"What's your favorite meal that Mom makes?" my husband, Kent, asked.
"Umm… fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and especially her chocolate-kahlua pie with whipped cream," I replied. "What about you?"
We were seated in front of a dancing campfire in pristine wilderness, and all we could think about was food, real food. For our first pack trip into the wilderness we'd bought over $200 worth of freeze-dried meal packets. Packets with exotic names, such as Jambalaya Shrimp, Orange Almandine Chicken, and Turkey Cashew a la King. The contents didn't live up to their mouth-watering names. After 11 days, the dinners all looked the same and smelled even worse.
Well, all this happened a number of years ago. I don't know about the rest of you horse folks, but it seemed as though Kent and I do everything twice. First, the wrong way. Then we begin to get the hang of it.
Our first pack trip was an 11-day venture into the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. We went alone with our two saddle horses and one pack horse. Neither of us had grown up with a horse-we'd just gotten horses that spring and thought, hey, it'd be fun to do a pack trip! We made a lot of mistakes, but we learned a whole lot, too.
If you'd like to go on an extended pack trip and only have one pack horse, I'd like to share with you some tips on food packing that we learned through trial and error.
•Pack light. First, consider your pack horse's well-being-you don't want to overload him. What is it you absolutely cannot, or will not, do without? For us, it's coffee. What item or items can serve multiple purposes? A Leatherman Super Tool comes to mind. Question the need of every item. Weigh everything.
•Organize meal packets. Your pack food should be tasty, nutritional, easy to prepare, and-by doing your own meal packets-relatively inexpensive. For a 10-day trip, three meals a day, you'll need 30 zip-close plastic bags. Label the bags according to the day of the trip and what meal they contain. For instance, label Day 1 bags: #1 Breakfast, #1 Lunch and #1 Dinner. Then take six paper grocery bags and double-bag them. Label one grocery bag breakfast, another lunch, and the third dinner. After you've prepared each meal, place the packets into the appropriate grocery bag. Now you know exactly where everything is.
•Get a great start. Breakfast meal packets are fairly easy to prepare. Only four out of ten breakfasts might be served hot. Plan to prepare hot breakfasts on non-traveling days when there's more time to enjoy them. An easy-to-make cold breakfast might consist of a couple of opened instant-oatmeal packets or granola, and a premeasured amount of powdered milk and dried fruit. A hot breakfast may contain powdered eggs, precooked bacon, and dehydrated hash browns. Another favorite is pancake mix, dehydrated sausage, and a little bit of brown sugar to make into syrup. If you're a coffee lover, bring a little extra. You never know, you might want to share a morning fire and some coffee with folks passing by.
•Have lunch on the go. Lunch is the most difficult meal to pack. Some lunches are eaten in the saddle and are designated as "traveling lunches." These zip-close lunches are in our horn bags and contain beef jerky, granola bars, apples (at the beginning of the trip), or dried fruit. For picnic style lunches, we have sourdough bread (it's a real keeper), a squirt bottle of peanut butter and jelly, or bagels and cheese. It's worth the extra effort to have real, honest-to-goodness, chocolate-chip cookies. Munching a homemade chocolate-chip cookie while surveying nature's splendor is hard to beat! Another lunch idea is fruitcake, which lasts forever, has fiber, and is nutritionally dense. My sweet mother-in-law, Betty Jane Shadduck, has an awesome fruitcake recipe (see box). You won't use this one as a doorstop!
