Mile 91.4 to Mile 109.8
Today is our first and only planned resupply for this hike at Muir Trail Ranch. MTR is about 1.5 miles off trail, so this stop will add about three miles of extra walking today. It is our seventh day on the JMT, but the ninth day since we started hiking. So, we started with a lot of food. We are planning to stop at VVR soon and could have resupplied there. However, stopping at MTR allowed us to start with one day less food. We chose to add this extra stop to reduce our starting weight a bit and make sure we could fit everything in the space available in our bear-proof containers.
Resupplying at MTR is a fairly simple process, but requires some advance planning. The ranch is not accessible by road, so they need a lot of lead time to transport hiker resupply packages from the post office in the nearest town to this remote location on horseback or via off road vehicle. Besides holding packages for hikers, they also offer filtered drinking water and an outlet for charging. They have a small store with a few essentials like fuel and first aid items, but no food.
The most amazing aspect of MTR, however, is their hiker box. A hiker box is often found in trail towns and is a place for hikers to leave food or gear that they no longer want to carry, but might be useful to someone else. Because of the huge number of JMT hikers resupplying here, there is a lot of unwanted food and gear. Instead of just a box, they have a series of over a dozen five gallon buckets neatly organized into categories like breakfast, dinner, drink powder, snacks, first aid, fuel, etc. Rocket spent most of our time there swapping boring items from our resupply for more exciting options found in the buckets.
All together, we spent about an hour at MTR reorganizing our food and charging devices. Then 1.5 miles back to the trail and we continued on. This brief stop made us even more excited for VVR, where we are looking forward to showers, laundry, and real food.
RocketWalk 