It's happening again...

Hello, Love.

Haven't seen you in a while.

No sooner did Mike come to visit me than did we hatch a new plan for adventure.

Simply: to stand at the summit of Aconcagua on New Year's Day, 2010.


The genesis of this plan had much in common with that of the Colorado Trail. Namely, we were in the book section of the Denver REI. It's dangerous when the two of us are together.

I'll make my planning public on this blog. I have a lot to learn before we attempt to summit the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere.

My first armaments are:

- Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills - Recommended to me by Chad as an incredible resource for all of the big mountain techniques I don't yet know.
- Medicine: For Mountaineering & Other Wilderness Activities - Another book published by The Mountaineers. Encyclopedic in scope, this medical manual goes beyond first aid to cover diagnosis and management of just about any malady that could strike while days away from medical care.
- Aconcagua - The Highest Trek In The World - This is the Cicerone guide for Aconcagua. Mike read the Cicerone guide on the John Muir Trail before we met and had great things to say about it. In addition to covering the basic logistics of an ascent, it also gives information on the surrounding area in case weather, acute mountain sickness, or syphilis forces you off the mountain.

More as soon as I know it.

Actual CT hike itinerary

If you're interested in where we camped and how far we hiked each day, Mike and I have put together this table of information.

It includes an adjustment for the Cataract Ridge reroute.

We're back!

Okay, well, we've been back for just about two weeks. We're busy pulling pictures, audio and video together so look for updates soon.

23 Days of Food

This is what 23 days of food at about 3500 calories/day looks like:

Recipe: Peanut Flax NanoPucks with Chocolate

If you refer to my food bar spreadsheet, you'll note that one of the highest nutrition-per-weight bars is the Kind Sesame & Peanuts bar.

These bars are really tasty, but at $2/each, their nutrition comes at a steep price. My CheapBastard(tm) reflex kicked into overdrive and I began reverse engineering a bar of my own that would match the nutrition and taste at a significantly cheaper price.

Your final price will depend on local availability, but shopping in Denver, CO at Vitamin Cottage and Whole Foods, I was able to make these bars for approximately $0.30 each. Yep, that's right. 30 cents each.

Peanut Flax Nano Pucks
	140 g flax seeds 100 g sesame seeds 240 g peanuts 240 g brown rice syrup 240 g Sunspire chocolate chips 170 g puffed millet 1.5 tsp salt

1	Preheat your oven to 275 degrees.
2	Grease the pan you intend to make these in. Size will vary according to the thickness you would like in your finished pucks. I used a 9x13 pan which resulted in bars about 1.5 inches thick.
3	In a medium bowl, mix the flax seeds, sesame seeds, salt and peanuts.
4	In a large measuring cup, mix the brown rice syrup with 2 cups hot water.
5	Pour the puffed millet into a large mixing bowl, and stir in the diluted brown rice syrup. This should deflate the puffed millet significantly.
6	Incorporate the seed and peanut mixture into the puffed millet and stir until thoroughly mixed.
7	Pour the mixture into the pan and spread evenly.
8	Put into the oven and bake for 30-60 minutes. What you're doing here is baking off the moisture that you added when you diluted the brown rice syrup. You want to bake until everything is golden brown and most of the moisture appears to have evaporated.
9	Remove the baking dish from the oven and score the bars into 24 servings.
10	When the bars have cooled, cut into 24 pieces.
11	Melt the chocolate over a double boiler, and dip each bar about halfway into the chocolate and turn upside down on a rack to cool.
12	When all bars are dipped, pour the remaining chocolate over the tops of the bars.

Nutrition Information

Amount Per Serving Calories 217.28 Calories From Fat (49%) 107.31 % Daily Value Total Fat 13.21g 20% Saturated Fat 2.98g 15% Cholesterol 0.00mg 0% Sodium 166.76mg 7% Potassium 90.25mg 3% Carbohydrates 24.94g 8% Dietary Fiber 3.88g 16% Sugar 8.20g Protein 6.12g 12%

The power of cheese...

I want to post some recipes for all of you out there in blog land, but I'm still waiting for some nutritional information to roll in.

I've utilized some ingredients from a local spice shop in Denver, but they're being stingy with the nutritional information for the cheese powders they sell. I've been a customer of theirs for nearly a year and in the past three months I've asked them for this information at least half a dozen times.

In the most recent exchange:

"Do you have the nutritional info for your Romano and Cheddar cheese powders?" I ask.

"I don't, but you can probably Google it," she replies.

"Right, but the weight depends upon the amount of water extracted. Do you know the manufacturer?"

"Yeah, but I can't tell you."

I mean, seriously. What the fuck is that? Does she think that if she lets the name of the manufacturer out I'm going to be compelled to circumvent them and buy 5 pound bags of cheese powder so that I can get pricing comparable to theirs?

In the end, she told me that if I emailed her she could look up the nutritional information that the owner said was floating around somewhere.

Update: I have the nutritional information and will be posting it along with the recipes soon!

Navigational aids...

I ordered 8.5 x 11 inch mapping paper from iGage. It comes in a pack of 50, and the above scale shot is from the weigh-in.

569g for 50 sheets: 11.38g each sheet.

This is funny to me because a single map page will weigh as much as the second popcan stove I made.

Nevermind, even at several pounds, there would be scant replacement for good topo maps on a trail I am unfamiliar with.

I bought the CT trail map CD-ROM (also from iGage) and I'm still checking, but I think -- printing both sides -- I can get the number of map pages to about 20 or about 228g.

I'll post my gear spreadsheet soon so you can see how the half pound of maps compares to the rest.