“What food should I take into the backcountry?” is a frequent question among novice backpackers. Us frequent backcountry travelers often get into a funk of the same foods that work for us, but still run into specific cases where we reconsider what we are optimizing for: weight, volume, tastiness, comfort, preparation time or price. In this post I’m going to crunch some data to better understand which foods are best for certain situations and offer my own advice from over 100 days in the backcountry.
The Yakima Skyrise is the first car top tent from Yakima. After owning one for a couple months, I have slept in this car top tent now for 20+ nights in desert campsites, county campgrounds, snowy forest roads and even a library parking lot. For the most part I love it, but there are several things I wasn’t a huge fan of. As far as I can google this is the only real in depth review of the tent that isn’t just blog advertising. This is what you’ll want to know.
Washington Column South Face (5.8 C1) is a 1000 ft granite face across Yosemite Valley from Half Dome. It is the easiest big wall climb in the valley and therefore the busiest. Optimistically, we were hoping to do it in a day with an early start, hauling only to Dinner Ledge and then blasting to the top. I even brought flashing light up glasses to make festive the predicted night rappels back down to Dinner Ledge where we’d hope there would still be room for our sleeping bags after sundown.
Speed would be the key and we planed to free as much as possible (first three and last four pitches) to make this climb 5.10b C1. Both Marco and I were relatively new to aid and we ended up learning a lot. We kept at it even after a lead fall injury where I climbed 70% of the wall with a fractured foot. I couldn’t walk, but I sure could aid climb!
A few weeks back I visited Moab with the goal in mind to climb desert towers, accomplishing a dream of Sadie’s for her birthday. The Falcon Guide had some of the most popular climbs, but if I bought a guide book for the area again it would be the more recent and fully featured High On Moab book. Surprisingly it was actually this map from summit post that really lead me to discover the variety of towers in Moab. If you are a moderate climber who is comfortable trying some aid, these are the regions and climbs you must check out (in order of preference).
I happened upon the Convict Lake area on my birthday backpacking trip up to Mt. Baldwin in 2016. The area is an amazing Eastern Sierra setting with two notable peaks (Morrison and Laurel) within a mile of the parking lot and an amazing remote basin several miles back. In this trip we were to follow the East Slope Variation route to ascend the chute between Mini Morrison and Mt. Morrison, ski down the chute, camp and then the next day ski out via the East Slope route. (map)
Last week I took the opportunity to go ice climbing with SMC at Lee Vining under the wing of the great Darren Shutt (SMC founder and great guy). I ended up climbing for three days, leading a WI3+ pitch and following a WI3+ multi-pitch. I topped it off by skiing in a snow storm at Mammoth in low 20s and 20-40 mph winds. But wait, there’s more! I also had the opportunity to test the car top tent out in winter weather while sleeping off NFS roads and borrowing internet from the public library after my coffee shop closed (I was also working remotely).
Topped out of Machete Direct to a beautiful view an hour before sunset.
This last weekend I finished my first multi-pitch aid climb: Machete Direct (5.10a A1 R, 6P) in Pinnacles National Park. It was a real adventure with runnouts to make my fingers sweet, unexpectedly technical sections and a night decent following a paper thin route description.
Cool view of snow and desert: Mt. Rose (left) and Eastern CA desert (right).
Wow, I did a lot of stuff in one weekend! Sadie and I trial ran what it would be like sleeping in a roof top tent, we actually found some decent backcountry snow near Mt. Rose on a super hot weekend and I did my first outdoor climbing since my injury.
Our tent atop the tree fort we built at China Camp
I always knew I would love bicycle touring, but now I finally had the opportunity to prove it. I’m all about human-powered transit whether it be running, bicycling, skiing, backpacking or something else. So when someone proposed a backpacking overnight it was easy to say yes. The weather had some potential for rain, but both days proved to be some of the clearest views in the bay I’ve seen in months. I bicycled through a tunnel and built a tree fort at China Camp so, easy to say a good weekend.
Ryan getting ready to board down the ridge as the snow from storm two starts coming in.
After climbing Shasta my third time and attempting some other well trafficked peaks like Lassen and Round Top last year I started broadening my scope for mountaineering. Up to this point I was only going out into the mountains on days with Low Avalanche risk and to places pretty close to Avalanche centers. However, I like things deep in the backcountry, wild and untouched. I needed to know how to predict snow conditions and avalanche risk. It was time to take an Avalanche Level I course.
