Rae Lakes Loop with a 2 year old (Packing and Prep)

Today we spent over 12 hours packing. Yes, it really took over 12 hours and we don’t have the kid to blame.

My Mom (Granny) was here the entire day and kept the 2 year old out of the house and It still took us over 12 hours. It’s 9:35pm and we are still packing. We are prepping for a five day backpacking trip with a two year old (details to follow) but to add to the packing puzzle we are also packing for the 2 1/2 week road trip to Oregon that follows the backpacking trip. More on that in future posts…

Monday morning we commence our 5 day backpacking adventure. We will attempt the popular Rae Lakes Loop in Kings Canyon California. This will be our third backpacking trip with the kid and the longest one yet. 5 days, 4 nights. In case there are others out there interested in carrying an extra 25lbs that you cannot eat or wear but that does cry, boss you around, and will probably pee in the expensive Deuter backpack, here is a detailed account of what you may want to bring.

When it comes to food, the goal here is as many calories as possible with the least amount of weight and volume. Everything needs to fit in the large bear canister so it’s very important that the food we pack doesn’t take up much space.

The award goes to the one pound bar of milk chocolate from Trader Joes. But since we can’t subsist on only chocolate for five days we found a few other not-quite- as-delicious-but-still-pretty-good options. Trader Joes really is the best one-stop-shop for backpacking food as their Tortellinis are packed with calories and are very light. We will be having these three nights in a row. We also found a multigrain tri-berry instant oat meal that had the most calories out of the other instant oatmeal options so that takes care of breakfast. And have you looked on the back of that Trader Joes trail mix you love? Yeah… that shit is loaded with calories. Yay for us, boo for anyone else not planning on exercising for 35 hours in 5 days. We picked raspberry chocolate and the other one with the peanut butter cups.

Here is a picture of all the food we are bringing. One meal is left out. We are ditching the spaghetti. We have no more room in the bear canister so we will pick up some dehydrated Mountain House food and eat that the first night. The tabs on the left are something new we are trying. They are the nuun hydration tabs the flavor is pink lemonade. We threw in a few of the good ol’ gatorade packs because when you are only drinking water for 5 days and are sweating a ton the sugary green stuff really hits the spot.

Here are the clothes I packed. Fortunately for us, we are sleeping at pretty low elevation so I didn’t need a ton of warm clothes. the only thing not shown here is my patagonia down sweater jacket which is a lighter option that the full size down puffy.

Here are the clothes we packed for our daughter. After this picture was taken we replaced a pair of her cotton leggings for some REI sahara roll up pants. If she is going to wet her pants whatever she is wearing might as well be quick drying.

My husband’s clothes aren’t pictured because according to him, “I packed nothing.” It will be such a treat for all the other hikers to see Peter backpacking naked.

Last but not least the toiletries bag. This is a sandwich sized ziplock. chapstick, sunscreen toothpaste, toothbrush, soap. That’s it.

Here is the breakdown. This is the spreadsheet Peter created of everything we packed and how much each thing weighs.  A kitchen scale and a luggage scale were used to get this data.

Food

item	servings	calories	weight oz	total calories	calorie/weight ratio
Multigrain triberry oatmeal	12	190	21	2280	109
oatmeal maple and brown sugar	12	160	17.2	1920	112
sugar	28	15	4	420	105
TJ Fruit Servings	8	50	4	400	100
Soft & Juicy Mangos	10	120	12.6	1200	95
Pound Plus milk chocolate	26	200	36	5200	144
Peanut Butter Cup Trail Mix	13	150	14.3	1950	136
TJ Nuts about raspberries and chocolate	11	150	12.4	1650	133
TJ Tortelinni with pesto filling	16	230	32	3680	115
Gatorade	8	50	4.4	400	91
Nuun Strawberry Lemonade	6	7	1	42	42
TJ Torelinnini with mixed cheese filing	10	260	24	2600	108
Trader Joes peanut butter pretzels	15	170	15.75	2550	162
Probar	1	370	3.14	370	118

Gear

Item	Weight (oz)	Weight (lbs)
nalgene	6	0.375
water filter	18	1.125
first aid kit	7	0.4375
Cooking Fuel	13.3	0.83125
Cooking Stove & utensils	25.2	1.575
Tent	107	6.6875
Sleeping Pads	51	3.1875
Peter Marmot Rain Shell	17.6	1.1
Peter clothing	44	2.75
Sage clothing	38	2.375
Liz clothing	67	4.1875
Peter Sleeping Bag & Two Down Jackets	85	5.3125
Liz & Sage Sleeping Bag	93	5.8125
Gregory Jade 60 Backpack	56	3.5
Deuter Kid Comfort III Backpack	126	7.875
bear bin	41	2.5625
camel back & water	60	3.75
food	201.79	12.611875
toiletries	6.6	0.4125
Sage	400	25
Fuel Cannisters	20	1.25
Totals	1483.49	92.718125

Below are a few resources we used to learn more about the trip.

• Summit post description of the trip
• Elevation profile and pictures
• Photo overview we found online