The Elk That You Glimpse In Summer Are Survivors Of The Winter

Still, a man's gotta eat.

My book, A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail is now available for purchase in a real life brick-and-mortar bookstore. I won’t even say anything goofy or self-deprecating; it makes me feel very good to know that and I don’t want to cheapen it. You can find it at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA. But if you don’t live around here you can always find it online at your favorite independent bookstore.

There are still six or so weeks left in the backpacking season here in Washington—your state timeline may vary—and I wanted to mix things up and write about a field in which I have a lot of ideas and experience but very little refinement or “expertise.”

That’s right: we’re going to dive into the art of the backpacking meal.

This is something I learned quite a lot about during my thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail back in 2016, but a lot has changed since then. For instance, I now make actual “money” at my job, and can eat better now than I did then. I also got married, which means I had a wedding registry, which means—you guessed it—that I asked for and received a food dehydrator. This perfect storm has upped my backcountry kitchen game significantly.

During a thru-hike, the goal of dinner planning is pretty straightforward. You want to incorporate:

• Enough protein to stay full

• A huge base of carbs to load up for the next morning

• A good enough taste to get excited about

Bonus points if you spend as little as possible to make all that happen, and it all cooks quickly enough that you don’t burn much stove fuel in the process.

What that meant for me in practice was close to five months of dinners that usually involved pasta or instant rice, hunks of cured meat, dried veggies I scrounged out of the community hiker boxes in towns, and some festive combination of powdered pasta sauces and packets of herbs.

You can see a recent recreation of this effort here. You’ll note the dramatic shot of whiskey being poured by a river—one more damning bit of evidence of my insufferability.

But as I said: things are different now, and I wanted to bring my backcountry cooking game up accordingly. Not only did I want to make something that tasted good, I also wanted the meal to appeal to my own annoyingly overdeveloped sense of food’s literary and romantic qualities. And while I won’t be thru-hiking again anytime soon, even shorter outings (26 miles roundtrip, in this case) call for something that’s going to stick to the ribs and fuel you up for the next leg of the journey. So I cooked up something that checked those boxes, something evocative of Washington’s wild places. With the exception of its rice base and goat cheese topping, its main components can all be found wild in this state.

Stoic Elk Rice

• Ground elk (1 lb)

• Morel mushrooms (2 handfuls)

• Dried rosemary (1 sprig)

• Fresh sage (9-10 medium leaves)

• Blackberries (1 standard carton)

• Forbidden Black Rice (1 1/4 cups)

• Smoked chevre (1 tablespoon)

Here, on video, I walk through the process.

My relationship with elk is a complicated one. I’ve written about that before, what it’s like to be in awe of a creature that you also have no compunction about eating. Previous outings to the Olympic forest in particular have brought me up close to these majestic, supremely eerie beings. A few years ago I was in the Hoh Rainforest over Labor Day weekend and came upon a bull elk in rut that was so agitated he shook a whole stand of trees with his antlers. Had he turned his amorous frustrations on any of us and charged we might not have come back from the trip alive. I encountered a few more in the Cascade backcountry in 2016 along the PCT. Later, in 2018, I camped alone at the Enchanted Valley Chalet—alone, until a few elk moved into the clearing and pierced the evening with bugling that was truly heartbreaking. No other word for it.

Craig Childs writes in his The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild that

The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself.

That last little bit stung me, I won’t lie. (How easily even the marmots summit the mountain passes that make me wax poetic after hours of toil. Humbling.) But after all I am not an elk and only know one way to be.

-Chuck

Hey, if you liked this week’s issue of the newsletter or have enjoyed it in the past, why not subscribe? It’s free and always will be.