If all goes according to plan, I will start hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in under three weeks. This very month! As I am so very human, I am starting to develop little momentary panics over things that I cannot possibly control or even predict.

Going down the back stairs early this morning, they were a bit damp from morning dew and my foot slipped. Immediately after I regained my balance, I squinted down at my ankles and mumbled, "Don't you dare..."

The new lightweight hiking shirt I ordered at the end of February specifically for the Southern California desert? Still not here. It was backordered and was supposed to be available again at the end of March. Still no notice from the company that it has shipped. Sort of need a shirt for this trip. Sure, sure, I have plenty of options if that one does not come through in time. Still! That shirt! It's important! If it does not arrive, who knows what else could go wrong!

Since I work during the day, I am trying to hike with a full pack immediately after work every day. Tonight Amelia tried lifting my pack with 6 litres of water inside and you could see a brief cloud of concern cover her face. "That's how much six litres weighs? Shit, Paul..."

These little bouts of panic only last a few seconds at most, but I think there is a certain amount of pressure that builds when you start planning trips/adventures of this magnitude. I have been talking about this trip on Twitter and Facebook for months now, and even though I am a curmudgeon whose own ego eclipses the opinions of others, I surely do not want this trip to fail in the first week.

As one would imagine, when you are hiking for 8-10 hours every day for months on end, food is an important consideration. I particularly love this tidbit from the Plan Your Hike website:

The Basal metabolic rate requirement of food calories is approximately 1,000 per day per 100 pounds of body weight. This means you need to eat about 1,000 calories per 100 pounds of body weight per day to survive without losing weight under normal conditions.

Does that seem low to you? I am an 180 pound male who exercises regularly and I definitely eat around 3,000 calories a day. So, I am estimating that I will need to consume at least 5,000 calories a day for the entire trip, minimum. To give you some perspective on what would be required to intake that many calories, here are a few foods and the quantities required to reach 5,000 calories (source):

• Olive Oil - 42 Tablesppons
• Peanut Butter - 53 Tablespoons
• Snickers - 18.5 regular bars
• Whole Almonds - 6 cups (1.9 lbs)
• Dried Quinoa - 8 cups (3 lbs)
• Muesli - 17 cups (3.2 lbs)

The foods listed there are considered relatively calorie dense for their weight too. The average PCT thru-hiker will be consuming about 2-2.5 pounds of food a day and even then most will lose 5-15 pounds of weight during their trip. I am a fairly lean guy already, so the process of keeping my body fueled and healthy is in the forefront of my thoughts now that all of my gear is purchased and ready.

While the calorie quantity and weight of the food is important, it also has to meet all the nutritional requirements that the strain of the trail puts on your body. An often cited resource for thru hikers is Dr. Braaten's Pack Light, Eat Right website. She covers everything from protein content to vitamins, as well as some recommended foods and recipes. Thankfully, as Amelia frequently says, I am a good eater. Put food in front of me and I will eat it. Even on mountains and in cold weather, my mind is so used to eating on a constant basis that even if I am not feeling hungry I am programmed to continue putting anything consumable within reach into my mouth.

That being said, I do appreciate having a hot, tasty meal that has absolutely nothing to do with energy bars, trail mix, soup mixes, or potato flakes. Since I am being resupplied five times via mail drop while in California, those boxes seemed like a perfect time to throw in a half dozen lightweight backpacking meals. Researching a half dozen dried and freeze dried meal companies online, I settled on Outdoor Herbivore. Their meals looked the most appetizing and were extremely price competitive compared to a company like Mountain House. They also have a fantastic 15% bulk discount on orders over $200, which sealed the deal. I went through their website last Monday and chose twelve different meals, which were delivered at the end of last week:

Bought two Hungry Double sized packages of the following meals:

• AppalaChia
• Bee Good Couscous
• Blackened Quinoa
• Cheddar' Mac
• Chia Oat Crunch
• Coconut Chia Peel
• Ginger Chia Gooey
• Naked Freckle Burrito
• Savory Lentil Simmer
• Sunny Sunflower Salad
• Switchback Soup & Stuffer
• Toasted Sunburst Muesli

If you want to see how the different meals compare on price/weight/calories, I created a spreadsheet that breaks it all down. Even with their excellent prices, if I bought only these meals for the entirety of my trip, the cost to feed me for the entire trip would be approximately $4,400. That is not including any money I spent on restaurant food during zero mileage days in town. Bit pricey. But for the occasional treat during mail resupply, I think they are going to be extremely welcomed.

Stubbornness is one of my defining characteristics. There is a voice in my head at all times that is a cheeky and rather brutally honest critic. I do not always listen to him because, let's be fair, such personalities are exhausting and particularly frustrating when you just want to ignore work/responsibilities/life. But, he's there and without that voice constantly pushing me I would have never gotten back to a state that would allow me to attempt hiking the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail.

So. Here I am four weeks away from starting that journey and the excitement is starting to build. Amelia has been fiddling and testing and researching with glee and determination for most of the past three months; while I have been rather more leisurely about my preparations. Steps were mapped out in my mind, of course. I perused gear reviews and blog entries in my off hours, bookmarked webpages, created a spreadsheet for gear costs and weights, and set money aside for purchases. Yet, it was not until the beginning of March that my relative languid behavior disappeared and I started seriously concentrating on the task before me.

All the gear except a few middling items have now been purchased. I am still waiting for a shirt and a stove to appear on my doorstep from the USPS fairy (I have yet to actually see our mailman), but all other incidental items can likely be procured in a single afternoon. A significant pile of dried meals has been ordered from Outdoor Herbivore and will be allocated to specific resupply boxes later this week. Plane tickets are purchased and sleeping quarters arranged in San Diego for the night before the hike starts.

Yup. All coming together.

The planning and preparations never really concerned me as much as they did Amelia. Much of my formative years were spent exploring forests and I have extensive backpacking experience from previous trips. Ultralight backpacking is reasonably new to me, but I have always been careful to choose the best gear for my outdoor activities, which has helped me have a pack weight that is significantly less than people who are still using packs purchased in the 80s. As a man whose metabolism still burns fiercely, food intake to me is as much about fuel as taste so I will eat almost anything put in front of me. While my concern for all these things is not exactly lighthearted, it borders a bit on laissez-faire. We shall just see how the gear and food goes, no?

What is on my mind is the reliability of my body. Last year at this time is when Amelia visited me in Portland after her stint in Antarctica and trip around New Zealand. She told me the other day that what she remembers of that visit is me still limping and becoming tired after walking just a mile. 10 months ago I was still scared of uneven ground for fear my knee would collapse on me. 6 months ago is when I went for my first 2 minute jog. 3 months ago, I snowshoed up solo to a remote fire lookout. A month ago I finally did a trail run that lasted over an hour (full disclosure: very sore afterwards). And, right now I am rotating between days of walking 6-8 miles or spending two hours in the gym doing weights, rowing, and stationary biking.

My knee will never be 100% again, I understand that. As my physical therapist joked, I no longer have original factory parts. I tore it up pretty bad and it will never be completely reliable. Rubbing the scar tissue in my tendon has become somewhat habit forming. But, in the past year I have worked desperately to restore as much strength and functionality as possible. Strong enough to attempt a 2,600 mile backpacking trip. Not strong enough to feel remotely certain of finishing.

In all fairness, I am giving myself even odds of making it through the first month. Even disregarding the knee, I have not treated my body gently these past three decades. Years of soccer, running, backpacking, mountaineering, and shenanigans have taken a toll. It has been a well lived life, in my opinion, but I am now starting to deal with the complications of that hard playing. Lots of muscles, tendons, and ligaments are infused with scar tissue. Backpacking 2,600 miles is not going to treat them kindly.

And yet, why the hell not try.

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."