Okay, in the books, something was said about food. That's one of the changes I guess
I would list it sort of under equipment changes that's occurred over the last twenty [or] thirty years. I guess
when I first hiked in the Grand Canyon I used a backpack that my brother created as part of his job with Trailwise
Ski Hut. Trailwise is its outlet. Then when I wore out of that, I began using a Camp Trails. When I was first hiking
in the Sierra, we had no backpacks at all, you just had a frame and you wrapped all your stuff up in a poncho and
tied it on the frame. It wasn't until after the war that such things as knapsacks came into vogue. The first food
that I used hiking in the Sierra, you just had to cook everything. You'd take rice and you'd cook it, and you'd
take a can of potatoes or tomato paste or something and try to make things more palatable. Flapjacks, syrup. What
is the some kind of. . . Mapleline, that you mixed sugar with to make syrup out of. And of course we had fish that
we could fry and make fish chowder out of the fish and onions and potatoes and bacon and stuff.
Quinn: The fish that you'd catch?
Steck: Yeah. I guess you can still fish in the Grand Canyon, but there's generally not enough time. So the first
food that I used in the Grand Canyon was basically freeze-dried stuff and dehydrated stuff that you'd buy commercially,
people like Mountain House. One outfit was called Sam-Andy that I bought a lot of stuff from. I think I still have
some. The Mormons use these distributors to get their year's supply of food for the basement. A lot of it was,
maybe even all of it, was suitable for backpacking menus. The trouble is, if you buy it in number ten cans, you're
going to have it lasting for a while. The idea of powdered applesauce and powdered peaches and powdered, dehydrated
vegetables was very appealing, only it was expensive, so after maybe ten years of using that, I began to use food
that I dehydrated myself. I'm right now dehydrating some pasta for a trip that's coming up in a week. For the long
trip, the long, long one with Robert and my brother in 1982 that was eighty days, I dehydrated all of that stuff.
There were three of us that were hiking all of the way, and then there were a variety of people that hiked different
parts of it. Essentially I was dehydrating, it seemed like, food for five people for three months.
Quinn: Did you have food and water caches for that trip?
Steck: Yes, there were water caches in two places only: one was in 36.7 Mile on top of the Redwall, and the other
was Buck Farm, also on top of the Redwall. I carried down about four gallons per person for those two caches. I'm
in a very mathematical field for my work as a statistician, but I made a mistake in finding out how much Clorox
[bleach] to put in my water to keep it from spoiling. In 1977 I didn't put enough in, and it was all clouded over
with algae after it'd been out from like July to September. I was going to put in more Clorox to make sure that
it was clear. I miscalculated the number of drops per teaspoon. I was off by a factor of TEN. So I put ten times
too much (chuckles) Clorox into the water. So it was undrinkable as it was, but if you stirred it up and let it
air out for a while, it became drinkable.
Quinn: What do you use now? How much per liter?
Steck: I don't use Clorox anymore, I use iodine crystals dissolved in water. I have a certain little container
that has a mark on it, and I put that much in a half-a-gallon of water. So it's always iodine only that I use.
I'm told that I have enough iodine in my little bottle to last me the rest of my life. Water is often a problem
and you should purify it, and I do ninety-nine percent of the time. If I'm drinking from a spring in Kanab Creek
or out of the Colorado River above the Little Colorado and the Paria's not in flood, I may not purify that, but
I probably should.
But the food: so I was dehydrating all that food and I was dehydrating for a year, just about. I had ten basic
menus so that on the eleventh day you had the same thing that you had on the first day. One of the things that
I always had was some kind of a facsimile of margaritas. The first night after we had gone under the bridge at
Marble Canyon, the Navajo Bridge, I made these margaritas, and my brother said, "What are you doing?"
I said, "I'm making us some margaritas." He said, "What, you didn't bring any wine?!" I said,
"No, Allen, I didn't bring any wine, but I got margaritas." "Alright." So he drank them. The
next evening I was making them again, and he said, "What are you making this time?" And I said, "Margaritas."
"Again?!" I said, "Yes, Allen, we're going to have them EVERY night." "Every night?! Oh
my God!" But he drank them. And the third night he drank them. And on the fourth day he said, "We're
having margaritas again, aren't we?" "Yes." "Oh, good." On the next night, it was "How
SOON are the margaritas?" You know, dulling the sharp edge of pain after the hard day's travel.
Quinn: What are some of the ingredients that you have in your mix there?
Steck: Well, it's classified (chuckles) but basically it's a little bit of lime Kool-AidTM and quite a bit of lemon
Kool-AidTM, and the ratio is very important. Then to reduce the overall weight I use a certain amount of lemon-lime
Crystal LiteTM. It has its own sugar built in, with a certain number of calories to this mix, and that's all carefully
considered in the daily consumption of calories. I tried, on these long trips, to have the right balance of carbohydrates,
proteins, and fats. I found out though on that first long one with all the kids, they were just ravenous all the
time. They drank my liquid margarine that I should have been drinking myself. It sounds gross to be drinking liquid
margarine, but you'd be surprised how good it tastes if you haven't had any fat in your diet for a week. It was
to put on things, actually, but I just ended up drinking it.
I began dehydrating all of these things, and let's see, the Sierra Club rule, I forget, but it's like sixteen ounces
of fuel per person . . . I can't say. All I know is that it's a lot. It's about four times as much as I figure
that I need now because now I don't, in general, cook anything. Well, I cook it at home, actually, like the pasta
that I'm dehydrating now. The menu is Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner, to which I add chopped green chilis and
tuna fish. I used to dehydrate the tuna fish and the chopped green chilis, but that's too much work, so now I just
take the cans, and it's not all that much. But the point is that I cook the pasta first, here at home, and then
I dehydrate it, and to prepare it for eating I just soak it, and when it's hydrated, it's then ready to eat. And
instead of heating it to boiling, you can heat it to some more marginal temperature.
Quinn: What percentage of fuel savings does that give you?
Steck: I think I use one-quarter of the fuel that Fingerhut would use for his Sierra Club trips. But he would also
have a large expenditure of fuel at breakfast time. And when I'm going, people that go with me, there's no hot
water for breakfast. You eat granola bars or nuts and berries or something, but there's no hot water. In the winter
I may allow people to have coffee for breakfast or something like that but in general if you're trying to economize
on fuel, precooking the dinners saves you a lot.
I have sort of standard menus that I use now. The easiest one that I really like is the macaroni and cheese with
chopped green chilis and tuna. Another one that I like is pasta with some corned beef kind of stuff and barbecue
sauce--course you've got to take the corned beef and take along a container of barbecue sauce--but that's very
good. I often will eat leftovers of that stuff for breakfast. That's very good.
With the margaritas generally go hors d'oeuvres, which are (undecipherable) nuts, but I'll usually mix nuts without
the peanuts, and you can buy them in large bulk at Price Club, something like that. And there's some calories to
that. I allow an ounce or an ounce-and-a-half of those, and that may be a hundred or so calories to add to the
dinner. Then there's a dessert, usually, to add to the dinner. So the dinner itself is generally not too substantial.
If that's all you're eating, with no hors d'oeuvres and no dessert, you may be a little hungry.
On this last trip that I made in early June, a lot of the meals that I calibrated over the years, I ended up burying
some, [it] just wasn't eaten at dinner or the next morning for breakfast. In general, I was the only person that
ate cold dinner for breakfast.
So food is different now than it was. I'm reading a book now, Arthur Clark's Profiles of the Future, and I wonder
what does the future hold for camp cookery. Maybe you'll just take an injection of something, so you'll be spared
the need for a stove entirely. A lot of people don't camp with a stove, they just take nuts and raisins and granola
and just eat it, maybe powdered milk and stuff. I use a lot of powdered milk. And for these long trips, to make
sure we got enough protein, I used a lot of dehydrated egg white. I bought that in bulk, but I've found out since
that I could just as well have made it myself. Well, let's see, that's probably enough about food.
Oh, I got one, it's kind of important, too. If you go on a longish trip and are going to put out caches, you're
probably going to cache gasoline. Just make sure that you don't cache it WITH your food. You can cache it with
cans, but if this were gasoline and this were a thing of powdered milk, NO GOOD, because after three months in
the cache, this is going to smell like gasoline. Robert ended up throwing away a lot of his food because he couldn't
stand the gasoline smell in food that he thought had been kept separate. I also had trouble with weevils, larva.
Quinn: Do you cache food in a tin?
Steck: Yes, but unfortunately the weevils got in it before I put it in the tin, maybe on the porch here when I
was kind of gathering things together, or perhaps one of the jars of mixed nuts I had, already had weevils in it
-it came from Madagascar or someplace like that. Then you put all that in the can, the weevils get out of one thing
and then all through the rest of it. Well, of course we ate the stuff anyway. We didn't eat the weevils -on purpose.
We threw them away if we found them, but there was kind of cobwebby stuff that came with them that was unpleasant.
They tended to like some things more than others. They loved walnuts, but generally left the other nuts alone.
I wrote something for the Backcountry Office on caching, and it's not too difficult: keep the gasoline separate,
put it so it's going to be in shade ALL DAY LONG. You put it on the north side of something big, so the sun won't
ever get it. And the weevils. I found that freezing, if I take something that I'm going to cache, I may put it
in the freezer. I once put a whole bunch of stuff in the freezer at Safeway overnight, where they store their ice,
and they were nice to let me do that. That will kill the beasts. |
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