Food

On our first trip west we took a cooler, and the reason was simple, didn’t everyone always take a cooler with them? After all, didn’t we need fresh meat, milk, juice, cheese and butter? For the first three days we filled the cooler with ice, constantly. It was hot and the ice melted quickly, a pain-in-the-butt. The ice melted too quickly, and we quickly had spoiled meat and milk along with a cooler that stank. We ditched the cooler, gained valuable cargo room, and simplified our lives tremendously. Of course I wondered what we would do for food but with a little thinking outside the box we came up with some great alternatives to the refrigeration-needy foods.

Many years ago I was a backpacker going out for excursions as long as fourteen days. Without a cooler. We survived, and on our backpacking trips we often dreamed a bit too about what we would eat when we arrived back in civilization. Car camping is simple really compared to backpacking since we had access to a grocery store every once in awhile. And best of all, I would not have to constantly search for ice and wonder if I was keeping all this refrigerated food items cold enough.

Camping without a cooler has been an advantage into creativity for sure and required us to think outside the box. Often times the boys will exclaim that we are eating better than we ever do at home! While I don’t agree our meals are simple and here’s a sample of our meals for the last week.

Breakfast — you have your choice of hot oatmeal, hot chocolate, granola bars, peanut butter on graham crackers or bread, and/or cinnamon raisin bagel and cheese if we have it. Mark usually chooses a bagel with magarine while Michael and I take instant hot oatmeal with cheese.

Lunch — summer sausage with cheddar cheese on a bagel if you’d like. PB sandwich, tuna sandwich with a little mayonnaise. We found a source for individually packaged mayonnaise and since it isn’t opened it doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Sometimes we choose to have our lunch items for dinnertime too.

Snack —- nuts, dried fruit, raisins, beef jerky, lemonade using dry powdered mix

Dinner menu for the last week—-

1. Chicken Chow Mein with an extra can of chicken added to the mix.

Rice

1. Ravioli

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Canned peaches

1. Taco Dip with Nacho chips — mix one jar salsa with 4 oz cheddar cheese and 1# ground beef. (We stopped at the General Store just outside the NP we were visiting and picked up a pound of beef at the end of the day and just prior to dinner)

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Canned pears

1. Cheesy Chicken Helper — Use one box Chicken Helper, two large cans chicken breast meat, one can evaporated skim milk

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Canned peaches

1. Chili over macaroni —- We use canned chili without beans and sometimes add summer sausage to the mixture to boast the protein level of the dinner

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Canned pears

1. Chicken glop — into one pot place two cans chicken, drained, uncooked rice, Chinese vegetables, can green beans, can corn. Heat and serve

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Canned peaches

1. Rotisserie Chicken

Salad

Wheat bread with squeeze margarine

Bananas, strawberries,

The key to thinking outside the box has been to shop in the packaged food isle, a place I avoid when we are at home, and searching for items that can be substituted for refrigerator items. Evaporated skim milk in a can is a great substitution for milk. Many hard cheese can go a week without refrigeration although we try to purchase small quantities, around 8oz, and use it within a couple days. Fresh fruit is always purchased at the store and eaten within the first day or two. Many National Parks have their own General Store where fresh fruit and perhaps some fresh meat can be purchased for the evening meal.

In a couple days we will stay overnight in a hotel and our conversations have centered around the hot showers and food, should we eat steak or BBQ, and where can we go that will have an endless salad bar.

So there’s how we have thought outside the box using tons of canned and boxed items.

Monday June 2 to Wednesday June 4

From lovely Bruce Canyon we drove to Zion Naional Park, in a round-about way since we needed a Wolly-World Stop. We were low on food, and Michael needed a new jump rope. Keeping a 16yo boy stuck 24/7 with his mom and younger brother content has become quite THE challenge on this trip. Michael desires exercise, lots of it, and our hikes just don’t do the trick for him. He wants to sweat, and to breath hard and to stay in-shape so that when he returns to his speed skating team he will still be in great shape. Also, if he is able to exercise hard then he is happier and is more content to be with his mom and younger brother 24/7.

From Zion we drove to Cedar City and when Michael, my navigator, asked me whether I wished to go the scenic route or the route Streets & Trips recommended I opted for the scenic route. WOW!!!! We traveled up and over a mountain and found ourselves passing through Cedar Canyon National Monument. Cedar Canyon looks like Bryce but on a grander scale. Sitting at over 10,000′ snow was still everywhere, and the views down into the valley, sitting at 4000′ were breathtaking. We opted to camp here for the night until we learned that the campground was still closed. Too muddy from the snow that had just finished melting. ugh.

At Cedar City we picked up all our food needs and continued on. I made a quick call to my friend AnnMarie having thought of her as we drove through a small Utah town having a Quilt-Walk-Festival and found her to be with a mutual friend from WA. A few words later and we have a new stop for our trip at Ann’s home close to Mt. St. Helen’s. It will be great to see her again.

Arriving to Zion we grapped the last camp spot, set up camp and headed to the visitor’s center. Zion has steep sandstone walls, sandstone laid millions upon millions of years prior to Bryce, and as a result is harder and denser than Bryce. Weathering and erosion play the role of shaping this canyon and each shutter bus drivers pointed out different recent landslides that had reshaped the canyon walls.

Tuesday we hiked to the ‘tourist’ spots; emerald pools, river walk, weeping rock, canyon overlook and py’rus trail. Wednesday we planned to hike to observation point which would have been a terrific 8-mile hike up the 2500′ canyon walls but when we got up the sky looked nasty. A few phone calls to friends with www access confirmed that Zion might have thunderstorms. Quickly we decided to pack up and move on. Off to CA we headed.

The drive was easy to Vegas with the exception to the very rocky start we had. Michael needs time alone, time to re-group so when we stopped in to REI to purchase a new tent I said OK to Michael purchasing a solo tent. We still have 6 weeks on this trip and that’s plenty of use-time and hopefully will provide him with a space to go to to get some alone time for him.

Yes, we had to purchase a new tent on this trip. Our tent is around 20 yrs old and the all the wind storms had taken their toll on this tent. WIND! oh my, little did we know what waited for us west of Vegas.

WIND. High Wind warnings were what we heard on the radio about 30 minutes outside of Vegas, gusts to 65mph were coming, and I believe it. For 5 hrs, or about 300 miles of our 550 miles of driving were in high head winds, and white-out conditions. It was the hardest driving I have ever done, the worst-driving conditions I have ever been in, just awful, awful, awful. Dust flying everywhere, and most the time you couldn’t see more than a few cars in head of you. Just awful, awful, awful.

Finally we arrived in a little town outside of Kings Canyon National Park, ate some real food, took very needed showers, got a good night’s sleep and will get out oil changed this morning before we head to our next destination.

Friday to Monday, May 30^th – June 2

Bryce Canyon’s scenery is unique they say however it reminds us very much of the Badlands in SD, but bigger and grander.  Beautiful.    Bryce is a canyon and much like Grand Canyon to the south you arrive and drive upon the plateau or rim of the canyon.  That’s where the similarity ends.  At Bryce the canyon is filled with hoodoos, a natural column of rock in fantastic form, formed by forces of nature sculpting the brilliantly-colored Claron Formation into a series of beautiful and unusual erosion features.  Bryce Canyon’s beginnings can be traced back to a network of braided rivers and streams, which transported a variety of sediments into a large freshwater lake that once covered SW Utah.  Over time the lake disappeared leaving behind the multicolored Claron Formation. 

About 10 – 15 million years ago a period of uplifting began in the region known as the Colorado Plateau, faulting and stretching and fracturing creating smaller plateaus.  Bryce has been craved from one of these plateaus.  Faults and earthquakes initiated the sculpting process by breaking the rock with vertical mini-fractures called joints.  Bringing in the forces of weathering and erosion with a meager 18” of rain a years and it’s amazing what has resulted.  At a rate of 1-4’ of erosion per year they estimate that Bryce’s hoodoos will disappear in 3 million years. 

Arriving at Bryce’s campground we easily found a site, set-up and was met by the camp host.  After she collected our money she shared that we really should check out the ranger’s programs.  In her opinion they are all excellent and after attending two I would concur.  At that point however she shared that the evening program was astronomy, with really large telescopes lead by Bryce’s Dark Rangers.   Being the astronomy buff Michael’s eyes lit up and even more so when Judy shared that this sky is dark and clear.   Being at 8000’ elevation and without cities close-by Michael knew she was correct.   We visited the grocery store just outside Bryce and then the Visitor’s Center.  This really should be high on any National Park’s visitor’s list of things to do first when entering a NP since they have a wealth of information about how the park is formed and what activities are available.

After dinner we headed over to the Lodge for the rangers talk about the night sky and then to the rear of the Visitor’s Center where four volunteers had their HUGE telescopes set-up.  I was a bit put aside by the shear number of folks there (100’s) but after an hour the crowd had dwindled to 10 or 20 folks.   Michael was in heaven, excitedly coming to find me and telling me that I needed to visit this telescope or that one to see this galaxy or that one, this globular cluster or that one.  It was fun to see these night-objects, which were so easy to spot in this oh is so dark and clear sky in Bryce; it is an astronomy’s dream-sky.  During this evening Mark kept telling me that it was time to go back to the camp since he was tired and Michael kept asking us to look at one more object and that we couldn’t leave yet.  Finally at 11:30pm the Dark Ranger called it quits and asked the volunteer’s to pack things up.  Michael and the one volunteer continued to look at objects and I know he would have stayed all night.

In the morning we hiked 11 miles on the Fairyland Trail.  Up and down and around and over; the trail took us past one beautiful and colorful hoodoo after another.  Tired and exhausted we finally made it to the General Store where the boys enjoyed ice cream and a pretzel.  Mark requested that every hike should end like this.

Sunday morning we  attended a bird hike, all of 1-mile in length it was just what we all needed after the previous long hike.  The ranger pointed out one bird after another and by the end of the two hours we had seen 22 new birds.   A couple on the outing asked if we homeschool–their daughter hs in SC, lucky woman.  They were so supportive of hs’ing and had just had their one grand daughter with them for 12 days showing her some of the west.    After a lunch of pizza from the General Store we did a little 5 mile hike through Navajo Trail and The Queen’s Garden.  Nice but a bit hot.  Tomorrow morning we pull out of here and head off to Zion National Park.