Trail Mix Fatigue

[J-L]

Most of my long trips (7-14 days w/no resupply) have involved me shoving all my food into a bear canister. On these trips, a significant portion of my calories comes from trail mix. I pack about 6 oz of trail mix for each day, giving me close to 900 calories. I like trail mix because it requires no preparation, it’s easy to eat throughout the day, it’s calorically dense in both weight and volume, and it lasts a long time. But sometime around day 5 or 6, I start to get tired of it.

My trail mixes are basic and usually consist of: mostly nuts (peanuts or cashews), a small amount of raisins, and a small amount of chocolate (dark chocolate M&M’s, sometimes dark chocolate espresso beans). I’ve recently tried adding in some extras, such as goldfish or pretzels, which make the trail mix more appetizing but also increase its bulk. I also don’t feel as full with the goldfish and pretzels added in, even though calories are about the same. I used to use store-bought trail mixes and found those to consistently taste less good compared to my basic mix.

So what are some foods I could pack instead of trail mix? Or how I can make my trail mix more appetizing after multiple days?

[Rick Reno]

Maybe carry a few different versions of the same old trail mix? I like to spice some up a little with cayenne, chili, or similar… make some a little sweeter… mix up the nuts (I LOVE macadamia nuts and they’re wicked fat bombs!)… use other dried or dehydrated fruits besides raisins… or maybe take a hit or two of legal cannabis; then you’ll NEVER get sick of GORP… or run out of recipe ideas!

[Roger Caffin]

Adding some fats will help: cheese & salami are good. They also have protein.

Cheers

[Rex Sanders]

What Richard said. Though I gave up on trail mix decades ago, any food eaten many times per day, day after day, gets boring or worse. My current day snacks are Larabars – I need to take at least two flavors and switch back and forth to keep from gagging on them by the third day.

A long, long time ago, my PCT hiking partner couldn’t stand the almonds in our home made gorp after a couple of weeks. At his first rest stop every day, he’d pick all the almonds out of that day’s supply and throw them on the ground (before LNT). We also had daily lumps of “peanut butter fudge” that neither of us could digest after a few weeks. Without getting too graphic – it didn’t change color or texture on the way out. Combined with carrying 40-50 pound packs, we were seriously short on calories.

Any food eaten day after day creates taste and digestion challenges. Variety isn’t just nice – it’s necessary.

I suggest creating two or three trail mix formulas that have big differences (nuts, chocolate, sweets or salts) – and switching formulas every day.

— Rex

[Ben H.]

I prefer deconstructed trail mix.  I bring the components in separate bags and then mix and match the components to match my current desires.

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

An alternative strategy is to change your eating habits.  I found that weight of snacks were getting close to that of the meals that I was bringing.  I stopped doing freeze dried meals because the calorie count was too low.  Since then I prepare my own meals and kick up the calorie counts,  I don’t bring many snacks anymore, I just eat better meals.  My 2 cents.

[JCH]

What Jon said.

[J-L]

Some good ideas so far, thanks. I think I’m going to experiment with making at least three different trail mixes: salty, sweet, and spicy. And changing up the dried fruit. I might also try packing a little less trail mix and making up the difference with bigger dinners.

I like taking salami and cheese for the first couple days, but I don’t think it would last for a week or longer.

@ Jon: What meals do you pack for during the day? My current strategy is to snack throughout the day and have a dehydrated meal for dinner.

@ Rex: Years ago I used to eat a lot of Lara Bars, but after one trip where I consumed too many, it’s a food I can never eat again. They all started to taste the same after day 3.

[Matthew / BPL]

Lemon and cherry Larabars remain delicious to me after years of eating them. Have you tried those two?

my current favorite high calorie hiking snack is Trader Joe’s sesame sticks. I lightly crush them which reduces volume slightly. Then I add TJ’s unsalted sunflower seed kernels which increase the caloric density and decrease the saltiness while filling in the voids between the sesame sticks. It’s still quite salty but manageably so. I crave salt when hiking.

I frequently carry some no sugar added dried mango when the salt gets to be too much. Sometimes I carry two bags of mango, one gets a lot of cayenne pepper on it.

Crushed Fritos are another favorite. My hiking partner eats an obscene amount of crushed Pringles in various flavors.

[tony g]

My trail mix is pecans ,macadamia nuts, pine nuts, Brazil nuts.  I add freeze dried fruits for change up.

I like the idea of dark chocolate and maybe the dipped espresso beans.

 

[Roger Caffin]

And changing up the dried fruit.
Here in Oz we get a LOT of dried fruits. They do not pall.

I like taking salami and cheese for the first couple days, but I don’t think it would last for a week or longer.
It does – well, good salami and good cheese do.
Both were developed in Europe as a way of preserving meat and milk for the winter. They can last – keeping them cool helps.

Mind you, I do not know how well processed cheese will last, but that stuff is not real cheese anyhow. Like so many other modern processed foods, it just seems yukky to me.

Cheers

[Geoff Caplan]

I’m with Roger –

You eat a LOT of salami and cheese in the Western Alps – it’s often all you can find in small villages and farm shops. And in the elbow seasons it’s often a few days between resupply.

A real salami will last for months – no special treatment required. That’s the whole point of the preservation process.

With cheese, get the hardest type on offer. Double bag it for safety, then wrap it in spare clothing for insulation and pack it in the centre of your pack. If you can keep it relatively cool, it will easily last a week. I’ve never had issues, even in warmer weather. And the calorie-to-weight ratio is great.

I usually buy a softer cheese like Dolcelatte for the first day or two to provide variety, and use the hard cheese later.

[J-L]

I’ll have to experiment with cheese on longer trips then. I eat a hard Parmesan at home frequently. It’s probably dense enough in calories and volume to pack.

How does one tell a “real” salami or sausage?

[Ben H.]

How does one tell a “real” salami or sausage?

You are looking for a hard salami; not a soft salami.  If it’s strung up on a string and not refrigerated it is designed to last a while.  If it is sliced up and wrapped in plastic it won’t.

 

[Roger Caffin]

Parmesan – a very fine cheese, but rather powerful. At least, the stuff here in Oz is that way. I could not eat it in bulk.
Edam, Gruyere, Emmental, Jarlsberg, all fairly hard cheeses. But NOTHING ‘processed’! That just trashes the cheese. (Why do they ‘process’ it anyhow? I have no idea. Must be a way of making it cheaper I guess.)

Salami – what Ben said. The soft squooshy stuff, pre-sliced and wrapped, is NOT salami, and it will not keep. In fact, never buy any presliced sausage for the field: all those cut surfaces will become contaminated rather fast. Genuine Cabana is not bad either (more chewy), but same rules.

Hint: buy one salami and try it at home. They usually have a skin – all sausages do. If you can peel the skin off easily enough, that’s good. But a few brands seem to rip half the sausage off when you try to peel them. That makes for a few difficulties in the field.

Cheers
PS: @Geoff – cheese and salami, yes, but also that wonderful wholemeal bread! Baguettes are all right, but pain de compagne is much better.

[BRYON L]

Our local Amish store carried dried beef that would easily keep for days. It was fantastic on wheat thins/crackers with your cheese of choice. When I ordered it, they would cut it however I wanted and double wrap it for me there.

It also goes well cut into small chunks in mac and cheese.

[Aaron]

How do you fit 7-14 days of food in a bear canister? I did a ~48 hour hike with my wife recently, first time using a bear canister. The food BARELY fit but only after stuffing ourselves on the first night. So really it fit 3 person-days of food. Including probably more than 6 oz trail mix per person-day.

We had trail mix, cliff bars, jerky, cheese, macaroni, oatmeal, granola. All pretty dense.
The not-as-dense stuff: sugar and spice mini containers, some of her toiletries, and a couple mountain house meals in original packaging.
I imagine I could get maybe 5 days if I ditched the less dense stuff and the whiskey.

I eat about ~5000 calories per 24 hours in order to not lose weight (say ~2500 for hiking, 2500 for the rest of the day).

[Rex Sanders]

Cramming enough food into bear-resistant containers is probably worth it’s own thread, but as long as we’re here…

I don’t have any trouble, but I’m not eating 5,000 calories a day. Checking my spreadsheet for a recent 8-day trip, I carried ~2,800 calories per day, everything fit in a Bearikade Expedition, and I still had food left over. Haven’t perfected food planning yet.

14 days might be a challenge, but Wild Ideas claims the Expedition can carry up to 12 days of food.

Container size matters, too.

— Rex

[Matthew / BPL]

Agreed that bear cans are a separate topic. Briefly, I have successfully crammed ~3300 cal/day X 10 days into a BV500. Air is the enemy. Couscous packs much more densely than macaroni, for example. Fat helps raise caloric density. Bulk packaging helps too.

[J-L]

Long post with a lot of lists, but maybe it will help someone else. After some inspiration here, I went to my local grocery store with the best bulk food selection (Sprouts). I bought small samples of all these items:

• Pecans
• Macadamia nuts
• Pine nuts
• Pistachios
• Honey roasted peanuts
• Honey roasted cashews
• Chili peanuts (spicy)
• Dried pineapple (little cubes)
• Dried blueberries
• Mini chocolate peanut butter cups

With these ingredients, I made up 5 different trail mixes. The first three are very different and have very little ingredient re-use. The last two I was running out of ingredient combinations.

1. Nutty: pecans, macadamia nuts, pine nuts, and pistachios
2. Sweet: dried pineapple, dried blueberries, honey roasted cashews, honey roasted peanuts, and chocolate peanut butter cups
3. Spicy: chili peanuts, honey roasted peanuts, macadamia nuts, and pecans
4. Honey roasted cashews, pecans, pistachios, and chocolate peanuts butter cups
5. Dried pineapple, dried blueberries, chili peanuts, macadamia nuts, and pine nuts

I also bought two different types of salami (they were not refrigerated at the store), some gruyere cheese, and some parmesan cheese. For a whole week, I had lunch consisting of:

• Slice of each salami
• Piece of gruyere and parmesan cheeses
• Small serving of one of the above trail mixes

Lunch every day tasted great. I left the salami and cheeses in plastic bags out on my counter-top, only cutting out a small serving each day. Even at day 7, the salami and cheeses looked, tasted, and smelled fine. They probably could have gone longer, but I ate it all. I will certainly consider packing more salami and cheese on future long trips. My next experiment is to cut all the salami and cheese on day 1 and see if it lasts. Not having to cut these items in the field would be nice.

So with the above trail mixes, I think I should have plenty of variety. The first three at least all tasted very different. Seems so simple now…

As for fitting 14 days of food in a bear canister, here’s what I did:

• Used a bearikade expedition
• 1st day’s food does not have to fit in the bear canister
• Last day’s food is just breakfast and a half-size lunch
• Bulk packed anything I could  (breakfast cereals, powdered milks)
• Found the lowest volume bars and freeze-dried foods (ex: Alpine Air meals are typically lower volume than Mountain House, Rx bars are very dense).
• Re-packed freeze-dried meals into freezer bags (huge volume savings)
• Took a hammer to some freeze-dried meals to further compact them
• Only ate about 2500 calories per day (eh, maybe a bit more. I never added it up). At home, I eat about 1800 calories per day. On the trail, I lost about 0.5 pounds per day. This weight was mostly recovered by pre and post trip feasting. Surprisingly, I never felt hungry and always went to bed feeling full.

[Roger Caffin]

All sounds extremely yummy (really), but …
what did it all cost?

Here in Oz that lot would have been a bit $$.

Cheers

[J-L]

I don’t remember what it all cost. Sausage and cheeses were the most expensive part, probably around $25-30 total (I saw some of the other cheeses you recommended, but they were more expensive). Trail mix ingredients did not seem expensive since I was only buying very small amounts of them.

[Roger Caffin]

Ah, right. We tend to buy nuts in 500 g bags: more $ but cheaper in the long run.
I make my own raw muelsi in a 20 L drum: 3 months supply in one go. All the dried fruit and nuts for that volume make for a big bill. Tastes good though, and I am still eating it many years later.

Cheers

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

They process cheese because it is a lot cheaper to make, but also ….. it melts on its own. American cheese is processed cheese. People are accustomed to its very mild flavor and smooth creamy texture. It’s in its own category to say the least.

Also, the US gov’t loves to make it with excess dairy milk and hand it out as food subsidies.

[Nathan L]

I use Greenbellies list of trail mixes.  They have served me well.

https://www.greenbelly.co/pages/diy-homemade-trail-mixes

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