Since the hundred mile wilderness can take 10 days one faces the prospect of carrying 10 days worth of food- a monumental amount. Whereas you may burn 5000-6000 calories per day, carrying that many is burdensome. For the 100 mile wilderness I carried about 1600 per day, which consisted of a packet of instant oatmeal for breakfast (which I ended up eating dry directly out of the packet so I didn’t have to spend time in the morning cooking) plus a clif bar (which I’ll probably never be able to look at again).

For lunches I had 2 clif bars and 2 fruit rollups and for dinner a package of instant ramen- to which I’d add sun dried tomatos- and a foil pouch of tuna or salmon. Since this is the longest stretch of the AT without going through towns, its the place where you are most constrained on what you carry for food weight. Even that relatively spartan amount of food feels very heavy. One way to alleviate it is to split your food into 2 portions and pay a local trail service place to do a “food drop.” There are no public access roads, but there are private logging trails and dirt roads every 5-10 miles or so and they can drive out to a spot on one of these that comes within reachable distance from the trail where they can stash some of your food, so you can get back carrying only about half. I took advantage of this and this photo was the paper I was given with detailed instructiona on how to locate my food. Since I was nearly out (thanks to losing a day to hurricane Arthur), it was like Christmas to find it…