The Situation

     Six days till the brother's reunite!  I am pretty pumped for Aaron to fly in, only problem... this means I really got to pull it together.  I feel pretty behind on the seemingly endless list of things to do, get,  check, and double check.  I know some may think whatever man just let it roll but I am a bit of a perfectionist so I want things perfect for this trip (if they don't come out perfect, well then, those will probably be the best memories of the trip, no sweat) and I don't want to overlook anything which means continuously checking and double checking myself to ensure I don't miss anything or get some thing wrong.  I know what your thinking... "how can that possibly be enjoyable, isn't that the point of this trip", and my response would be, yes it is and in actuality, I really enjoy the stress of putting this trip together, planning it out, and triple checking every thing.  I guess that's just a part of who I am.

     Trip is coming together though, yesterday I spend many hours mapping out the trip, checking water sources, and planning food/water caches that we may need to set out.  My conclusion, I don't think we will need to do any of that.  Why?  Because there is supposedly plenty of water due to the early date that we have planned and the snow melt which creates many streams in addition to the many rivers and lakes along the way, even the East side of the trail.  There is also three on-trail stores that you go by (there are small stores, not Costco's).  From the people I have talked to, one can live off the stores for resupply of food if one's not picky.  I am slightly picky and I know Aaron is a bit too.  I don't want to be living off potato chips and nutter butters so we will bring 14 simple dinners with us and some snack foods for the morning and lunch (things like tuna, granola, trail mix, nuts, dried fruit, jerky, oatmeal, coffee, tea, electrolyte mix...).  We will mail three packages to ourselves to resupply our morning and afternoon foods and some things to make our dinners better.  I want to bring the two weeks of dinners with us so if by chance we don't get our packages or some thing happens and we don't really have any extra food we at least have 14 simple dinners to supplement our calorie burn for each day.  We will also carry 6 liters of water each in two 3 liter bladders and one, 1 liter bottle so a total of 14 liters of carrying capacity.  Do we need this much water?  Probably not but there are a few sections of the hike were there is no water source (two I can think of), one thats nearly 20 miles (here is where we will use all our capacity), and the other 14 miles, plus, the East side again is low on water supplie.  We can just carry the ultra light bladders empty if we don't need the water.  If the weather gets hot on us we will need more than less obviously so the versatility of having 14 liters is a good idea since we will mostly be self reliant.  In my opinion, better to have more than less, even if it's super heavy, I will carry the extra weight, it's worth the piece of mind for me.  Food we can go without but water no... of course we won't be going without food since we will carry our 14 dinners with us at minimum.