Camping for a month

[Gold Seeker]

Everyone has covered most of what I would recommend, but just in case you want real emergency survival food I would recommend making up some pemmican, pemmican is what has been used throughout history by native americans and for most exploratory expeditions in polar and other inaccessible regions and packs a lot of calories in a very small package and if made correctly will keep for a very long time without any special storing, i.e. refrigeration, etc.

Do a little research and you will see what I mean as it being one of the ultimate survival rations and it's use in the past, many back country backpackers and mountain climbers still use it today.

Here is a PDF file that will guide you in making your own pemmican.

http://www.traditionaltx.us/images/PEMMICAN.pdf

You can also find other recipes by doing an online search.


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[dcpac]

Wow, I did not expect so many great ideas, Thank you. I have done a lot of hunting/trapping and spent several days in the wood but never this long. If I am well supplied I will not have to waste time coming out to resupply. I have all the necessary emergency stuff including an EPIRB and I have water purification down. I am going to have an empty 55 gallon barrel flown in with the dredge supplies to store food in. The road opens in June so I have a couple months to pack things in and play around sniping and such. I am so excited it is not often my job in the Navy lets me get this kind of time off.
Thanks again for all the ideas and Sierra Sam your tax dollar is paying for the chopper in a roundabout way because your tax dollar pays my salary Thanks!

[tcfifer]

Color me GREEN with envy. Would love to do what your doing.

TC

[Geo-George]

"I am going to have an empty 55 gallon barrel flown in with the dredge supplies to store food in."

It's gonna take up a lot of space on that chopper, and empty?
WRONG, fill that sucker with something, anything!!!
Uh, like maybe, uh, ....FOOD!

Never, ever pack in a container, of any type, that is empty.
If ya plan on bringin' anything out, you can put it in the barrel
after ya eat the food.

I put a bag of sugar in my coffee cup, NO EMPTY CONTAINERS!

[RiverGold]

I spent a large portion of a summer once camped on the Big Sur River. Since it quite exceeded the legal camping limit time, I won't give you the number of weeks, but I basically did what you are talking about and I was careful to leave no traces when I de-camped. I hiked out once a week for groceries and mail, like you are planning, to a general store and post office about 10 miles away. I was trying alternative diets at the time so I bought mainly light, waterless grains like rice, oatmeal, Wheatena, buckwheat groats, bulgar wheat, and wheat flour. I also had spices, condiments, tea, coffee, Nori dried seaweed, raisins and other dried fruits, sunflower seeds and walnuts. Because of the weight, I only had a few canned items like sardines, tuna, kipper snacks and smoked clams. Note that the grains are all relatively odorless foods. One hint: if you eat something odorous like sardines, burn all the juice from the can in your campfire before bed or you will have four-legged visitors during the night. Wash your hands and dishes really well before bed. if you don't, you are liable to wake up with a racoon or worse licking sardine oil off your dishes or even your fingers. I always hung my food aobut 30 feet from where I slept. I tied empty cans with silverware in them to the food bag to hear if anything got into it. I was also in my chosen camp long enough to find some edible plants like wild beans and mountain sorel and the river had plenty of trout. Stay away from mushrooms unless you are an expert---the wrong ones will kill you. I learned how to make some pretty good unleavend pan-baked bread, too.

I got clean water directly from where a tiny spring came out of the mountainside. But, I would use a filter system now. The other habit I developed was gorging on burgers, coffee and peach pie at a small restaurant near the store. After a vegetarian diet six days a week, I would also briing back a steak in a baggie to cook the night I returned. But, with a few diet changes, I got along fine in mid-summer with no refrigeration. I lived on about 90 cents a day for food in the 60's and the freeze-dried foods were too expensive for me.

The local ranger saw me from time to time and he knew that I was probably camped illegally, but whenever he saw me hiking out, I was carring a large black bag full of garbage that the "legal" campers left on the river. I guess he figured letting me exceed the two-week limit was a good trade-off, because he was responsible for hauling garbage out of the back country on his mules when other people did not clean up.