, we are minimalists and concerned about carrying too much weight, so we take only what is absolutely necessary (deodorant, towels, and variety of clothes are NOT necessary), occasionally allowing ourselves to bring one luxury item such as a small book, a deck of cards, or a pillow. One of the most oft-repeated phrases when one is contemplating whether or not to include an item is “ounces add up to pounds”; this means that even if something seems really light, it will add something to your overall pack weight. And a heavy pack means a less enjoyable trip. At the start of the trips, our packs are really full, but as we eat through several meals, they become progressively lighter.  A good rule of thumb is to try and limit pack weight to about 20% or less of your bodyweight.  Some of the family members are somewhat anal when it comes to pack weight and make spreadsheets that look like this.  (Brent's very exacting spreadsheet created for our Camino trip).

Q. What do you eat? 

A.  Lightweight food.  We dehydrate a variety of your run-of-the mill options like beef stew and chili (and by we, I mean Tess), but lately Tess has become more hippie-like and has been making things like Quinoa and salmon, Mexican rice and beans, Thai noodles with peanut sauce, and dehydrated homemade hummus.  She experimented with dehydrating smoothies and refried beans (separately), but those options were vetoed.  It took Tess and Shay many tries before they nixed the beans.  I only ate the beans once.  We also lunch and snack on things like hard cheeses and salami (within a few days of purchasing them), corn chips—which have the highest calorie to weight ratio (calories are very necessary currency for the hiker), and tortillas (they don’t crush like bread) with tuna in foil or with peanut butter and Nutella.  I loved the latter combo when I first ate it and said, “It tastes just like a Reese’s peanut butter cup”, but I quickly came to be disgusted by the mere sight of the light brown combo—have you ever changed a newborn’s diaper? I refuse to eat it to this day.  Breakfasts are mostly oatmeal with dried bananas or apples with a hot drink like tea or cocoa.  Occasionally breakfast is a Snickers bar.

Me, trying to work my way through a PB/ Nutella tortilla

Q. What do you drink? 
A. We just drink water (sometimes mixed with flavored powders) that we gather from lakes, streams, rivers, and sometimes, when desperate, puddles or beaver ponds.  Since we don’t want to get Giardia or cysts in our lungs, we make sure to sterilize the water first.  We do this with a SteriPen which uses an ultraviolet light to kill bacteria.  Sometimes, because the SteriPen only sanitizes and doesn’t filter, there are residual, but harmless chunks floating in your drink.  This is the reason we primarily purchase opaque and/or colored water bottles.

Q. How do you shower/do laundry?  
A. Ha! This one always makes me laugh. Have you ever watched a show where people—like pioneers —just strip down on the shore of a lake and jump in for a bath?  Yeah. It’s like that. Except when it’s really cold and you are battling against hypothermia, you just wash up in the frigid water with your handkerchief (with a drop of Dr.Bronner’s—it won’t kill the fish) and never actually remove your clothes.  Stench is kind of par for the course and you mostly get used to it.  As for laundry, since you normally only wear one outfit to hike in, and carry one outfit to sleep in (that is all that is necessary), laundry isn’t part of the normal routine.  HOWEVER, when one is hiking daily in mud and mire, some type of clothes cleaning is necessary; it’s called “rub your muddy socks on the rock in the river and get the big chunks off.”  We do carry a clothesline with us to hang out any wet laundry, but mostly we just use the line to hang our food up in what’s called a “bear bag” so the critters don’t eat all of our fritos.

Q. Do you eat a lot of s’mores? 
A. Umm, no.  Hiking is more like working and less like vacationing (see chapter 4 for more clarification), and by the time we reach our campsite, we are anxious to eat a hot meal and crawl into bed…no S’mores allowed. Also, no one likes sticky when backpacking because stickiness requires washing.

Q. How do you charge your phone? 
A. You don’t. You put it on the extreme battery-saver mode and only use it for emergencies. And maybe for listening to music when you think you might die. Sometimes you hit the jackpot and find a state park with electrical outlets in the bath houses or you enter a ghost town and unplug the pop machine since ghosts most likely can’t drink liquids.

Q. Do you see a lot of wildlife?  
A. Almost never, and most certainly not dog-eating wolves.  We do see a lot of wildlife poop, though, so we know they are out there.  The closest I have ever gotten to wildlife was on this trip when one brown weasel and one white one jumped out of tree together and ran around my legs, then popped up the tree again.  I guess that is where the song “Pop Goes the Weasel” came from, but it should be plural. We do hear a lot of squirrels chiding us from their perches and some beautiful songbirds waking us in the mornings. This was my favorite bird song from this trip.

Q. Do you do a lot of stargazing? 

A. We actually don’t do a lot of stargazing because our tired heads hit the pillow (or ground if you didn’t choose that luxury item) by around 7:30 most nights—long before the stars start to twinkle.  I do remember one summer trip to Isle Royale, Michigan however, where I saw the most marvelous stars during a midnight potty break outside. 

We may not see lots of stars, but the daytime views are amazing!

Q. What do you do all day? 
A. I refuse to answer this question.  It’s called a HIKE…figure it out.

Q. How do you deal with blisters?  
A. I almost never get them, but some of the family members do and we like to cover them with Compeed—a cool wax-like blister covering we discovered in Spain while doing the Camino de Santiago!

Q. What do you do if it rains? 
A. We carry on as usual. Also, before this ever happens, as a preventative measure, we line our backpacks with trash compacter bags. That way we get wet but our precious sleeping bags stay dry.

Q. What do you do if someone gets sick/breaks a bone/gets eaten by a bear? 
A. We haven’t actually had anyone get sick on our trips; the exercise and fresh air seem to have a immune-boosting effect.  We have had two injuries on our adventures—one in Alaska where Cole cut his knee open down to the fat globules under the skin (luckily we were still at the resort where we began, on a day hike into the mountains). We hiked down the mountain, got in our car and drove to the nearest ER—6.5 hours away; that is a really good story that requires a separate post.  Our other major injury was in Michigan, when I slipped on a rock and sprained my ankle while acting out a SpongeBob episode for my children.  I proceeded to hike, crying, into camp and two days later, hike out with duct tape for a brace.  When we got done and removed the tape, my ankle looked like a puffy purple orange.  So far, no one has gotten eaten by a wild animal yet, but I did see a movie one Valentine’s Day where a man got eaten by a bear and lived. It was so traumatic for me that I wrote about it here.

Me, icing my cankle on Isle Royale, MI

Q. Do you bring a gun? 
A. No, it would be too heavy. We do bring a tiny knife to cut Salami and pepper spray to use on things that scare us (like Wolf Man). There is an accepted sub-culture on the trail and almost everyone is pleasant.  Crazy, maybe, but mostly pleasant.

Tess using our tiny knife to prepare some victuals for our lunch.

Q. Why don't you wear hiking boots? 
A. Because they are heavy and super rigid. When you hike, you want something that is sturdy but light; something that has very little break-in time.  We mostly hike in running or trail shoes. I sometimes wish I had more ankle support (see photo above this one), but most of the time I am satisfied with my sneakers.

See our pretty trail runners?

Q. Are you doing what Cheryl Strayed/Bill Bryson did?  
A. Cheryl Strayed was trying to escape her horrible life; we have great lives and just like to be outdoors.  Bill Bryson only did a tiny part of the trail, stayed mostly in hotels, and bathed regularly, so no.  But hey, they both got enough fodder for a book.  As Hemingway says, "Bad childhoods and war make for great writing." I think he would agree that bad trips make for great writing as well.  See the blog series “A Very Long Walk in May.”

Q. Do you bring a Coleman grill/cast iron Dutch oven/ax? 
A. Ha, ha, ha* (*fights off the urge to be angsty) We go for the MSR canister stove instead the Dutch oven to save on weight. Nope on the ax. For the times we can have fires, we just gather up kindling.

Tess using our stove on a rock--the only raised surface available. The minute after this photo was taken, the stove collapsed and boiling water got all over everything...but not on Tess!

Q. Do you get lost? How do you know where to go? Do you use maps or a compass? 

A. Yes, we get lost. But never forever because we never go very far off of the trail. We have maps of the sections we hike, but sometimes they are old and the trail has changed.  Most of the trails are marked with signs, at least every few miles, to direct hikers. I have never used a compass, but it seems like it would be a wise thing to take along--very Lewis and Clark-like.

Q. Are there campsites? What do they have? 
A. Yes. There are campsites. And they don't have much. We sleep in our tent at these campsites. Many of them are close to some type or pond or river so you have a ready water source. Some of the campsites have fire rings and allow fires and some have logs to sit on.  Occasionally, you will find a picnic table which is wonderful, and sometimes the trails will have latrines (which are toilets sitting on the top of the hill somewhere behind a few scraggly trees). These are gross and smelly and remind me of a never-emptied porta-potty; you get the idea. Mostly, I just go find a secluded spot in the woods and do my business there.  You are supposed to dig a cat hole to bury your poop, but I figure that is racist against humans since none of the animals are required to do it; so, I just cover it with leaves. Besides, a trowel is just extra weight.

A pretty typical campsite on a pretty typical gray day on our very long walk in May.

Q. Does your dog wear a backpack? 
A. Yes, and he carries his own food and sometimes my water bottle.

And sometimes (not often), he gets tired and decides to take a nap on a log.

Q. Do you lose a lot of weight? 
A. Tess did when she hiked the AT a few summers ago, and I always lose a little, but the minute I return, I am “scary hungry” enough to eat an entire pizza. This normally evens out any weight previously lost.

Both Tess and Shay looking skinny on the AT.

Do you have a question that you have just been hankering to ask? Leave your inquiry in the comment section and I will do my best to address it!