The Food Challenge

Wilderness trips require lots of preparation before the first paddle carves a swirl in the river. For our trip to the Athabasca Sand Dunes, we'll be isolated from civilization for more than three weeks. If we neglect to bring something with us, we'll have to make do without - there are no stores along the way where we can buy missing items.

Packing and food preparation for canoe trips is something we've been refining for many years. Here Debra is preparing Pickerel Pizza on the Missinabi River. The boys are 3 and 5-years-old.

Protection from the elements is critical to being comfortable on a trip, but if the food is inadequate - it means a long, tedious time on the river. There are a number of considerations that need to be taken into account when planning food for a wilderness trip.

Food must be nutritious, but it must also be preservable, light and compact enough to fit within the weight restrictions of a bush plane and be as unattractive as possible to wild animals. 

Dehydrated food meets all of these criteria best and our kitchen was the bustling nerve-centre of our pre-trip preparations for several weeks leading up to the trip. Two dehydrators kept humming long hours, drying meat and vegetables which were then sealed in a vacuum bagger to keep the freshness in and the moisture out. The whole family helps out, cleaning and preparing vegetables, slicing and marinating meat.

Fortunately for us, Debra is an expert in packing and preparing wilderness foods. There's a popular belief that food on a camping trip is either tasteless mush or a cardboard-like substitute for a meal. In reality, with a little imagination, it's possible to prepare just about any meal in the wild that you could in the comfort of your home. 

There are a variety of ways to plan menus, but we like to use a 7-day menu which gets repeated for the number of weeks we're out. Meals are chosen for a variety of criteria; ease of preparation, variety and speed preparation. The meals we select for any given day will depend on the circumstance encountered.

A lay-over day usually warrants one of our 'Sunday dinners,' while a wet, miserable day usually means a fast, easy-to-prepare meal.

We like fresh fish on trips, but we never assume the fishing will account for a significant part of our diet. Diced cubes of fish on a pizza baked in our reflector oven is an all-time favourite.

Regardless of how carefully a trip is planned, its always important to bring along an extra few days of light-weight food, just in case. Usually, we return from our trips with a few meals left over because we've managed to supplement our diet by finding the odd, well-stocked fishing hole. 

That's usually not too hard to do on northern rivers which never get much traffic, even in busy years. Grayling is our favourite, but the Athabasca Sand Dunes are on the southern end of the range for Grayling and we'll be fortunate to catch any.

All the trip reports we've read on the river have indicated that black bears are common and don't seem afraid of humans. That means we'll have to be careful about what we do with our food. We'll use a large 60-litre barrel made of plastic with a water-tight snap-on lid. The barrels are an awkward shape for bears, but that would only slow them down a bit if they were really interested. Fortunately, the dehydrated food is not overly attractive to bears and most well-fed animals tend to pay no attention to it. 

For a few weeks before a trip begins, space on the kitchen table is a precious commodity.

On northern trips, its often hard to find trees suitable for hanging food packs. We always keep the food well away from the tents, usually in the barrels, and tie our pots and pans on the outside of a barrel to act as an alarm if they're disturbed. But it's not just the food that campers need to worry about. Cooks often tend to wipe their hands on their clothes while cooking and don't think twice about the odors their bringing into the tent with them. A bar of soap wouldn't be something we'd put on our plate to eat, but there's a good chance a bear will find it quite attractive. Critter-proofing a campsite means paying close attention to all the small details, especially but not exclusively those relating to the food.