With five days until I leave New York, it's coming down to crunch time and I'm realizing how utterly hosed I am.  Heidi is helping immensely with the food preparation.  She's been repacking an avalanche of junk food purchased in bulk from Costco.

Meanwhile, I'm frantically trying to work out when and where she'll need to send it and in what quantity.  In some ways the task is turning out to be easier than expected — i'm treating each section of hiking like a mini hike and planning from town to town.  However, it is also turning out to be much much more time consuming than I anticipated.

If you're planning to do a thru hike, I suggest you don't wait until you're two weeks from the start of your hike to address mail drops.  

Back to the food prep.  I have the first week sorted out and did a test fit with my Ursack only to find that six days of food doesn't really fit when it's packed in ziplocks.  Some of my food is going to have to live outside of this protective sack and be at risk to rodents for a day or two. Hopefully the odor-proof bags that I'm storing everything in prevent the critters from detecting the food inside.

I'll share more about the way I'm keeping my food safe once I'm on the trail and can share how well it's actually working, but here's the gist of it: I'm not hanging food, as there are hardly any trees.  I'm using OPSak odor-proof bags from LokSak, then placing these inside a Cuben Fiber dry bag which should together neutralize almost all the food scent.  I then am placing the food inside my kevlar Ursack, which is a bear-proof bag.  However, it's not bears that I'm initially worried about, it's what hikers refer to as mini-bears: Rodents and other scavengers.  They are incredible pests and will chew through tents, backpacks, and drybags in an effort to get a tasty meal.  The kevlar bag is resilient enough to prevent them from stealing my meals. 

I'm planning on placing this in my tent's vestibule so that even if rodents attack, they don't have any need to damage my tent in their quest.  That's the plan at least.  We'll see how it works in practice in a about a week!