You can read all over the place these days about the great reasons to hike—the exercise, the nature, the vistas, the time with your honey or family.
And they’re all as true as can be to us. Gail and I will celebrate—just about the time this magazine comes out—17 years of hiking pretty much every dang weekend.
But the true secret behind such a sustained oddity comes down, really, to one thing.
Lunch!
Which usually happens at the approximate mid-point of our hikes—ideally on a mountain peak after the climb has been accomplished and it is thus the proverbial all down hill after lunch, though of course Virginia’s mountains don’t quite work that way.
Lunch has evolved over the years—not quite from the crusty old bread and a hunk of cheese that marked my father’s hiking years’ food break—but at least from a perspective that was closer to eat-to-live than is our current lunches’ glorious hike-to-eat context.
Consider first just a few of the accoutrements that are the first things in our packs these days: the light-blue Ice Mule cooler that requires only a small amount of cubes to keep foods well protected and beverages perfectly chilled; the Toaks titanium knife-fork-spoon sets; the retro gingham napkins; the ultra-lightweight Helinox chairs; and our most recent addition, the also-lightweight Helinox table, which is as light and packable as the chairs.
And then there’s the food! Which The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All has refined and perfected in full scale with the furniture and tools, most of which she also researched, purchased and brought to our packs.
Her menus run from perfect sandwiches and salads to what is my current favorite, which might be called haute hors d’oeurves. From the ice bag she unpacks nearly a dozen cute little containers made in New Zealand and offering everything you need in the way of vegetables, protein and crunch. She then recommends combinations of cheeses, veggie chunks, chicken salad, olives, etc, toward the consummation of the perfect single-bite moutaintop culinary experience.
The wine is of course perfectly chilled, and the Deer Park Sparkling Lime water awaits on ice, its carbonation fully intact inside the vacuum bottle, and its cuddled cubes the same size as when they were dropped into the bottle.
My usual, non-woodland consumption pattern of chomp-chomp-chomp is slowed to near politeness in the wonderful context of food in the forest. Somehow the recommendation to slow down and enjoy your food fits perfectly, at least in part because once you’re done, you gotta, you know, get up, fold stuff back up, re-stuff the packs and hike some more.
But not before the ideal denouement to a trailside lunch—the chocolate! Here The Greatest Day Hiker and I diverge slightly: While I have graduated from bluebells—the exquisite blueberries covered in milk chocolate—to Hershey’s Special (pretend) Dark Chocolate, she takes dainty and far fewer bites of Lindt 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate, which is of course far more commensurate with the lunch than mine, first two ingredients of which are “sugar, chocolate.”
I’ll walk it off on the way down, right?
Yes, go hiking! And not skimping on the lunch will up your odds of heading out again soon.
The story above appears in our March/April 2021 issue.
