Some people just start a thru hike. That’s fine. It’s also not me – I find it fun to plan and prepare the logistics for a trip. Sometimes I overdo it. I created this in XMind over the winter one weekend to start gathering a to-do list of sorts for the trail. After awhile I stopped updating it as I moved the most relevant stuff into Google Docs/Drive.
Much of what I’ve read indicates you don’t need more than a couple resupply boxes to start – prep one for Warner Springs and Kennedy Meadows and figure out the rest on the trail. We ended up prepping 10 boxes regardless, based on the results of the 2016 Halfway Anywhere survey. I figure even if we scrap most of them, we end up with some food after the trail for weekend trips. Or just a bunch of extra munchies. Either way, I expect to modify our resupply strategy sometime mid hike. For now the boxes are headed to the following spots:
- Warner Springs (mile 110)
- Kennedy Meadows (mile 703)
- Sierra City (mile 1198)
- Crater Lake/Mazama Village Store (mile 1830)
- Big Lake Youth Camp (mile 2002)
- Timberline Lodge (mile 2107)
- White Pass (mile 2303)
- Snoqualmie Pass (mile 2402)
- Stevens Pass/Skykomish (mile 2476)
- Stehekin (mile 2574)
Like most, were using USPS flat rate boxes. Food wise we have a mix of bulk foods, home dehydrated fruits, and some bulk order freeze-dried fruit/veggie/meat combo packs. In the boxes we have a mix of the following meals/snacks concoctions:
- RXBARs
- Oatmeal with Nido, dried fruit
- Instant mashed potatoes from Costo (tasted better than the Idahoan brand) with dried kale, jerky, misc freeze-dried veggies
- Gummy worms, gummy bears
- Peanut butter
- Snickers – I’ve heard these are mandatory and work as currency
- Trader Joe’s Chocolate covered espresso beans
- Ultima Replenisher Electrolyte Powder
- Couscous or ramen with misc freeze-dried veggies
- Nature Valley protein bars (yay Costco)
We used the medium and large boxes for the food. The exception being the Kennedy Meadows box, which has the above but also has to fit the ice axes, crampons, BV500
Aside from all that I’m moving my life into a basement and garage, prepping my truck for storage, and getting ready for the lifestyle shift. As for the actual start of the hike we’re lucky to have some friends that will be joining us in San Diego the week prior to our start – they’ll drive us down to the Southern Terminus.
Southpaw Hikes 
[…] We’ll be carrying food in ~3-8 sections and stopping in various towns along the way to resupply. Our diet will consist of freeze-dried and dehydrated foods, peanut butter, snickers, candy, chips, tortillas, cheese, jerky, instant potatoes and just about anything else that gives us the calories, fat and protein we need to hike. There’s a handful of places where resupplying in town is prohibitively expensive, not available, or poor selection. We’ll be sending pre-packaged resupply boxes to those locations. More on that here. […]