Sometimes I keep a diary of everything I eat. Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here
Saturday
I wake in the desert outside Las Vegas. I’m on an air mattress in the back of my rental minivan- I got this specific van because the seats fold down into the floor, so I knew that I’d be able to sleep in it. I step outside to pee. The sky is paling above the bare, rocky hills and in the distance I can see other vans, tucked into washes and perched on bits of flat ground. Jeep tracks cross the land in every direction, like a spiderweb. There must’ve been a mine in these hills at one point, or some reason for people to make these roads. A hundred years ago this spot probably felt like the middle of nowhere. Now it’s just outside the sprawl that makes up the edges of Las Vegas, shiny new strip malls that will one day be just as shitty and depressing as all the other strip malls.
I only slept for five hours last night- I was too anxious to fall asleep until late, and I passed the time curled in my sleeping bag reading Tessa Hull’s graphic novel Feeding Ghosts by headlamp (it’s really good). Now I brush my teeth, spit into the dirt and then ease the van back onto the paved road. I stop at the first gas station I see and buy one of the square bottles of unsweetened iced tea that are ubiquitous at gas stations everywhere. There’s only a couple people in the gas station, and they look as if they’ve been up all night. Yesterday evening this town was a madhouse but now the streets are quiet, just the morning doves calling out and these stragglers who never went to bed.
I pick up SJ at the airport, my friend who’s tagging along on the first session of my April Utah guided trips just for fun. She had an overnight flight and tells me she wasn’t able to sleep on the plane at all. When in Vegas! We head to Sprouts so I can buy groceries to cook meals for my hikers while we’re at the rental house and I grab a package of grocery store sushi for breakfast, tuna with the spicy mayo on top. Then it’s time to pick everyone up. It’s lovely to see them, and we stop by REI for canister fuel and then get lunch at the burger place next door- they have gluten-free buns! And finally we’re off, headed five hours east to Escalante. There’s chips for the drive and I eat some dark chocolate and put on an audiobook and everybody naps (except me, ha ha).
We stop in St. George for Everything Bundt Cakes, a place I just discovered (apparently it’s a chain?) that makes this small gluten-free chocolate chip bundt cake that’s the best GF baked good I’ve ever had. We all get little cakes and eat them in the car and then exclaim happily out the windows as the low desert gives way to ponderosa forest, still patchy with snow, and the glimpses of Bryce hoodoos you can see from the road. We drop in elevation again, out of the ponderosas and into the junipers, and then we’re at the rental house in Escalante, which is incredibly spacious (probably because this is a mormon community). SJ prepares blackened salmon tacos for dinner with sockeye she brought from Alaska while I go over the maps with everyone and we test our inreaches. There’s slaw with the tacos, and black beans, and radishes and cilantro, and the salmon is so good because SJ’s housemate, who’s a commercial fishermen, had it professionally vacuum sealed at the cannery after catching it, so it’s been preserved much better than the sockeye I packaged with my budget vacuum sealer in Bristol Bay last summer and have been eating since then, if I’m being honest.
At last it’s time for sleep.
Sunday
I meant to take a benadryl before bed (I recently discovered how well these work for sleep [even though they do increase your risk of Alzheimer’s by inhibiting a neurotransmitter important for short-term memory and cognition]) but took an aleve by accident, and am awake at 4 am. That’s ok though because my room has a bathtub so I use the time to take a long bath and try and figure out my life, or more specifically, what to do with my novel- should I keep trying to get a traditional publishing deal? No-one seems to want it. No, I decide, while washing my hair- I’ll self publish. I can hire my own editor, I can have creative control over the cover, I can get it into the world much faster- it’ll be better that way, really. It’s just so hard to let go of the idea of institutional approval. We are all socialized, within crabitalism, to want that. There’s this part of me that wants to have my art validated by- who? A small group of people, and their ideas about which art is commercially viable? Vs. the opinions of readers and my own opinions, which are what matter most to me at the end of the day. Of course with traditional publishing, ideally, there is also the money upfront. But with self-publishing you make more money in the end anyway- just over a longer period of time.
My morale is boosted by this newfound clarity and I happily make breakfast- chilaquiles, sauteed kale, cantaloupe, leftover salmon and beans from last night. Everyone is packing their packs, merrily chatting about gear choices and sun shirts and what they’re bringing to eat for dinner. By 8 am we’re in the van and an hour later we’re at the trailhead, double checking we’ve got our poles and enough water to make it to our first source and then we’re off, walking across the slickrock as the sun spills clear light across the land. I eat two chocolate chip Aloha bars as we walk (I recently discovered these, I’m burnt out on every other bar and likely will be on these soon as well) and midday we take a lunch break on a flat stretch of slickrock that SJ refers to as a “patio” as in “look at that patio over there! Let’s sit on it!”. For lunch I eat my snacks, but in greater quantity- potato chips, turkey jerky, dried figs, pistachios and this chocolate I found at Costco that has hemp protein in it and tastes… fine. Shortly after we scramble down into the canyon that we’ll follow to the Escalante river and I get to show everyone quicksand, stabbing what appears to be sand with my trekking pole and watching it jiggle. We get our feet wet for the first time, duck our way through tamarisk for the first time. Smooth red sandstone walls, striped with black where the water runs down, are overhung above us. We pop out at the Escalante river (which I’ve been pronouncing with one hoarse syllable- SKLANT, pretending I’m a local), and I give a little pep talk- the river’s not as deep as it looks, except for when it is, so you just gotta poke it with your trekking pole as you walk. Walking in the river is hard so we’ll mostly walk on the banks in the tamarisk. Tamarisk sucks. It pokes you and grabs at you. We’ll do our best to stay on the cow trails. If the cow trails dead end, that probably means this bank is turning to rock wall and we need to cross the river. You’ll want to secure anything hanging off your pack. I wear my sunglasses as safety goggles.
At one point in the afternoon we’re taking a snack break on a stretch of rocky beach when the light gets kind of grey and the warmth of the sun retreats. We all look at each other, confused, and then realize- it’s the eclipse! We agree that the vibes are Not Great and there is collective relief when the syrupy yellow warmth of the sun returns and we can stuff our puffies away again. A few hours later we reach camp, a patch of dusty ground littered with cow patties and the pokies from tumbleweeds, beautiful rock walls all around. We are exhausted but morale is high. We’re having fun! For dinner I make the same thing I always do on trail- bean taco soup. I bring water to a boil, add rice noodles, almost an entire bag of instant refried beans and some taco seasoning, and let it sit for five minutes until it’s done. I forgot to get taco seasoning this time but I do have powdered bone broth packets, an incredible Costco item, and those are even better. I brush the pokies from my tent spot as best I can, but accept, as I work to inflate my neo-air, that I’ll likely get another hole in it tonite. I have one tiny hole I’ve been nursing for years- I have to re-inflate the bag once per night but I get up to pee at least once anyway, so it feels chill. By 6:30 pm we’re all in our shelters for twelve hours of sleeping bag time, which is, in my opinion, the correct amount of sleeping bag time. I packed my zpacks pocket tarp for this trip- it’s the shelter I used for the PCT, CDT, AZT and various other things. If you’re in this shelter in the rain your living space is small (although workable)- but for all other times the vibes are expansive and very good- it feels like you’re cowboy camping, but without the anxiety, and I always feel so close to the earth when I sleep in it. I pop a Benadryl, which works on me like a sledgehammer to the forehead (all I’ve ever wanted in this life, honestly), and pass out.
Monday
To wake everyone, I shatter the still, pristine darkness of the canyon at 6 am by blasting Kesha’s Tiktok at full volume on my phone. I had dreams about AI robot cop dinosaurs and woke three times, instead of once, to groggily re-inflate my sleeping pad, so there’s definitely a new hole. But in spite of all that I still slept nine hours, and I feel amazing. For breakfast I drink a cup of black tea and prepare my slurry of protein powder in water and bob’s red mill gluten-free muesli, which is… fine. I choke it down, reminding myself that this 800 calories of protein, fat and complex carbs will keep me from feeling hungry again in an hour the way other trail breakfasts do. We gear up to do more battle with the tamarisk- we have a few hours left of it before we reach our next canyon, a small creek that drains into the Escalante and which we’ll follow to its headwaters in the east. The tamarisk pokes us and we poke it back, the cow trails dump us, unceremoniously, into the river, where we poke our way across. Sometimes we go high on sandstone boulders or there’s a bit of open forest, and then the tamarisk again. Everyone is incredibly good sports and at noon we reach our side canyon, a beautifully open affair of smooth gravel and picturesque boulders that are easy to navigate around, clear pools appearing on occasion. We have lunch at the junction. All morning I’ve been eating my snacks (pistachios, protein chocolate, potato chips, jerky, dried figs) and I eat some more of that for lunch. We gather water and we’re off, falling into contemplative silence now that constant humor is no longer needed to keep up morale. I drop some lemon-lime nuun into my water, as a treat. There is no drink additive on this earth as delicious as lemon-lime nuun. I eat more of my snacks as we walk. I think I’m growing bored of these snacks? I try and imagine what different snacks I might pack next time, but nothing comes to mind. Am I… sick of all hiking food? Perhaps.
We camp on a stretch of gravel near the end of the canyon. A wind comes up, turning setting up our shelters into a fun game. I make my bean soup again, then pop a bennie and burrow down into my sleeping bag. The wind is cold but I wriggle around until I’m cozy and just warm enough and let the good desert nighttime vibes carry me away.
Tuesday
I dream I cut my hair into a mullet. Do I want to cut my hair into a mullet? I ask, with my 6 am waking brain. No, I don’t think so. I did that in fall of 2022 and it looked like shit as soon as it started to grow out, and I missed my long hair besides. I slept so good, again, in spite of the sleeping pad reinflation. I wake the others with Rammstein’s Du Hast, which was popular my freshman year of highschool. I drink my tea and eat my protein powder muesli and pack my little snack bag for the day.
We walk on a dirt road through juniper forest for a few miles today. “This is basically like the CDT in New Mexico,” I tell the others. Our water source at the end is a spring piped into a metal cattle trough- also like the CDT in New Mexico. We have lunch on a stone “patio” in a sunny wash out of the wind and I have snacks, again. I remember that I packed kale chips, which have now turned to dust in a Ziploc baggie, and I eat some of that with a spoon. It doesn’t taste very good. There’s a bit of a scramble, during which we find whole logs of petrified wood- apparently extinct species of trees that existed during the dinosaurs, which is very cool to me, and we enter our next canyon, where strange green chinle hills crumble in slow motion towards the earth and there’s many cool rocks to look at. I eat snacks and drink more nuun while we walk. The canyon walls rise up, and the heat does too. Camp is in an enchanted cottonwood grove just before things get slotty. There’s quant pools of surface water and one single mosquito that re-materializes every time you kill it. I put extra beans in my dinner and hang up the two ounce bug mesh I use in case of mosquitoes, all by itself from a tree, staking the corners and tucking it around my sleeping bag. The mesh is ethereal, as thin as a pair of pantyhose, and I’m amazed that I haven’t put a hole in it yet. But maybe I have somewhere along the way, and replaced it? Maybe this isn’t my first one? How much gear have I even gone through, over the years? What have I used on my different hikes, and when? More and more my memory jumbles everything together- I have to go back and read my blog posts to check if I’m recalling things in the right order. Maybe I already have Alzheimer’s? I decide to try and fall asleep without benadryl but my mind starts racing as soon as I lay my head down, per usual, so I pop a bennie and watch the stars through my mosquito net. I see a satellite arc across the space between the two canyon walls, followed by another, and another. I’m finally seeing starlink! I think, and I begin to count them. I get as high as ten before I fall asleep.
Wednesday
This was supposed to be a five day trip but my hikers have been crushing the miles, and in the morning I present them with two options- we can have a super short day and get to camp early and just chill, and do the last few miles to the trailhead in the morning, or we can finish today and get pizza. Everyone agrees to see how we feel and decide by lunch. We eat our breakfasts (I have the slurry again) and then splash through the slotty part of the canyon, which is very beautiful and fun, at which point we are deposited back at our old friend the SKLANT. We follow it downstream for a mile but the use trail is better here, and the canyon is wider so there’s more open forest, and we do very little battle with the tamarisk. There’s a wall of ancestral Puebloan petroglyphs, and then another, and we contemplate the squiggles, spirals and bird feet, as well as the alien-looking people in decorative clothes with six fingers on each hand and the cowboy glyphs, also charming, of people fist-fighting, that were scratched into the rock in 1938.
There’s another wee slot canyon and then we’re having lunch (snacks for me), and everyone agrees that pizza for dinner sounds pretty good. And so we begin our long climb out of the canyon in the heat, in deep sand and on slickrock, stopping on patios to eat snacks and drink electrolytes. We reach the car at 7. I’ve stashed a few bags of chips there, which we devour on the drive, and I discover that the secret to washboarded dirt roads is driving fast, something I’ve seen locals do, ripping by me in a cloud of dust as I inch along, but have always felt too intimidated to try myself- drive fast on washboards? Surely not! Well, I am here to tell you that it works and it’s real. By 8pm we’re at the Escalante Outfitters (best restaurant in town) eating pizza, and then we groggily drag ourselves back to the rental house, and to bed.
Speaking of hanging in the outdoors, there are still a few spots in my summer Brooks Range guided trips- details are here! And a reminder that I’m teaching a two-hour class on making routes in caltopo via zoom on April 28- deets and registration for that are here.
Until next time,
Carrot
I love your Food Diary series. I hope you do decide to self-publish your novel. I can’t wait to read it.
"Am I… sick of all hiking food?" lol currently thinking this exact thing as I plan my own spring resupply boxes. I think I'm gonna eat a lot of cheese? And avocados? And hope that Whole Foods has some fancy new bars that I do not yet hate? WE'LL SEE