Tuesday, July 23, 2013

John Muir Trail: Here We Go…

Our bags are packed.  We’re ready to go.  I’ve dreamed of hiking a long trail with my kids for years, and now we’re actually doing it!

Thursday morning we’ll wake up in Yosemite Valley, eat as much hot breakfast as we can stuff in our bodies, and then lug our heavy packs to the Happy Isles Trailhead.  From there, it’s one foot in front of the other for 30 days, passing through some of the most spectacular wilderness in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

I think the kids are ready.  They’re excited… and nervous, which is what you’d expect.  I’m excited and nervous too.  I’m sure there will be days when it feels like a struggle for them, but we plan to take our time and keep it fun.  The boys have their own cameras and journals.  They’ve got ropes and a step-by-step knot guide.  They’ve got a star chart, a great field guide for identifying critters, little knives for whittling… and, of course, they’ve got a great big, beautiful world to explore.

Please send us good vibes!  When we return, I will share a series of posts containing pictures and journal entries from our trip.  Check back for that in September.

To read more about what we’re doing and why check out this past post.

To learn more about the John Muir Trail check out this link.

Jason Kapchinske is the author of Coyote Summer.


Thursday, July 11, 2013

John Muir Trail: Food

Today, I mailed our food resupply packages for our upcoming John Muir Trail hike.  We’ll be picking them up in a few weeks at the Tuolumne Meadows post office and Muir Trail Ranch.  We’re planning to be on the trail 30 days, so it’s a lot of food:
  • 58 packages of freeze-dried dinner meals
  • 189 packets of instant oatmeal
  • 8 packages of freeze-dried egg scramble meals
  • Several large sacks of nuts and trail mix
  • 116 snack bars
  • Enough buffalo, turkey and beef jerky to make leather pants for the family
  • Enough dried mangoes and apricots to make matching shirts
  • Chia seeds (I’ve never had these before, but I fell for the packaging which informed me that these seeds turned the ancient Mesoamericans into superheroes)
  • Coconut flakes
  • Multivitamins
  • Candies (to bribe the kids up high mountain passes)
  • Instant coffee (to get my sweet little wife out of her sleeping bag in the morning)
  • 62 packets of hot chocolate
  • 15 Chocolate bars
  • I'm probably forgetting a few things, but that covers most of it... I couldn't find any freeze-dried wine.


To find out more about our trip and why we’re doing it, check out this previous blog entry.

To learn more about the John Muir Trail, check out this website.

J.S. Kapchinske is the author of Coyote Summer.