Preparing for a Long Outdoor Trip

Many people often ask what I do with all the wild game I harvest throughout the year. On an average year I donate about half the meat to charities or families in need and keep the other half to fill my freezer.

However, this year my freezer is already empty! The reason why is my little brother has decided to take 6-months off from work and walk the Pacific Rim trail all the way from Mexico to Canada! That’s over a 2,600 miles hike and he’s doing it all by himself. Pretty amazing if you ask me!

Now back to the reason my freezer is completely empty. As brother dear prepared for this long haul one of the things he needed to get prepared were all his meals for the entire 6-months. He took all my wild game and dehydrated everything. He spent weeks drying all my moose, caribou, bear, hogs, deer, alligator, fish and anything else I had in the freezer. Once the meat was dehydrated, he placed it into a blender and packaging it up into little sealed packets for each meal. On the trail he will add water to these along with chunks of rendered fat to ensure he has enough calories. Every 2-weeks my parents will ship him another food package and he will stop in a local post office along the trail and pick it up.

Getting ready for a trip like this takes some extreme preparation. The first few weeks of the hike is through the dry desert where water is scarce and the sun is brutal. Eating healthy and keeping his body in tip-top condition will be key and wild game is a great option. So far he said the desert has been extremely dry and dusty covering him in dirt from head to toe. The photos he posted have been pretty unbelievable and he even had a fox come up and steal crackers right from him! Guess the animals have learned that the hikers carry food!

I’m sure he’s going to have a ton of stories by the time his trip is over and fall comes. In the meantime I need to get back out turkey hunting and start refilling my freezer!