Clear Springs Press

         This is about selecting food, cooking tools and cooking methods for ultralight backpacking. For a backpacker more focused on walking the trail than preparing gourmet meals, trail food has to meet these requirements:

• It must keep the weight to a minimum.
• It must provide optimum nutrition for the hiking environment.
• It must provide enough variety and flexibility to avoid food boredom.
• It must build in enough flexibility to adapt to variable re-supply options.
• It must make it convenient to match an individual's energy needs with the energy content in trail food.
• It must include ready to eat or no-cook options.
• It must be as easy to prepare as hydrating a freeze dried entree.
• It has to taste good.
• It must be as inexpensive as possible without compromising light weight and good nutrition.

         My approach is pragmatic. For example, I use a food dehydrator to augment the dried and freeze dried food that is commercially available. If I can find a reasonably priced commercial source for an item, I buy it and save the time and labor of making it. If I can't find commercially available or reasonably priced ingredients, I make my own. The objective is to make it easy, not complicated, expensive or laborious.

         This is more than a collection of recipes. Rather, this book presents a set of principles on how design meals, improvise recipes and utilize less expensive sources of bulk ingredients and still provide excellent to superior nutrition at lower cost.

         This enables the hiker to improvise recipes from the bulk ingredients that can be resourced at trailside resupply points. It also enables the hiker to optimize weight and nutrition when planning trips.

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