Day 250: Sourdough Vacation

Grant and I are going on a little vacation, so posts may be few and far between this week.  There definitely won’t be internet (or even a phone) at the ski hut we’re going to.

But fear not, I’ve got a couple entries lined up and I’ve conned my sister into posting them for me (and maybe even writing one herself).

This trip is going to be a waste challenge (although, we won’t have to worry about remembering to take our waste home with us since we have to pack out everything we pack in).

There’s a group of people which means we only have to cook one meal each.  I figure we can do ours waste-free and just take what we get from everyone else.  It’s like going to someone’s house for dinner; you can’t exactly go through their garbage and start rejecting what they prepared for you.

Because there aren’t any stores once we get there, I think it’ll actually be easier than other vacations when we end up eating out a lot and making impulse purchases.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be snack food: no fruit snacks or granola bars or ramen noddles (my personal backcountry lunchtime favorite).  We’re going to have to do a serious bulk shop in the dried fruits and nuts section before we go.

I can make granola bars and salvage the ziploc bags we have around the house to pack them in.  What do people who don’t use plastic do when they go on a hiking trip?  You can’t possibly store a week’s worth of food in metal containers. . . I just realized I sound like an idiot.  Of course you can do it without plastic.  As if no one went camping before they invented ziploc bags. . . .

. . they probably used metal or wood, or cloth. . .

That actually reminds me of a story I heard about how the men who built the Kettle Valley Railway here in BC used to keep sourdough starter wrapped in a piece of cloth inside their bedrolls so it would stay warm as they moved from place to place, and they could always have fresh bread in the work camps.

When I think about the dehydrated camping rations I usually use while hiking, I wonder if that can really be called progress over baking fresh sourdough in the woods.