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#111505 - 02/19/09 02:07 PM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: chaz]
billstephenson Offline
Moderator

Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
Quote:
I have given up on making miles count ...


That sounds a lot like me. I try and be ready to head out when the weather is supposed to be perfect and then just stroll around and soak it up.

I was gone during our recent ice storm, but my neighbor, Sandy, told me she walked out onto their deck about 4 hours into the ice building up and she was stunned by the loud cracking of large branches busting off the trees from the weight of the ice. She said it was night time and every few seconds you'd hear another branch being ripped off or an entire tree breaking in two and as they fell they'd break ice off other branches and the result was like hearing a hundred windows being shattered and thousands of shards falling the hard ice coated ground.

You do not want to be in the forest when that's happening and your certain to find nothing at all to eat out there for awhile.

Bill

_________________________
--

"You want to go where?"



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#111627 - 02/21/09 12:53 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: billstephenson]
bigfoot2 Offline
member

Registered: 09/17/06
Posts: 1432
Loc: Eugene , Oregon
Bill,
Just click it...you know you want to wink

BF cool

P.S. $20.00 donation for a necklace sound o.k?
_________________________
Hammockers aren't stuck up, they're just above it all.

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#111628 - 02/21/09 01:05 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: chaz]
kevonionia Offline
member

Registered: 04/17/06
Posts: 1322
Loc: Dallas, TX
chaz:

Love your philosohy. HYOH. If it means leaving the others AHEAD while you stop and study a mushroom, then DO IT.

_________________________
- kevon

(avatar: raptor, Lake Dillon)


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#111640 - 02/21/09 11:04 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: SheltieDad]
Samoset Offline
member

Registered: 07/04/08
Posts: 429
Loc: Newnan ,GA
I do all sorts of fishing while hikeing and always carry appropriate tackel for the area inwich im traveling. I love wild salads of allsorts , and who doesent love berries. a hand full of wild roots, herbs , flowers , mushrooms , can work miracles on plain couscous or ramen especially when served with fresh fish . I enjoy hunting usualy not whilehikeing thouh But even on my best foraging trecks i return home with the same amount of extra food . thouh it seems the treks i remember the most are the ones where the foraging was the best . Its amazing how powerfull the sences of smell and taste are to my memory process . so for me its much more than just calorie suppliment its part of a overall greater expeirence and apreiciation for the outdoors.
_________________________
Some peopole live life day by day. Try step by step.

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#111641 - 02/21/09 11:13 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: bigfoot2]
billstephenson Offline
Moderator

Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
Originally Posted By bigfoot2
Bill,
Just click it...you know you want to wink

BF cool

P.S. $20.00 donation for a necklace sound o.k?


Sounds very generous. I have two exquisite necklaces sitting on my desk that are waiting only for your address smile

Bill

(Good ol' bigfoot, I knew he'd come through wink


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#111642 - 02/21/09 11:16 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: Samoset]
billstephenson Offline
Moderator

Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
They're taking limits of Crappie here right now. I gotta go fishing!

Bill

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#111688 - 02/22/09 02:16 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: SheltieDad]
NiytOwl Offline
member

Registered: 11/06/04
Posts: 501
Loc: California
I've done the wilderness survival experience, and there are a couple of experiments you can try that will illustrate living off the land:

#1: You will be hungry. Very hungry. To experience why you will be hungry, eat nothing but baby mixed green salad (no dressing), along with a small handful of berries. Stab yourself with a pin several times for each handful of berries you eat (simulates real life collection of berries). You can eat as much of the salad as you want, but you have to eat it one leaf at a time (or put it in a bowl one leaf at a time) and you can only do this during daylight hours. For good measure, let your dog urinate on some of the salad (simulates real greens obtained under real conditions). After several days of this, try to say "arugula" without grimacing.

#2: Related to #1, because after a day of eating nothing but salad and berries (assuming you have the typical omnivorish modern diet), you will be unable to watch a late night Ronco infomercial about a device known as "The Salad Shooter" without immediately associating it with the current status of your digestive system. All that roughage will surely leave your gut "clean as a whistle" in very short order.

#3: For at least 4 hours of the day, walk around the house with your fully loaded backpack. Make sure you explain this experiment to your family so they don't think you've finally blown a gasket. You may substitute an 8-hour day on the job only if that job does not involve sitting for the majority of the time. You can also do any activity that will leave you tired, sore, and ready for a hearty meal that will consist of (yech) only salad and berries.

#4: For the Bear Grylls afficionados, you may eat all the worms, grubs, scorpions, spiders, and road-kill that you can find (or that your family plants around the house for you to "find"). This is your only real hope of avoiding hunger, so you'd better get used to it.

#5: If your hike will take you near fishable waters, you might be able to add fish to your diet. This is only allowed if you can both catch fish AND clean fish (not like an ex-girlfriend who washed the fish with dish soap and a pot scrubber and told me it was cleaned). Roll a die. If its a one or two, you may add a trout to your meal. A three or four means you must suck out a small syringe of blood from your body (simulates real fishing with real mosquitoes). Five indicates that you have to take a cold shower with all your clothes on (simulates falling in the lake). Six - nothing happens for a six, other than reminding you that you should forget this nonsense and pop open a cold one!

Ok, joking aside, if you really want to eat like Euell Gibbons, you want to hook up with a real person who can take you around and show you not only what's edible, but what is worth your effort to eat. There are a lot of natural foods that take a lot of calories to procure. There are many more that, while edible, taste like !@#$. A very small number are both edible and tasty. Some, like worms, require suppression of the gag reflex for most of us. But your chances of a full belly are much better if you can get over those mental blocks put in place by our parents (babies have no problem eating dirt). You mention being like our ancestors - those people ate stuff you and I would puke over. Wormy bread, maggoty meat, and rotting produce regularly found their way to the table.

The point here is that living off the land is not my idea of having fun. It is a survival skill, like making fire without matches. While backpacking for enjoyment, I don't want to spend hours scavenging for what will almost always be meager fare or food that turns my stomach to eat. I'll gladly carry the extra weight in food to avoid this.

However, I am all for supplementing an already full menu with natural foods. Trout on a bed of watercress and miner's lettuce is one that seems to come together fairly often when I'm creek fishing. Sometimes wild onions find their way onto the menu. Blueberries were a lakeside treat in Yellowstone and Lassen parks. My rule of thumb is that if there's a lot of the stuff, feel free to pick it. If it's pretty sparse, leave it be.

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#111697 - 02/22/09 08:49 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: NiytOwl]
Pika Online   content
member

Registered: 12/08/05
Posts: 1814
Loc: Rural Southeast Arizona
NiytOwl, that is about as well put a summary of foraging as I have encountered. When I was in the Army long ago, I went through a week of foraging as part of a course in "Escape, Evasion and Survival". This course was conducted in the SE, U.S., a relatively lush part of America in my experience. We ate lots of greens, a few roots, a bit of green fruit, grubs, bugs, the occasional lizard or snake eek and drank lots and lots of water. Almost everything I ate was either bitter, sour, crunchy-chewy, insipid or otherwise bloody awful tasting. Going hungry was often a realistic, perhaps pleasant, alternative.

Was it an interesting experience? Yes but the same thing can be said about being hung; I'm sure it is not boring for the hangee. Would I do it again? Not unless my life depended on it. I had mild diarrhea for most of the week, had relatively little energy and dreamed of hamburgers and prime rib all the time.

The rules of the exercise did not allow us to kill our comrades for lunch but I'm sure that the idea entered a few of our minds. crazy


Edited by Pika (02/22/09 01:03 PM)
_________________________
May I walk in beauty.

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#111699 - 02/22/09 10:13 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: billstephenson]
Samoset Offline
member

Registered: 07/04/08
Posts: 429
Loc: Newnan ,GA
Hey Bill StrikeKing makes a small crankbait with a rattle inside called the bitsyminnow i always carry the albino version when im doing anytype of panfishing. it allmost allways produces large healthy fish. Ive also harvested large and small mouth bass aswell as trout with it. Good Luck
_________________________
Some peopole live life day by day. Try step by step.

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#111770 - 02/23/09 06:45 AM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: SheltieDad]
GrumpyGord Online   content
member

Registered: 01/05/02
Posts: 945
Loc: Michigan
A couple of years ago there was a guy doing some "classes" on wild food in three seasons so I went thinking it would be good for supplementing hiking food. Some of it was good but most of it consisted of cooking the greens in bacon grease and cooking in three changes of water etc. Not too practical for backpacking. It was intended for home cooking and did not translate well into wilderness situations and was not intended for survival situations.

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#111810 - 02/23/09 05:33 PM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: GrumpyGord]
NiytOwl Offline
member

Registered: 11/06/04
Posts: 501
Loc: California
I still don't understand the rationale of cooking veggies in three changes of water. From a nutritional standpoint, what's left? Along with whatever made the veggies inedible, you've removed most of their nutrients. The only time it makes sense is for starchy roots and nuts, since you're after the starch.

On a side note, I never throw out bacon grease. I keep it in a can under the sink. What's it good for? Well, I never pick up animal poop. I just throw a little bacon grease in the microwave for 15 seconds, then pour the warm grease over the poop. It's almost always gone by the morning!

Pika, I think some of the tastiest meat I've ever eaten was during a 4-day survival outing. It was a reward for making a proper deadfall trap. For every working trap you set, the facilitator rolled a die to determine if you "caught" something. When I lifted the rock and saw that little 2-oz chunk of meat covered in crawling ants, my mouth started watering! It's really true that hunger is the best seasoning.

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#111871 - 02/24/09 01:42 PM Re: Foraging while hiking [Re: NiytOwl]
jpanderson80 Offline
member

Registered: 07/28/06
Posts: 292
Loc: Memphis, TN
On a side note, I never throw out bacon grease. I keep it in a can under the sink. What's it good for? Well, I never pick up animal poop. I just throw a little bacon grease in the microwave for 15 seconds, then pour the warm grease over the poop. It's almost always gone by the morning!

______________

LOL So many comments, so little time...


_________________________
I always forget and make it more complicated than it needs to be...it's just walking.

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