Mark dehydrated all of his food for the trail. He started the first of August and worked continuously at it till the end of March. After watching him prepare food for a month, we knew how determined he was to hike the trail because we would have quit after the first couple of weeks!!

There is a lot involved to dehydrate food. For example, Mark bought 40 pounds of bananas at a time. (I think he did this 5 times.) In order to figure out how many bananas he was going to need so he could fit it in his “dehydrating schedule” he weighed the bananas after he took the skins off. The actual weight then was 22 pounds. He cut them into ¼ inch round slices and laid each one individually on the dehydrating trays. Some he coated with cinnamon. (Yum!) The trays are 14 inches in diameter and he would have 20 or more loaded up at a time. It took roughly 6 hours to dehydrate them at which point each slice had to be taken off individually because they would stick a little to the tray. 40 pounds of bananas ended up yielding 4-5 pounds after dehydration!

Those months we had 2, sometimes 3 dehydrators running just about every day. He would fix food and let it dehydrate all night. Some things take 12 hours, especially the raw cookies he made with oats, honey, raisons and spices. He also had to cook spaghetti and rice before dehydrating them. (He cooked 35 pounds of rice.) For a variety, there is rice with broccoli and cauliflower, rice with peas and carrots, plain rice, ginger rice, etc. These he put into individual bags, 2 servings per bag for a total of 198 meals of rice! There are 40 meals of spaghetti. On the trail Mark will “rehydrate” (as he calls it) the rice and spaghetti with water in the morning. It reabsorbs the water so by the time he is ready to eat, it looks like he had just cooked it. He also made his own crackers and hummus. They are dehydrated and vacuum packed as are all the cookies, granola, deer jerky, oatmeal, and fruits. He has each package weighed with the weight recorded so the larger packages can be mailed when he will have greater distance between hostels.