6 lbs of dried beans and gear

Moments are ticking down like heavy steps. 12 days. To write and synthesize and eulogize the last 2 years of effort into an inadequately dull paper about mycorrhizal fungi. Hours pass by. For everything that I have done and planned, there are a dozen things undone on my constantly growing list. 

Meatloaf playing his usual outdoors game - food or toy? - with a Ganoderma mushroom

I know, deep down, that I can wake up tomorrow and stuff my old backpacking gear into my pack and head for the border, and everything would be just fine. The stress and self-doubt will dissipate as I walk. But that doesn't stop the list from growing.

• We need to renew our passports. 
• We need to figure out how to get from here (New York) to there (California).
• I need to find new homes for the things that have piled up during the last few years.
• I need to cook more dried beans, and dehydrate more dried beans. 
• I need to try my dehydrated beans to make sure that they are edible. 
• I need to figure out what we are going to eat aside from beans. 
• I need to spend less money on wine and waffle fries.
• I need to earn more money.   

It doesn't seem so daunting, I suppose, when you put it down in writing. Thesis, passport, beans, money.

Food planning has taken so much more thought than I am used to. On the PCT, there are remote sections where you need to mail yourself a box of food to resupply. Almost everyone uses mailed resupply drops at a few spots along the trail. I'll be doing ~10 resupply boxes, because (as of a year ago) I've got a really special gut that gets pissed whenever I eat gluten. And if there is one thing that doesn't go well with backpacking, it's diarrhea. That means no pop tarts, no granola bars, no pasta sides, and no pizza. And so I have been stocking up on rice pasta and dehydrating beans, still unsure as to how I am going to combine the two, and what Craig is going to eat.

I have most of my gear already. I'll be starting with some older supplies, and changing them up as I need to. I hike in Chacos sandals, sometimes with incredibly awesome darn tough socks. I wear old running shorts and tank tops. I'll bring along a desert shirt with sleeves! and a rainbow-colored desert straw hat from Mali. I will have long underwear for sleeping and cold days. I will send myself a rain jacket for the Sierras. I will have one extra pair of underwear and socks, that I will wash and hang to dry on my pack. For town, I have a light cotton dress with a hot pink and blue diamond pattern.

My pack is a Granite Gear Vapor Ki from 5 years back. My sleeping bag is a North Face Cat's Meow from 9 years ago, that traveled with me during the cold parts of the AT. My shelter is a North Face 2-person tent (Tadpole, I think?) that Craig and I will share. I have a voluptuous Thermarest Prolite inflatable pad that I found returned, new, to REI on sale for $40. A sheet of Tyvek homewrap for a groundcloth, bought on Ebay years ago. It's not the lightest set of gear, but it'll do. 

I usually use a cat food alcohol stove, but there are stricter open-flame laws in California this summer on account of the drought. We'll probably be bringing along Craig's MSR pocket rocket and buying fuel canisters along the way.

In my miscellaneous bag, I'll have my little flip phone and charger. My camera and its charger. I'll have a little notebook, and two pens with duct tape wrapped tightly around them. I'll have some tablets of iodine and ibu profin and Benadryl. A small comb, a little bag of Q-tips, tweezers. A tube of sunscreen, a tube of toothpaste. Floss, a toothbrush. Contact solution and glasses in a hard case (ask me about the last time I brought a soft case camping). A steripen borrowed from my adviser to sterilize water with UV radiation!

I have a limited budget for this trip, so we'll be making do with some heavier lightweight gear, and passing up on a lot of zero days (when you don't hike at all, and stay at a hotel and shower and eat cartons of ice cream and overdose on internet).