My car camping trip on Mt. Rainier had filled me with joy. I loved the trip so much that I came up with a new goal for the following summer: wilderness camping. I had gone trekking into wild places all my adult life, but that had abruptly ended three years earlier when ulcerative colitis hit. I wanted to go backpacking again.
It was an ambitious goal. Car camping alone had been a challenge for me, involving exhaustion and a giant cooler full of special food. But now I was a year out of the hospital, and I could feel my strength growing. And Rainier had made me determined.
My Three Challenges
The challenges to backpacking were mainly logistical. I could think of three problems I would need to overcome.
First, I didn’t know how I was going to eat in the wild. On Rainier I’d had my giant cooler, but I couldn’t bring a giant cooler in a backpack.
Then there were my daily helpings of fermented, probiotic foods, namely goat-milk kefir and sauerkraut. These foods were medicine to me—their bacteria kept my delicate gut microbiome in balance. When car camping, I’d kept them in the cooler with my meals. How was I going to carry them and keep them cool in the wilderness?
Finally, there were my knees, which had gotten creaky with age and illness. I was weaker now than a few years ago. I wasn’t sure my knees could handle a pack anymore.
These obstacles were daunting, but I was hopeful. By now I had learned that through careful problem-solving, many obstacles presented by my disease could be overcome. All I needed to do was sit down and create a plan.
What To Eat on the Trail?
I felt confident as I started Googling. There are plenty of people with restricted diets, I thought. Many of them must go backpacking. I just needed to find their advice on what to eat.
To my surprise, though, my initial searches left me empty-handed.
I first Googled “macrobiotic camping food.” Macrobiotics was not exactly the diet I was on, but it was a good approximation, because it, like my diet, excludes gluten, dairy, and sugar. To my chagrin, there seemed to be only one article online on camping while eating macrobiotically. It was about car camping. The author described cooking veggies with sesame oil while being tortured by the smells of others grilling at their own campsites.
This dearth of information boggled my mind. Could it really be true—did macrobiotic people not camp?
I tried Googling “vegan camp food,” partly just to make sure the search engine was working. Indeed, there were many hits for this topic. But veganism is not as restrictive as macrobiotics, and most vegan camp foods involved sugar and gluten and other things I couldn’t eat.
Next I tried “vegan gluten free camping,” and again found resources…but, of course, these largely involved cooking with sugar.
Oh my god, I thought. Am I really going to have to Google “vegan gluten free sugar free camping?!?”
Laboriously, I typed it all out and pressed Search. Still nothing. This was getting ridiculous. I just wanted macrobiotic camping dishes! That single word—macrobiotic—encapsulated what I wanted.
Finding safe backpacking food was going to take more research than I’d thought. I couldn’t just do a quick Google search; the websites I wanted weren’t put together. I resigned myself to combing through various other health-food camping recipes and slowly piecing together a list of lightweight foods I could carry and eat.
Finally, weeks later, I had a breakthrough. I somehow stumbled across the concept of making your own deyhdrated camping food, the option I hadn’t known I needed. Dehydrating my own food simply hadn’t occurred to me. I instantly knew it was my missing link.
I quickly found BackpackingChef.com, and from there I was off and running. Chef Glenn McAllister describes backpacking the Appalachian Trail on homemade meals, which he created because he believed his meals would be healthier than the processed foods most hikers eat. His book, Recipes for Adventure, is a how-to guide that covers everything from purchasing a dehydrator to cooking and dehydrating the food to how to pack it into Ziplocks for the trail.
Finding his website, I felt overwhelmed with relief. Dehydrating my own food was the answer to my biggest logistical problem! I could do this!
What To Do About Sauerkraut?
It was still only fall of 2017, almost a year till I would go backpacking. For Christmas, I asked my family for Recipes for Adventure, and in January I bought an Excalibur 3926TB dehydrator, the model recommended by Chef Glenn. I began to experiment with dehydrating foods, eating my concoctions to make sure that my finicky gut could still digest the meals after I’d dehydrated them.
Next I began researching my second problem: how to carry probiotic food into the wilderness. This was trickier than the other food, because I doubted that fermented foods could be dehydrated and still retain their probiotic properties.
Every day, I ate a cup or two of sauerkraut and drank a cup of goat-milk kefir. After years of experimentation, I had found that these were the foods that kept my gut in balance—their bacteria seemed to be the bacteria my gut most needed. I had never found a probiotic pill that helped me, whereas sauerkraut and kefir did.
I thought I could go without kefir for a few days, but every time I had skipped sauerkraut for even one day, my colitis symptoms had begun to flare. I needed to somehow take sauerkraut with me.
Sauerkraut contained far more liquid than dehydrated food. It would add a lot of weight to my pack, especially because I would also need to keep it cool. Perhaps I could transport it in a cool bag with glacial water that I could collect from streams?
The more I thought about that option, the less it seemed likely to work. Sauerkraut and extra water would be too heavy.
Then I began to wonder: Could I dehydrate the sauerkraut?
I posted a query on a well-known fermentation forum, Permies.com. (The “permies” refers to “permaculture.”) After explaining my need for sauerkraut and my desire to go backpacking, I wrote:
One idea is dehydrating it…but that will only work if it doesn’t kill the beneficial bacteria. I have read one post somewhere (can’t find it now) about how, if you dehydrate at <106 degrees F, the bacteria will survive and will be reactivated with water. This seems at least POSSIBLE to me, since probiotic pills are also dry and not always refrigerated. So:
Has anyone else tried dehydrating sauerkraut or anything similar? Do you happen to know if the bacteria can survive this process? Do you have any recommendations for rehydrating—should I just add water, or eat it dry and expect it to reactivate in my gut? If it’s hopeless, any suggestions for other ways to travel with ferments?
A few people responded. They agreed that, if this was going to work, the key would be to dehydrate the sauerkraut at a very low temperature. I didn’t know how probiotic supplements were made, but I crossed my fingers that it was something like this: cultivating beneficial bacteria, then drying them out gently, without killing them, so they’d reactivate once swallowed.
I soon posted again:
Well, it’s a couple weeks later and I’ve done my first experiment with this… I dehydrated at 105 degrees F, which took around 8 hours. I stored the dried kraut in a mason jar in a cool place, but not the fridge, reasoning that I wouldn’t be able to store it in the fridge on the way to our backpacking trip. Then, after a few days, I substituted the dried sauerkraut for all the ferments I usually eat…
Well… My gut didn’t do as well as it usually does…but it also didn’t do as poorly as it does without any ferments at all. The first day was actually the worst, possibly because my body was adjusting—I had some gut symptoms and felt a general malaise all day. By the third full day, though, I was feeling normal energy, although my gut still wasn’t normal. (I’m not getting too graphic here, out of politeness! 🙂 ) It would have been rough going, if I had been backpacking that first day, since I was feeling off and tired. But the second and third days would have been fine.
The experiment gave me mixed feelings. If I’d gone into the wilderness with the dehydrated sauerkraut, I wouldn’t have been happy and might have had to cut the trip short. But at least I would have been safe.
A couple months later, in April of 2018, I read an article that boosted my spirits about backpacking.
“Doctors told him to check his wife into a nursing home,” read the headline on CNN. “Instead, he wheeled her around the world.” Intrigued, I clicked the article. It read:
When Andy Fierlit’s wife suffered a brain aneurysm 27 years ago, doctors urged him to admit her to a nursing home. But Fierlit wanted to make their life ordinary again — or even extraordinary — so he embarked on a mission to show her the world.
Since then, Andy and Donna Fierlit have visited all seven continents — more than 20 countries, so far — with Andy doing the pushing while Donna, who is partially paralyzed, rides in a wheelchair…
“The challenges are there,” Andy admits. “But if you think ahead and preplan, you can overcome them.”
Reading this story uplifted me. If Donna Fierlit could travel so far with her limitations, I could go backpacking with mine!
(I emphasized Donna, and not Andy, in that sentence on purpose. For all the article’s inspiration, it centers on the story of the able-bodied person; I wished Donna herself had been brought more fully into focus.)
A few days after reading the article, I went completely off all ferments for several days.
This was Part Deux of my experiment with the dehydrated sauerkraut. Since I couldn’t be sure any bacteria had survived my dehydration effort, I now wanted to know whether my change in symptoms had been due to fewer probiotics or to no probiotics. There was no point in bringing dehydrated sauerkraut if it didn’t even include bacteria.
This experiment lasted four days, approximately the length of time I’d be backpacking. To my amazement, my gut hardly responded at all. I’d been in a particularly stable period lately, with virtually no colitis symptoms for a couple weeks. Even now, my bowels remained stable.
My body didn’t seem to mind going off probiotics at all.
I was elated. This was the first time in years that I’d experienced no symptoms from going off fermented foods. I had now been in remission for a year, so perhaps my gut microbiome had reached some new phase of stability. Regardless of the reason, my freedom had expanded. I could skip fermented foods altogether during the backpacking trip. Problem solved!
Dehydration Station
As summer approached, I became a pro at dehydrating meals.
Most of the meals in Recipes for Adventure contained things I couldn’t eat, but the book was still a godsend. It includes recommended cooking temperatures and times for virtually all dehydratable foods, including beans, rice, fruits, and vegetables. Those numbers, plus various other instructions such as how to pack your meals, were incredibly helpful.
We had decided to start backpacking with an easy, relatively flat trip: a hike to the Enchanted Valley in Washington’s Olympic National Park. The flatness of the trail would be a way of addressing my third challenge—my knees. By going up the least slope possible, I’d be able to see how just carrying a heavy pack affected my knees and whether I could later do more.
The trip would require only two or three nights, so I would just need to prepare two or three breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. (I was preparing them for both Ron and me, even though he didn’t need my diet. It’s easiest to share meals when backpacking.) We always ate buckwheat porridge for breakfast with apples and blueberries, and all of these could be dehydrated. For dinners, I chose to make a simple black bean soup and a coconut dal, both with rice, and with already-dried seaweed mixed in for greens. We decided that we’d carry some oils, too, since fat is important but doesn’t dehydrate well. We planned to pack a small plastic bottle of olive oil to add to our dinners and a small plastic tub of almond butter to add to our breakfasts.
To dehydrate each meal, I first cooked the amount that I thought we would need, preparing it in the kitchen exactly as I would if we were eating it at home. I mixed in spices and all other ingredients except for the oils. Then I set it aside to cool. A couple hours later, I carefully spread it across several dehydrator trays lined with parchment paper.
Dehydrating takes time—most meals took around eight hours to dry. For a couple weeks, our dehydrator was often whirring in the background of our lives. Periodically, I would stop the machine and check the trays to see whether the food had completely dried. If any liquid was left, the food could rot between now and the trip. It would be horrible to discover bags full of rotten food after we were already deep in the Olympic Mountains.
Like magic, the beans, rice, and veggies shrunk down into small, light, crispy pieces. It was amazing to see how much volume they lost by removing their water. I stored them in mason jars until all the ingredients had been dried, then assembled all the meals, packing each two-person breakfast or dinner into double Ziplocks. As Chef Glenn recommended, in each bag I included a paper towel labeled in Sharpie with the meal it contained. That way, the meals could be quickly recognized, and the paper towel could assist in cleaning the pots after we ate.
Lunches would be eaten on the trail and couldn’t be cooked. In my healthy days, my favorite trail lunch was a bagel with summer sausage and some trail mix on the side, but most gluten-free bread, summer sausage, and trail mix have sugar. Now I found sugar-free beef jerky online and ordered a few packs, and bought nuts, dried apples, and another small tub of sugar-free almond butter. We would be eating paleo lunches.
We were ready to go.
