• Happy Weed Appreciation Day! 🌱🌿🌻

Longer solo trips and resupply question.

Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
762
Reaction score
711
Location
Dodgeville, Wi
[FONT=&quot]As solo trippers we must carry all gear and provisions ourselves. Longer trips, 2 weeks or more, requires a level of endurance I no longer wish to endure if I do not resupply within the trip. I am wondering if any solo trippers on this board resupply mid trip - on trips from say 15 to 30 days. If so, how do you do it; fly in, cash goods ahead of time ... How do you maintain feasible portaging of provisions for a long trip in the bush?

Bob
[/FONT]
 
I have come to accept the fact that I will be triple portaging on any trip two weeks or longer. For my style and eating habits I can do three weeks with the loads starting out at 55 pounds each. The days of starting with three 75 pound loads are behind me so I am looking for other options too. In the past I have gone in so far and securely hung a pack far out of sight. I made a circle and came back and picked it up a week later. I then headed off in the other direction for the rest of the 30 day trip. Traveling with a clover leaf shaped route you could come back to this cache spot numerous times to avoid hauling the same food and fuel over the portages for weeks. This is probably not allowed in many places so keep that in mind when planning.

The option I use a lot is to find a great fishing lake loaded with Walleye. This works best if it is a lake that requires a bushwhack to get to and no one fishes it. I then tell my fishing friends about it and when the hook is securely set I mention that if they are flying in anyway they might as well bring in my resupply on the plane. I time my trip so I arrive on the remote Walleye Lake the day before they fly in. Since they are flying in there will be thick steaks and slabs of bacon on that plane. Alcohol transports easily on an aircraft too. I am usually ready for a little R&R by that time anyway so I lounge around while they catch and fry up all those Walleye. I have had a lot of this type of resupply. Now that more of the fishermen are retiring I offer the option that they can have the others fly out with all the leftovers except what we need to paddle out. This has worked out very well for everyone too.

The third option is to have an air service drop in my resupply. In this case I advise having it bound up in corrugated boxes and wrapped up watertight. This leaves no extra barrels or packs to deal with. A satellite phone or an Inreach is handy because you can then be flexible on the date and location of the supply drop.
 
Bob, Some good ideas from Marten. I've been able to go for a month without re-supply. Dehydrated 3 meals a day + olive oil and coconut oil for fat + a small wood burning stove should just about fill one large blue barrel. On point to point trips all done in the wilderness this is probably the only route to go. Fly in drop offs are expensive. If your route crosses near a small town at some point you can have supplies sent to the local post office for general delivery in your name (motorcycle adventure riders often do this along their routes).Some people I know will go for a month in a wilderness area using a figure 8 route (similar to Marten's clover leaf).They stash a half trip's worth of food somewhere where they will cross back over in about 2 weeks. A local outfitter may stash food for you at a lumber road/portage crossing.

Good luck with this.

Gerald
 
I had food flown in for my 1st long solo (30 days). Turned out I didn't need it and I hated to spend that much money ($800) since I try to trip on a budget. Last time I carried my own food for 42 days. If I left my dog home I could do 45 days out of a 60L barrel, which will weigh about 75 pounds. With her along I needed a 60 and a 30.

I've often thought a cost effective way to resupply mid-trip might be to hook up with a hunting/fishing lodge in the area so they can fly your resupply in on one of their regular flights.

Alan
 
I haven't done more than about 5 days in a trip, canoeing... that will have to wait til I retire.

But for long backpacking trips, I did a trip in the Great Smokey Mountains one time where I "cached" half my food in my car at the Newfound Gap parking lot. Food is roughly 2lbs a day, or 14lbs a week. So I did a 3-4 day loop in one direction, came back to the car, resupplied for another 3-4 days out of my trunk, and then headed off in the opposite direction on another loop. (Both loops involved the AT and the side trails down off the spine of the range.)

I think the same technique could work for a figure 8 loop, or even an out and back (though for an out and back, the math would be different).

edit: AT hikers use the post office/drift box method as well... and some hikers have people drop things off at pre-determined cache points on a schedule.
 
Last edited:
Last summer my wife Kathleen and I were canoeing in the East Arm of Great Slave Lake. A lone kayaker from Winnipeg stopped at our morning camp. Said he was on a 65-day trip. I told him that his kayak seemed too small to carry enough food for 65 days. He said he was living on flour and peanut butter. He would make a little spatula out of sticks to cook a bannock from the flour, and then spread it with peanut butter. Of course he was supplementing his diet with fish. This does not seem like something I could, or even want to do. Adventurous, though!
 
I have used all of the above with the exception of having supplies flown in.

On long backpacking trips we occasionally stashed food near intermittent trailheads if they were close enough to our hiking route. A friend who enjoys month long self supported backpacking trips out west stashed gasket sealed buckets in a couple of locations; we drove to those spots a year later to collect the barrels and what foodstuffs/batteries/etc he had left behind. The buckets were a little UV brittle but the contents were still good.

Out western trips we caught a lot of trout to supplement our packed in victuals, which allowed us to stretch trips out for additional days, and made for some odd meals. I would not depend on catching fish, but if your schedule allows you the flexibility to add on a few extra days fresh caught flesh is a wonderful addition.

The longest trip I have done without food resupply was 22 days, fitting the foodstuffs into a 45L barrel (with some freeze dried meals starting out in a small dry bag).

On tidal trips potable water becomes the weightier concern. Or even some non-tidal trips; I have had 5 gallons of freshwater left at a midway point on very muddy river, simply because that was easier than settling and filtering. Having run out of water twice on desert hikes and once on a tidal trip I really do not want to ever repeat that experience.

My most common resupply solution is a route that takes me back near my truck at some point, so that I can pick and choose what I need to reup. I am not caching barrels that I need to take along with me or go back later and fetch, I do not need to take everything left in the truck and oh, look, there is still some beer in the cooler.
 
A local outfitter may stash food for you at a lumber road/portage crossing.

I had a memory chuckle reading that. I had an outfitter leave some resupply for me at a mid-way crossing. Something they did so often enough for trippers that they had a critter proof stash bin, left semi-hidden there on site.

I knew exactly where the bin was hidden and what it looked like from the detailed description of a friend who had used it a few years before.

It was not there. There were some rather anxious WTF minutes before we found it, a very different bin, in a very different location, 50 yards away from where it should have been back in the scrub. The outfitter had recently changed it.

I guess the moral of that story is that you better be able to find any drop/cache if you are counting on it, especially if you did not place it there yourself.
 
These are some great ideas for longer trips I would like to plan. In Quebec, there are pourvoiries which are basically a kind of fishing and/or hunting licensed area I have passed when doing tandem trips. I wonder if a pourvoirie owner would keep a cache for later pick up. I am also of the keep it simple, eat the same thing over and over, style.
 
I have come to accept the fact that I will be triple portaging on any trip two weeks or longer. For my style and eating habits I can do three weeks with the loads starting out at 55 pounds each. The days of starting with three 75 pound loads are behind me so I am looking for other options too. In the past I have gone in so far and securely hung a pack far out of sight. I made a circle and came back and picked it up a week later. I then headed off in the other direction for the rest of the 30 day trip. Traveling with a clover leaf shaped route you could come back to this cache spot numerous times to avoid hauling the same food and fuel over the portages for weeks. This is probably not allowed in many places so keep that in mind when planning.

The option I use a lot is to find a great fishing lake loaded with Walleye. This works best if it is a lake that requires a bushwhack to get to and no one fishes it. I then tell my fishing friends about it and when the hook is securely set I mention that if they are flying in anyway they might as well bring in my resupply on the plane. I time my trip so I arrive on the remote Walleye Lake the day before they fly in. Since they are flying in there will be thick steaks and slabs of bacon on that plane. Alcohol transports easily on an aircraft too. I am usually ready for a little R&R by that time anyway so I lounge around while they catch and fry up all those Walleye. I have had a lot of this type of resupply. Now that more of the fishermen are retiring I offer the option that they can have the others fly out with all the leftovers except what we need to paddle out. This has worked out very well for everyone too.

The third option is to have an air service drop in my resupply. In this case I advise having it bound up in corrugated boxes and wrapped up watertight. This leaves no extra barrels or packs to deal with. A satellite phone or an Inreach is handy because you can then be flexible on the date and location of the supply drop.

Well, if you need company, I'm game. I do the same thing, look for good fishing on longer solo trips. Getting tougher every year. Last spring I went up Horse Creek in BWCA to the border waters just after ice out. Lower Basswood Falls was crowded to the point there were no campsites open. Maybe September would be a better month for crowds, but the fishing wouldn't be great. Less fish means more food.
 
Next year's trip is back to Atikaki in eastern Manitoba. August so the fishing is tougher but even the outpost camps are empty by then.
 
Back
Top