Preparing for fell hiking

 

For about a week now, I have made preparations for a hiking trip with three friends to the fell (the mountainous landscapes in Scandinavia, and parts of England) of Jämtland (a province in western Sweden).

We will start off our one-week adventure the next Wednesday, the 1^st of August, and I still have more things to do before that, but I though I’ll write a short post about it now, before I am all set, to tell a bit about how I expect this to be. Then, I hope to write more once I am finished packing, about how I have prepared. Finally, I will – of course – post once we are back, to tell all about our epic journey!

Hiking basically means to walk around in (relatively remote) nature, typically in mountainous terrain, usually following a pre-set trail, so it is easier not to get lost. There are more variants to how you can do this. For example, you can rent cottages along the trail if you don’t want to sleep outdoors, or just want to pack lightly. We, on the other hand, will bring tents to camp every night and portable stoves to cook food out in the wild.

This means that our backpacks will be very heavy, and that is among my top concerns: I have made a few test-trips around the village and into town with my backpack stuffed with magazines, and those 15-17kg hurt my weak shoulders something terrible! And that is even though the backpack has a waist belt that loads some weight on the hips and legs instead.

A solution would be to minimise the weight – compromise away items that weigh more than they may be essential, portion the food precisely so that I don’t bring excess, and so on – but, you hear that that does seem a lot like living on the brink. So, I do not think that is a very good idea, not only because of the risks it entails, in case of some unexpected disaster, but also because it will surely make the entire trip a misery, and that is not the point of doing this! We go hiking because we want to have fun, not test our minimal requirements to survive!

My dad, however, gave me a hint to what seems like a much better solution. He was talking about purchasing a water bottle that can be attached to the belt, so that I won’t need to pick it out of the backpack each time I need to drink. Also realising how that would mean carrying less in the bag, I realised that, instead of minimising all weight, I should minimise the weight I carry on my shoulders! The more things I can have in my pockets or attached to the waist belt, the less strain my shoulders will endure. And it is the shoulders that are the problem: my legs are strong enough – the test trips did not tire me or anything, only hurt my shoulders. So I should be fine. Hopefully…

On deciding what food to bring – apart from the need to carefully note what will not get ruined lying for days in a warm bag – there is usually a trade-off (a compromise, or “a balance achieved between two desirable but incompatible features”) between variation and carrying capacity. If you want varied meals, you need to bring more different stuff, but that usually takes up more room in the bag, which I have heard is normally stuffed full before you even have everything you need in it. I at least plan to be spartan, and favour efficiency above luxury, at least in this aspect, for several reasons: I my bag is not very large; I know that I can stand to eat the same food for at least three or four days in a row, so I hope manage a week; I know from experience that when you are really hungry and exhausted, you will eat almost anything!

My plan is to have oatmeal for breakfast, and I’ll bring a bag with some sugar and cinnamon to spice it up (because it is difficult to bring milk, and jam is too low in nutrition, and I could never eat it pure unless my life truly depended on it). For snack, I will have nuts and dried fruit, which I could add to the breakfast porridge if I would want some variation. As for lunch, we all agreed to buy freeze-dried food (various dishes), which is basically food heavily dehydrated into a powder – to eat, just add warm water and you have a meal in minutes. It probably tastes weird, but is an efficient way of making food fast in the middle of the day, so that we can keep on moving quickly thereafter: you make the food in the bag the powder comes in, you there is no need to make camp before or wash anything after. For dinner, however, we will prepare proper meals. I want to bring white beans in tomato sauce for the first day (it is relatively heavy, so I think it is best to finish it off as soon as possible), and pasta (a type of macaroni that is done in a few minutes, called snabbmakaroner – “fast macaroni” – in Swedish) for the rest, alternately together with meatballs or powder soup (varied flavours) as a sauce.

Mmm… all this writing about food reminds me that it is time for a late lunch now. So, this will have to be enough for now.