Spring Break, Part 2, Prep

So now that I took my psych test, I have some time to continue working on this project. It is going to take a while, but it will be finished.

So when we got to my house on Wednesday, we at a little food, toured the house and went to bed. It was getting onto 3:00AM. Since we needed to get a lot of things done the next day, we were up again by 7:30. The first order of business was to prepare food. I have a food dehydrator, so we sliced up a bunch of bananas and started to dehydrate them. As soon as we did that and ate breakfast, we went shopping.

Getting Ready for Shopping trip

The first place we went to was the hardware store. We had a dual objective there. The first was to purchase some parts for a steady cam rig that Nate made out of his trekking pole. This took a while since both Nate and Raf had slightly different ideas about how it should go together, which was drastically compounded by trying to find parts that would work. We were greatly assisted in this endeavor by the hardware store guy who gave us tips and ideas on how to put it together. The second objective was of a more revolting nature.

In the summer, the acceptable way to deal with human waste is to dig a cathole, that is, a small six to eight inch deep hole in which the feces is buried. In the winter this is not a small problem. We would be hiking and camping on over four feet of snow. If we did manage to dig to the ground, it would be to no avail. Under the snow ground is as hard as cement and would take hours to dig eight inches unless we brought a jackhammer. Why not just poop in the snow you say? The problem with that is, when the snow melts, it carries the pathogens in the surface water into the streams, thereby contaminating them. No, the solution is to pack the poop.

This was the second reason for going to the hardware store. We purchased a 3’ long, 4” diameter PVC tube, one end cap, and a screw on cap for the other end. Although bulky, we figured this would be the cheap method, (as opposed to buying a $100, built for backpacker/rock climber’s model).

Me with poop-tube, Raf with steady cam stuff

We then proceeded to China-mart. This was supposed to be a quick and easy, go in, grab our food, get out trip. It was anything but quick and easy. Having come off a couple mid-terms, and little sleep the night before, we were moving slow. We had no plan. We walked up and down the aisles all together, all looking for the same thing. When we found it, we would weight the options, wondering which would be the best choice. We usually ended up letting Raf make the final choice. (: Halfway through finding all of the food, we ran into some real trouble.

It had to with waste disposal. We didn’t know how we would deal with it when we returned home with a tube full of poop. Could we throw it away? Should we try to flush it down the toilet? We weren’t sure about the former, and didn’t really want to try the latter. After trying to find flushable kitty litter, with which we were going to control odors, we saw something. It was diapers and depends. Of course!! No, our idea was not to use depends. We realized that we can throw well bagged and contained ‘stuff’ in the garbage. They do it all the time with diapers. Elated, we grabbed some doggie-bags (not the kind from restaurants), and went back to shopping.

Cutting Apples

We finally finished shopping and returned home. There we sliced boiled and dehydrated; apples, lentils, zucchini and black beans. While those dehydrated we mixed up GORP (good old raisins and peanuts) and a peanut butter log with honey, oatmeal and dried milk. Those were to be our lunches along with cheese and wheat thins. Breakfast was oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar. Diner, the excitement, was; spaghetti with zucchini, curried rice with lentils, rice and beans, or cheesy mashed potatoes.

After food prep, we got down to construction. Nate and Raf worked on their steady cam project, while I worked on the poop tube. While we were preparing the food, Nate had worked hard on decorating the PVC tube. With colored sharpie, he drew a bear/godzilla/nun on the side. The tubing had been made in, or by a company called, Charlotte. Since the parts already had that name standing out on them, we christened the poop-tube “Charlotte.” She was really quite impressive looking, and we thought of the looks she would get on the trail.

Nate's artwork 

After construction, we pulled everything together. We got the fuel, food and gear, and laid it out in my basement. Although we did double-check everything there, we were pretty confident we did not forget anything because we were pretty thorough back at Gordon. Raf had a little trouble with his pack, but after a little ingenious work with an old guitar part and a Canadian penny, he fixed the problem very sturdily. 

Banana Chips and bunny ears!!

Gear prep

At six thirty, I took David, my younger brother, to Taekwondo, and, after saying high to everyone, returned home and soon went to bed. We were going to get up early the next morning and wanted a pretty good sleep.




All Photos courtesy of Nate Mori's camera, although many were also taken by Rafael Rozendo.