Cold Soaking

Gasp! I’m going to try it

Cold soaking is a thing, and it’s gaining in popularity with long-distance hikers who don’t feel the need to have a hot meal, and who are looking to drop the weight of a stove, pot and fuel. There IS some logic behind it.

Now, Steve Bannon is more likely to embrace globalism that I am to give up a hot dinner. But might there be a lane for me to cold soak….for lunch?

Yes. Yes there is. And it’s only going to add a negligible amount of weight. I generally graze on 3-4 snacks on the trail between breakfast and dinner, each weighing approximately 2 oz. But what I’m going to try on my next trip is to have a 4 oz. cold-soaked lunch, and a single snack on either side. When I break in late morning for snack #1, I’ll add some water to the ziploc containing my lunch, and then a couple of hours later I’ll stop and have a good 15 minute nutritious lunch. It just so happens that there are commercial meals now available that are suitable for this method, and I’ll be trying out 7 of them and reviewing them after my next hike.

Meanwhile, if you have a hankering to delve into this topic further, there’s a lot on the web. Two nice resources that I found are The Trek and BoundlessRoamad.

Now keep in mind that cold-soaking and going stoveless aren’t exactly the same thing. Of course, if you go stoveless you might be cold-soaking, but stoveless hikers also eat things like nuts, cheese, hard sausage, PopTarts etc. Amy and James have a nice discussion about going stoveless HERE.

I figured my lunch won’t be all that cold since I’ll be hiking the AT in June, and it’ll be a good trial run for some upcoming desert hikes and 10+day section hikes where either water is at a premium (not to be wasted washing out dirty pots) or the hike is too long to carry the weight of my typical meals.