After I’ve spent the day trekking up a fourteen-footer treacherous mountain, man, am I craving a hard-boiled duck egg or maybe a healthy Banana Gluten-Free Breakfast Muffin! As a health-conscious hiker, I know I deserve a tasty treat and I want it to be filling, delicious and have the nutrition to power my body all those ten miles back to my Jeep six thousand feet below this mountain pass. I’m not the type of hiker to ingest a Cliff Bar at fourteen thousand feet at the summit of the highest mountain in the continental United States. I will however, happily chomp down on a ziplock bag full of homemade tuna salad! It may not be classy with my bag O’ tuna salad clenched in one sunburnt happy hiker fist, but when you are a hiker gal who ignores gluten quite often, Tuna Salad Bag is a healthy lunch option!
Training to climb a fourteen-footer and also having a weight loss goal over forty; The struggle is real! What is the Hungry Mountaineer food blogger to do? As healthy as we eat in our household, we enjoy the finer things in life, fried chicken kabobs Bangalore style, Dark Chocolate Beet Cupcakes and a margarita or two on a hot and humid summer evening. If they have beets in them, they are healthy, right? I obviously mean the cupcakes, not the margaritas!
Here in our small mountain town of Big Bear Lake, California, we have been sweating through one hell of a two-week heatwave. It has not been easy to begin our hardcore training in this weather! But I have been trying my absolute best! Ninety-one to ninety-three-degree weather is not ideal for me to go for a run or a hike but when Mt Whitney is the goal, you can’t let a California heat dome slow you down!
Keto; Most of the time
In our household, sure, we are concentrating mainly on keto but my neighbor did happen to gift me a big bag of organic local oranges. Just what is the healthy food blogger to do? I happen to also have just so much organic kale in the garden that is starting to bolt. What a perfect excuse to create some delicious Organic Kale, Ginger and Orange Juice! Every morning this week, I have been drinking green juice for my breakfast before 2 p.m. meal and man, it’s refreshing during a crazy Southern California heat wave. Green juice is the perfect nutritious morning beverage to power me up those mountain passes as we work on our training hikes at over 8,000 feet in elevation.
Keto Ham Wraps
What the hell is a Ham Wrap, you may ask? It’s such a delicious and healthy and yes spicy keto snack or lunch! I take good quality sliced ham, I wrap thinly sliced chunks of aged cheddar cheese, spicy mustard and my favorite pickled jalapenos, and roll them up. I shove them in my mouth when I stop on the trail at that summit over yonder! Of course, easier than Ham Wraps are just chunks of dried Chorizo Boar’s Head Sausage with slices of aged cheddar. (I recommend Red Tractor Aged Cheddar from Whole Foods)
Just nuts!
Any kind of nuts are a perfect trail snack. This is my favorite slightly spicy trail mix snack: Bombay Mixed Nuts. Nuts give you great, easy-to-digest on-the-trail protein. These nuts also have lots of salt, so they replenish all that sweating you do on a fourteen-mile training hike. Why wouldn’t you munch on a check full of nuts like an athletic chipmunk? These are just so easy to chomp on the trail. They don’t need to be chilled on a half-day hike. They don’t melt like delicious chocolate trail snacks. Why wouldn’t you bring a big bag of nuts with you, trailside?
Duck eggs, yes, please
A lot of hikers love hard-boiled eggs on their long hikes. Especially if you are gluten-free or keto. I’m a huge fan of salted duck eggs on my hikes. They are high in omegas and very high in protein. I think they just taste better than regular eggs, also!
Salted Red Potatoes
I know they sound weird but when I used to run marathons, this was one of the snacks they would hand out to runners! These starchy tubers are full of more potassium than a banana! I know other trail runners who mash potatoes with a beef bouillon cube, throw it in a ziplock bag and consume it like a gel on a long run. That is not my personal favorite. I like to bake red potatoes the night before, salt them really well, then chomp them on the trail. I know I’m weird! It’s the ex-trail runner in me!
Tuna Salad Bag
I keep my Tuna Salad Bag next to my ice water bladder so the mayonnaise in it stays nice and cold all morning. I may be a healthy eater but I just can’t say no to Best Foods Mayonnaise! At least it’s keto-friendly! I know, I know, all you bread eaters may think my tuna in a bag is weird but it is my gluten-free lunch choice! I like to stop at the top of the switchbacks to inhale my tuna salad lunch and enjoy my favorite Mt Whitney view over Sequoia National Park. What do I put in my Tuna Salad Bag besides good-quality tuna, my favorite mayonnaise, a hard-boiled duck egg and spicy pickles? I also like to add crumbled cooked bacon, aged cheddar cheese, a handful of pepperoncini, and a squirt of mustard. I’m getting hungry for a Tuna Salad Bag just typing this!
Sometimes I decide to actually be a Bad Hombre and bring some homemade Millet Sourdough Bread with me on my trek. Homemade bread tastes so good at the summit! Especially if is smothered in Homemade Keto Chicken Liv
er Pate! I try my best to stay away from gluten but sometimes I just have to give in while trekking up a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain and have some delicious home-baked sourdough. I’m only human!
Nut butters
I’m obsessed with these Pro Bar almond butter gels. Unfortunately, I think Pro Bar may have discontinued them, so I have been on the hunt for a replacement brand. I’m not a fan of those sugary preservative-filled gels but I do adore these nut butter squeezers. I could easily consider one of these a delicious trail breakfast. I have been known recently to just throw some crunchy almond butter in a ziplock bag with some chia seeds and consume that like a gel on a long hike.
The wag bag dumb-dumbs
Now that we have talked about what you need to eat to fuel your body for a successful summit of Mt Whitney, let’s talk about something unpleasant. All those assholes who leave their Wag Bags on the mountain. Yes, if you are going to try to summit Mt Whitney, you have to pack out your shit (Literally). Here in the year 2024, all these dumb as fuck millennials seem to think if they poop in a bag (Their Wag Bags, provided by the U.S. Forest Service to every hiker) they can just leave them on the mountain. Who do they think is going to come pick up their shit? Smoky the poo is picking up Bear?
Every year I have summited or tried to summit, I have removed my used Wag Bag from the mountain. What kind of nature lover would leave it behind???? This year, as I summited Mt Whitney, I decided to try to run as much of the trail as I could, so I went light with my backpack, my gear and my trail snacks. I thought, why can’t I use a dog poo bag for my Wag Bag? It’s much smaller and fits easily in the pockets of my runner’s pack without taking up so much room. So yes, I did act like a responsible hiker and pack out my poo, unlike the twenty or so hikers I saw today who couldn’t be bothered to be responsible and left their shit behind on the mountain. This is why we can’t have nice things, like nature!
This summer, as we attempted to summit Mt Whitney, I was trying to do this twenty-four-mile challenge in twelve hours. That was my goal, which meant first and second breakfast and also lunch on the trail. I used three liters of water and one liter of high-energy sports drink. I also had two ounces of liquid chia seeds in a ziplock bag. The goal with the chia seeds was natural energy and they also help you not have to pee as much on the mountain. That should be a time saver.
When it came time to actually trek up the big mountain on August 20th, I had packed in my small runner’s backpack for my nutrition, a Banana Breakfast Muffin, a Tuna Salad Bag, a bag of Chorizo sausage and cheese, two packages of gummy chews with caffeine and three salted red potatoes. Would this be enough calories to sustain me for twelve hours on the trail?
Mt Whitney is a scenic treasure here in California. Let’s keep it that way! Eat healthy on the trail but pack out your trash, especially your Wag Bags! And see you on the Mt Whitney Trail in August 2024!
