GORP

[Steven Hanlon]

this may sound silly, but in all my years of hiking and backpacking, i have never had GORP. i typically have honey roasted peanuts, a snickers bar, or nacho cheese pretzel combos (my favorite). so i decided to bring along some GORP for this past weekend's Dolly Sods adventure. i was going to need some mid day snacking since i was looking at 15 miles each day.

i have come to the conclusion GORP is crap. my GORP consisted of raisins, m&m's, peanuts, cashews, and granola. i simply can't stand to eat it, esp. when it's hot and i've been hiking for several hours. i tried to choke down a few handfuls Saturday as a mid day snack an hour or so after lunch. it was like eating dust – it satisfied nothing.

not sure how people can eat it, but more power to them.

i'm returning to my combos, they taste good and have powdered cheese in them. what's not to love?

[Alex H]

Everyone is different on the snack front. I think you had too many nuts (either peanuts or cashews but not both) and the granola is what made it dry and hard to "choke down". I'm a classic GORP guy just salted peanuts, M&M's and golden raisins in equal quantities. The most important to me are the peanuts and the M&M's. If I didn't usually have crackers with lunch I would do more Fritos or the like.

[Jerry Adams]

Recently, I've been making these cookies that are sort of GORP like. They're pretty "crisp" which some people may not like.

180 calories per cookie
9.5 grams fat
16.8 grams carb
6.3 grams protein

About 60% of the carbs are from nuts, raisins, and whole grain so they're not quite as bad as regular cookies.

3 ounces butter (3/4 stick)
9 ounces peanut butter
1 1/4 cup (9 3/8 ounces) dark brown sugar
3 Tbs (2 ounces) dark corn syrup or molasses
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbs cider vinegar
1 Tbs Vanilla
1 egg
1 1/3 cup (4 5/8 ounces) old fashioned rolled oats
1 1/4 cups (5 ounces) whole wheat flour
6 ounces raisins
4 ounces chopped peanuts
6 ounces chocolate chips

Cream the butter, sugar, corn syrup, baking soda, baking powder, salt, spices, and vanilla. Add the vinegar and mix. Add the egg and mix. Add the rest of the ingredients except chocolate chips and mix. It's really difficult to mix because it's drier than regular cookies. I kind of cut it up with a knife and then smash it back together.

Divide the cookie dough into quarters in the bowl and use one quarter to make 12 cookies for each batch. You have to smash them down with fork on cookie sheet because the dough is stiff. Put 4 chocolate chips on top of each cookie.

Bake @ 350 degrees F for 14 minutes, let sit about 5 minutes, then put on rack to cool.

[Jake D]

For me now i get a bag of trail mix from Job Lot Glacier mountain flavor. has peanuts, raisins, craisins, papaya, pineapple, vanilla chips. then i add peanut M&Ms and honey roasted peanuts

i like a good mix of fruit and nuts so there is a texture and flavor difference. i find that mostly nut mixes eventually just have one flavor.

[spelt with a t]

Commercial GORP or trail mixes have too many ingredients. I like to mix just two things together, or keep two separate baggies in my hip pouch. Some of my favorites are:

Dried cherries and roasted macademia nuts
Dried cherries and chocolate covered espresso beans (careful not to overdo the espresso beans!)
Candy corn and dry-roast peanuts
Peanut M&Ms and peanut butter M&Ms
Cheese and sourdough pretzel nuggets (Snyder's of Hanover, the only pretzels worth eating!)

Limiting the number of textures and flavors helps accentuate each one, in my opinion. Making my own ensures I can pick fresh ingredients, so no stale candy corn or sad, shriveled dry fruit that's rock hard. If there's something I'm in the mood for it's easy to pick out and not have to hunt through 7 or 8 ingredients for a few measly M&Ms.

[Mary D]

Actually, GORP is Good Old Raisins and Peanuts. IMHO, not much fun.

I carry dried fruit (different kind each day) plus almonds, walnuts, cashews, filberts, sometimes peanuts or soy "nuts" (roasted soybeans). With the nuts, I make a different mixture for each day. I throw in a Kashi cereal bar and an Odwalla bar, and that's my lunch, which I munch on throughout the day.

I use unsulphured dried fruit bought in bulk from the organic section of my local supermarket. I avoid the stuff that is full of sugar (like candied pineapple and mango). My favorite of all is the unsulphured Turkish apricots. I often put the dried fruit in my dehydrator for 2-3 hours to get out more moisture (it seems as though every year the commercial dried fruit is less dry). For trips of more than 5 days, I use freeze dried fruit which, although pricey, is a significant weight saving.

[drowning in spam]

Lately my 'gorp' has been dried fruits. They're not as calorie dense as my normal gorp, but it's easier to eat a lot of.

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

Well…here are my thoughts:
I used to hate GORP/trail mix. I still do 99% of the time if I buy it pre-packaged. What keyed me in was when I learned to love raw nuts and seeds. But even then the texture can be a turn off when it is hot outside.
If you pulverize the nuts/seeds/fruit and berries into bars or balls it tastes a lot better. Easy to chew and digest. I carry home made stuff on my hikes now. My last hike I carried raw oreos (I posted the recipe in the food section here). You might like it that way!

[Ken Larson]

Jerry….Your cookie recipe is SUPER. Made a recipe to send to Grand Rapids Veterans Home as I do this monthly with a few friends of mine. I would bet they will be a big hit. Making a second recipe for my upcoming trip with four of my grand children and I believe they will think their awesome.

Changed a few items as noted below:

"1 1/4 cups (5 ounces) whole wheat flour" (substituted pastry flour)

"It's really difficult to mix because it's drier than regular cookies." (I used a Kitchen Aid mix…no issues)

"It's really difficult to mix because it's drier than regular cookies". (Wife and I found them to be chewy and delicious!)

"You have to smash them down with fork on cookie sheet because the dough is stiff." (Used the palm of my hand and it works great.)

[Alex Wallace]

That's the most bear scat I've seen in one location!

[Dean F.]

I'm with Steven- I have never had luck choking down handfuls of GORP. But I think this is because, like most people, I probably overdid it with a huge bag. I like all of the components- just not together.

I often carry Emerald Cocoa-Roasted almonds in snack-sized ziplocks, for example. Sometimes cashews instead. I love cashews. But my prunes and chocolate-covered dried cherries and other dried fruit are SEPARATE. I also like Larabars as a fruit source, and I found these honey/sesame bars called Bumblebars that I like, for more fat and calories. The Larabars are mixed fruit and granola, but heavy on the FRUIT rather than the granola so that they are moist and not dry and hard to choke down at all.

That's my "GORP."

I have also thought of taking along some halva- it's a sort of middle-eastern candy made with ground sesame seeds and honey or sugar, so it is both fatty and sweet- but I haven't gotten around to trying it on a hike. Some of it is gooey, but other kinds are fairly solid and might travel better.

[Anonymous]

"Some of it is gooey, but other kinds are fairly solid and might travel better."

It all gets pretty messy if you are travelling in hot weather. The sesame oil starts to separate out and make a real mess. It can be especialy problematic if you are concerned about bears.

[Dean F.]

Could you keep it in a tube, like Mike C's superspackle?

[Anonymous]

"Could you keep it in a tube, like Mike C's superspackle?"

That should work, or any other impermeable container. The problem with zip loc baggies is that they aren't impermeable to oils over time, and you can end up with a real mess. Been there, done that.

[Larry De La Briandais]

Am I the only one that likes GORP? I like mine with a few cashews and maybe a few M&Ms. I can certainly do without the M&Ms, especially if it is hot. I eat the nuts and raisins separately. I really like following up the nut with the raisins. And the raisins in the "trail mixes" always taste different than regular raisins. Maybe it's the salt. I don't know, but I really like them.

GORP all the way.

[M B]

I love trail mix. All kinds. With dried fruit, etc.

I dont like yogurt covered things in them.

We had some with peanut butter chips and chocolate chips last time that was really good.

Dont need to get too fancy.

If you dont like it, it may not have enough raisins and MMs or not enough salt.

Granola is granola, has no place in gorp. Granola from Whole Foods is great too , but expensive, I think I paid $8.99/lb for one once.

The dried fruit is literally infused with sugar in some. I wouldnt eat it, except out on the trail.

[Harald Hope]

steven, sounds like you are fond of junk food, something I try to really avoid when backpacking, for what are to me very obvious reasons, but possibly not to others. I don't want to put junk into my body when going out into the wilderness, it lessens the experience in my opinion, quite significantly, but it seems popular with this generation so that's life. If you really like that sort of thing, food based on basically natural whole ingredients might not be your cup of tea, I guess. One of the things with junk food is that it triggers some addiction type responses in the body, the salts plus sugars are basically calculated to make you crave them, not how normal healthy food works at all. So when we are addicted to that type of non food, we find that real food is 'not satisfying', for about the same reason a smoker finds a nicotine free cigarette 'non satisfying', or a beer drinker non alcoholic beer, and so on.

I've never thought of trail mix as gorp, it's just trail mix, a nice descriptive term. Granola has no place in trail mix, not sure where you came up with that notion, granola to me doesn't have any place at all in my backpack, it's heavy and not nearly as good as real rolled oats.

The basic idea behind trail mix is to find a mix you like, so you can safely assume the mix you found was not a good mix, and I can agree, it sounds about as bad as you can mix up, so it's no surprise you found it vile, but concluding that gorp is 'bad' because you made a really bad selection for your trail mix hardly seems to be very sound reasoning.

Last trip I did this, pitted dates, raisins, dried date rolls, dried skirt steak diced into little pieces. and dried bananas for the potassium, I think it's potassium. I mix it up every morning depending on how I liked the day before's batch. Last long trip I did I tested a super dry mix, I dried the already dried ingredients more, and by the 6th day, the stuff felt like sawdust in my mouth, so this time around I carried more moist weight, and more animal fats, and that really fixed the problem, for probably just a pound or a bit more starting weight.

I would do nuts but I can't really eat them on the trail, mild allergies, I'm very sad to say, because I love them, and they are pretty much the best source of fat/protein I can think of for trail food. Nuts are stunningly great sources of energy and nutrition, it's really hard to beat them. Peanuts are about the worst 'nut' out there, it's not an actual nut at all, just some ground thing. Good nuts are almonds, cashews are good but are a bit mealy, walnuts are pretty good. Macadamia nuts are absurdly rich and decadent, if I could do nuts, I'd toss in a few every day as a reward to myself. Nuts are pretty much pure fat and protein, exactly what you want on the trail, with some carbs from the dried fruits. I used the dried meat, which was a very fatty cut, to substitute for the nuts, and that worked really well.

I also did pemmican, about 3.5 oz a day, which was also fantastically good, note, this is all real food, mostly unsalted, or super lightly salted, so you won't get that mass produced corporate salt/sugar thing going, which a lot of people have grown to crave. The only drag with pemmican is it's pretty hard to make, but that's what the original wanderers in this continent used, along with the early explorers and trappers, they knew what was up re all day travel and nourishment. I knew the pemmican was working when it took me either the same or less time to walk UP the mountain I had come down the day before, which threw my schedule off a bit since I'd given that climb 2 more hours than it took. That's what happens when you use real food sources though, I suspected it would be like that, and it was.

This mix made me able to walk further every day than I did 20 years ago, with better energy, over tougher terrain, the pemmican is a big part of that though. I also had dried bread that I put jamon serrano/prosciutto on, along with some cured Lomo, those were insanely good too. I'm glad I've learned about real food as I've gotten older, always tried to use it in the past, but this year was a real step up for me in terms of quality of my diet on the trail.

'power bars' likewise are an oddity invented by and for corporations, a few dates and a few nuts are a power bar, basically, give or take, only way better for you, and far far cheaper, no wrappers or other processing either.

[Jeffrey Windsor]

Just this morning on a 13 mile hike with a group of scouts (5000 ft up the mountain, 5000 ft down the mountain: I love the sound of exhausted adolescents), I was discussing trail food. Most of the time on the trail I suspend my normal, everyday rules for eating and I pack in the junk. Fritos? Only on the trail. Licorice? Very rarely at home, but a staple trail snack for me. Another leader had some candied ginger, which is amazing. I haven't eaten any candied ginger since I gave up running a decade ago. I need to check up on the calorie load of candied ginger, because I want to justify it on my next hike.

On the original topic, I do love real GORP: raisins and peanuts. It's easy to keep a baggie in a waist belt pouch or a cargo pocket for easy, constant grazing and no energy lulls. If I'm not talking, I'm probably savoring a peanut or raisin, which I might take a half minute to finish, one at a time.

M&Ms occasionally, depending on temperature and whether I'm keeping my snacks in my cozy (so they won't melt, of course. My cozy is a multi tasker).

[M B]

I dont worry about what I eat on the trail. If I was on a really long trek, like a couple of months, sure I would. But for a week or so, no way.

The more junk I eat, the more calories I can consume. And eating something, is often better than eating less.

I dont find myself "addicted" to junk food, I rarely eat it any other time, so it doesnt bother me.

I find a snickers, is better on the trail than a Clif bar. And a smushed honey bun, is a better breakfast than a bagel with peanut butter.

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