I am looking for some ideas on meals to eat up high. They need to be light, tasty and use little fuel. I would prefer to avoid the Freeze dried backpacking store type meals and just cook up something myself. I would appreciate any input on this. Send me your 3 favorite meals recipes suitable for climbers.

-- Martin Wood (martin@appliedgeo.com), September 09, 1999

Answers

One thing to watch out for "up high" is that it becomes harder to digest fat, so don't include too much. Meals that may be tasty and high energy below 3000m may be too hard to digest above 4000m.

On Denali, we took sticks of butter to add to meals, figuring this had the best energy to weight ratio (we had to go very light). This worked great down low, but we soon found our bodies had a hard time digesting the fat up high. You can see what foods we found good and which not on my report on our climb (scroll to the very end):

http://www.geocities.com/~gibell/trip_reports/denali_j.html

-- George Bell (gibell@geocities.com), September 09, 1999.