Welcome to episode 170 of the first 40 miles.

If you're new to backpacking, or if you're hopelessly in love with someone who wants you to love

backpacking, then this podcast is for you. We'll talk about the essentials, how to lighten

your load and how to make the most of your time on the trail. I'm your host Heather Legler.

And I'm Josh Legler. And this is the first 40 miles.

Today on the first 40 miles, we took off for 24 hours to enjoy a little northwest winter

backfagging trip. We'll share our top five

experiments and our brush with death. And if you've ever wondered how to start a fire

after a soil-drenching rainstorm, we'll show you what worked for us.

Then we'll give you a hack that will make your winter fires burn cleaner, hotter, and more efficiently. All this and that's about it. Today on the first 40 miles.

So back in episode 167, Josh and I got together in our backpacking room and decided to plan a little

winter backpacking trip. So we gathered some supplies and made some tentative plans, but one of the things that we didn't plan was food.

And so we were kind of thinking maybe I would be in charge of the food, which I ended up putting together everything that we brought with us.

But we took this as an opportunity to dump out our bucket o calories.

And we talked about our bucket o calories way back in episode 38. It's a big box that we keep all of our back

of our backpacking food in.

And as you can imagine over the years,

it fills up, gets depleted, fills up gets depleted,

and then things end up at the bottom of the box

that never get used, or that never should be used. So anyway we dumped out the box on the

kitchen table and here's what happened. All right you ready to dump? Oh, dumping

okay. I think we're just gonna dump it and sort. All right. Here we go.

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