We bucked all our Christmas traditions this year. With none of our adult children at home and still reeling from the election, there didn’t seem any point in decorating a tree, baking cookies, or preparing a Christmas Day feast. So we didn’t. We hiked Stratton Mountain instead. The weather favored our outdoor ambitions: snow-cover, sunshine, […]

As promised, here are recipes for the food we carried on the Long Trail. GENERAL INFORMATION I purchased most of the ingredients for these recipes from the Brattleboro Food Coop, which runs a fabulous bulk department of grains, legumes, nuts, dried fruits, seeds and spices. I bought shelf-stable cheese tortellini, and prepackaged foods like pasta […]

Snow in December! To have both sunshine and snow in December is a gift. On Monday, I woke to the town plow rumbling down my road: A few inches had fallen, and it was still coming down. This was a tremendous gift after last winter’s dearth of snow and this past summer’s drought. We need […]

Most of our planning was about the food we carried. Jan nixed my idea to eat beans and rice three times a day. “We need variety,” she said. “And texture.” “But none of those instant backpacking meals,” I said. “No way!” Jan agreed. While backpacking in the White Mountains earlier that summer, I’d witnessed the […]