How should I ship my resupply?
Smaller packages to every resupply (will have my food) from home base?
One big package starting at 1st resupply and shipped to every other from there?
Or a mix; some smaller packages to a few spots from home base (San Francisco)
I like the idea of carrying dehydrated foods but is it worth the shipping price?
gus
If this is your first long hike, I guarantee whatever you decide will change a lot as you hike. Best advice is to be as flexible as you can. Don’t buy too much of one kind of food in advance because after Week 1 you might not like it any more.
Many PCT hikers will spend a day off in a several large towns along the way (S Lake Tahoe, Ashland OR) resupplying for the next month or so from the grocery store, according to their needs and the strategies they’ve developed. For instance, I found out on the PCT (my first long hike) that I didn’t like to cook, so I sent my stove home and that changed everything. I found out I didn’t like depending on USPS schedules (missed a mail drop at Belden Town on Friday afternoon before a three day (July 4) weekend), so I stopped mailing packages as much. My definition of an acceptable food load changed very much too, in quantity and quality. I found I needed less than the books said, and that I could have a lot of fun hiking a few days with hotdog buns and peanut butter from a convenience store in a small town.
From what I’ve seen of statistics on the AT, which I hiked with zero food drops, I spent about the average cost per day on trail food, buying along the way. The higher cost of food pretty much cancelled out the postage savings.
Garlic
I had a totally different outcome from Garlic on my PCT hike, which is fine. I had 2/3 of my meals mailed pre-packaged and sent from home. Never got sick of them. I found out for myself I needed about twice as much food as I thought I was going to need. I bought a lot of candy and other junk food in towns. Remember, unless you aren’t picky at all on what you eat, many of the smaller stops on the way only have small convenience stores with not very much in the way of selection. You might want to send packages to these for sure.
I don’t know if you are sending fuel to yourself? If not, then you can use the postal services $4.95 anywhere boxes. You can save a lot of money with these. Also, if you don’t open them for some reason, you can forward them free of charge.
As you can see from Garlic’s and my dissertations, there are many ways to go about this. On the CDT I sent about half my food and bought the other half on the way. Experiment and see what you like the best. Robocop
Robocop
We do as much buying as we go as we can. We did the trail in 2000 and are planning to hike again this year, using the same strategy. In California, except in the Sierras, you can generally find reasonable resupply options in the stores along the trail. In Oregon and Washington, unless you go way off trail (i.e. to Sisters and Bend and Cle Elum), the food choices are limited and expensive at the campground stores, so we will buy food in Ashland and Cascade Locks to mail to all the small POs along the northern part of the trail.
We also use a drift box, forwarded up the trail every three weeks or so, which carries all our guidebook sections, extra maps, medications, socks, etc. You can put extra food in there as well, and mail it to those towns where options are limited.
For this year, we are sending a food box to Warner Springs (since we are behind the kickoff herd, I don’t expect the store to have much left when we get there), and then my DIL is mailing gear (ice axes and bear cans) and food to Kennedy Meadows. We will mail to Vermillion from Mojave. She will mail another box to us in Cascade Locks with some warm gear and rain pants as well as the Washington guidebook. For the rest, we’ll buy along the trail.
The PCTA website has a good article about resupply as you go in the planning section. http://www.pcta.org//planning/before_trip/strategy.asp
Ginny
I found that many people got sick of the food they had spent a lot of effort organizing before a hike. Having said this, I found for myself that using meals that I had planned ahead and dehydrated myself was a lifesaver and by that I mean I felt the quality of nutrition I was able to carry was increased from resupplying on trail. For me this was key to staying strong as my hike progressed. Don’t get me wrong, I ate my fair share of junk food, sugar, and any calorie I could find.
The time and effort to put together prepared meals, dried fruit, jerky, etc. was considerable and when I was doing it I wondered if it was worth it, but for me it certainly was!
Flash
You already can see that there are many different ways to resupply. But, sticking with your original questions, i’d say that if you are going to primarily ship your resupplies, ship them often. Unless the price of shipping is going to make your hike unaffordable, you’ll be grateful to be resupplying more and carrying less.
If you’re shipping from SF to the trail, beware the flat rate boxes. They will end up costing more.
Personally, i found resupplying from towns in California to be fun, reasonably cheap, and reasonably nutritious except for Kennedy Meadows and Bridgeport. For Oregon and Washington i mostly shipped to myself, and it was a boost to eat some better things more often. I liked the change partway through.
I bought and shipped ahead from Mt. Shasta City and Portland, instead of Ashland which is where everyone else shipped from. Ashland is spread out. Mt. Shasta has health food and supermarkets, PO and UPS, all within a couple of blocks. Ashland is more spread out. In Portland i had a girlfriend with a car.
If you’re concerned with nutrition, know that you can find health food of some sort in Idyllwild, from Agua Dulce if you find your way into the suburbs, in Mammoth Lakes, Truckee, Chester, Mt. Shasta, Ashland, Bend, Portland, and probably a few other places. Many healthy foods were in the hiker boxes in Warner Springs, Agua Dulce, Tuolumne Meadows, and Skykomish.
The things people tended to get sick of the most (judging from boxes) were power bars, and bulk dried starches like oatmeal, potatos, quinoa, etc.
markv
I did a hybrid strategy and sent some food from home, bought some in trail towns, and mailed some to myself from stores on the trail. What I found was having to mail stuff to myself from a trail town ended up being a huge amount of work. While my friend who mailed stuff from home sat in the hotel room watching TV all day, I was stressed out buying/putting together/mailing several boxes to send ahead to those places with little to no food available (as an example, I supplied all of Washington from Cascade Locks which was painful). I also found that the few boxes I sent from home had far more variety and flavor then what I ended up eating when I did a resupply from home since I could use a dehyrdator and actually make interesting meals. So if I had to do it again, I would have more food sent from home so I wouldn’t have to do any mass mailings from a trail town. There is no reason to mail things like snacks/granola/candy bars to yourself as any place with a gas station can supply those things. You only need to mail things for the meals themselves.
I had a spreadsheet that when I entered my estimated daily mileage told me when I wold arrive in a given town. I kept it updated regularly (entered actual dates I arrived in a given town and adjusted the mileage average) and I knew within a half a day when I would arrive in a given town over the next 2 weeks (as I had any zeros planned in it). So I never missed a post office hour for those towns that I mailed stuff to. If I knew the PO would be closed, I either had a box sent to a business(usually a hotel) or trail angels place directly so I could still get it. It also made it easy to plan where to next send my bounce box as I knew where I would have time to mail it back out. The only time I got bitten was in Cascade Locks for Labor Day as I had to sit on my butt waiting for the PO to open so I could mail out all my boxes for Washington. If I had them sent from home instead, I could have left 2 days earlier.
The cost of mailing food is overstated. With todays available use of Flat Rate Priority Mail boxes (medium size works great) and considering the extra cost of food in small remote towns cancels each other out.
But as you can see from the various replies here, what works for someone doesn’t work for everyone else.
Miner
One factor i don’t think that’s been mentioned yet: if you prepare many boxes for resupply at home before you hike, and then turn out to be one of the 50% of hikers who do not hike the whole trail (injury, boredom, emergency at home, etc.) then you are stuck with resupply boxes you aren’t using.
Only prepping a few boxes for early on, and then buying and/or shipping from trail towns along the way is a way of hedging your bets.
markv
So this is the part of the planning that I think I’m going to figure out as I go. I don’t like the idea of putting a lot of packages together ahead of time. I’m hoping I find good resupply options on the trail or near by.
I’m hiking SOBO so I plan to put together a couple of boxes for the first couple of weeks, then begin resupplying as I go. I have support in Washington, Northern and Central California. I’m very fortunate to have my Dad who plans to hike in some food into the Sierra. I’m hoping to resupply myself at Tuolumne Meadows and Reds Meadow, then get my dad to bring me a package in Kings Canyon near Vidette Meadow. If that doesn’t work I’ll hike out at Kearsarge Pass (Onion Valley)
Does anyone know when Tuolumne Meadows closes for the season? I’ll be there mid September.
I’m thinking that the town near the Columbia River crossing should have enough food options for me to ship a couple of packages ahead between there and Ashland Oregon. After that I think I’ll be good to go.
I can’t imagine resupplying in town to take all day. Am I missing something? Going to a major store spending about an hour buying food then maybe another hour boxing it up while running clothes at the laundry.
Brett
Miner is right about stressing out in a resupply town. My unforgettable day was in S Lake Tahoe, fairly spread out, and I put four boxes together. I was still fairly new at this, so shopping in an unknown store was hard (you know how many different places there are to hide raisins?), then finding boxes, packing tape, remember the toilet paper, do you need to deal with fuel? Schlep the four bags of groceries to the motel, go back and get the boxes, find all your paperwork and label the boxes, repackage all the groceries for the trail, go back and buy the ziplock bags you forgot… Then you have to haul four 12-pound boxes to the PO which is about a mile away. Oh yeah, it’s Saturday and the PO closes at two o’clock. It’s no fun skipping lunch when you’re that hungry. Then it’s time for laundry, finding an outfitter to get new shoes, finding internet at the library which closes in an hour…you get the idea. It’s a relief to get back on the trail and get some rest sometimes.
It’s not always like that for sure, and you get better at it with experience.
Garlic
Couple of random comments. Mailing things from home like snack/candy bars in resupply can be cost-effective if you have access to something like Costco for bulk purchase. Prices on the trail can by so much higher its still cheaper to mail.
You can use the USPS.com website to determine whether Flat-rate is better deal than non-FR, for the weight involved. You can also order all manner of PM boxes, for no charge, from the website.
It is a risk if you buy in bulk ahead of time. I flunked out on two thru tries and although I used most of my food, I still ended up with lots of high-calorie stuff I wouldn’t normally touch in civilian life. In fact I’m wearing that stuff now.
Al H.
Garlic’s story reaffirms for me the importance of WHERE you choose to ship resupplies from. The traditional places are Tahoe, Ashland, and Cascade Locks. I think Tahoe and Ashland aren’t good choices because of being spread out. The towns that have good stores and are very compact would be Idyllwild, Mojave (not fantastic stores, but ok and compact), Shasta City, and Etna (much like Mojave). Mammoth and Truckee wouldn’t be too bad. Cascade Locks would be ok.
I guess strange stores aren’t a problem for me, since i basically walk the aisles and keep a vague tally in my head of how many calories i have in the categories sugar, salt, breakfast, lunch, and cook food. When i get enough calories in each category, i check out.
markv