How to restock on food and fuel

You have a number of options when it comes to restocking. First, you can mail yourself a package, care of general delivery, to a post office near a place where your trail crosses a road. For example, there’s a post office at Toulumne Meadows, in Yosemite National Park. It takes less than 5 minutes to walk there from the John Muir Trail. There’s also the Mono Hot Springs Post Office, located about 12 miles west of the John Muir Trail and about 100 trail miles south of Toulumne Meadows. It’s important to phone ahead to find out how long the post office in question will hold your package.

Second, you can ship your food to a pack station and either pick it up there, or have them horse pack it to a prearranged meeting place in the wilderness. The latter service is called dunnage and cache. The typical arrangement is that you pay one fee for a person on a horse to lead the pack train, and another fee for each mule you use. Each mule can carry up to 150 pounds of your stuff. If your cache only weighs 30 pounds, you still have to pay the full fee for one mule. If the round trip from the pack station to your meeting place is two days rather than one, the fee will probably double. In general, you can expect to pay from $150–$300 per 1 mule day for this service. Does that sound expensive? It’s really not so bad if you compare it to the cost of a week of food and lodging in a nice hotel.

In order to find a pack station in the area you plan to backpack, you can use a search engine. I prefer Google. Enter search criteria in the manner shown below. The straight quotes around groups of words ensure that your search will only yield results in which those words appear next to each other. the “+” sign means that both phrases must appear in your results, and “OR” means that only one of the phrases need appear. You can also exclude a phrase from your results by preceding it with the “-” sign. Not all pack stations have Web sites, but the regional Chamber of Commerce will almost certainly have one, and you’ll be able to find telephone numbers for local pack stations and information about other tourist services there.

Examples of what to feed your search engine

A less costly option than dunnage and cache is to ship your food to the Muir Trail Ranch, located on a small private inholding in the Central Sierras, near a 93 degree Fahrenheit hot spring. The nearest trail head to the Muir Trail Ranch is Florence Lake. They charge $45 a piece for packages weighing up to 25 pounds if you mail them to their Post Office Box. If you deliver them to the pack station yourself the cost drops to $30. You’re not allowed to ship stove fuel, but they sell it in bulk, so this isn’t a problem. Your cache has to be packaged in a 5 gallon plastic food or paint bucket. You can get these for free from restaurants—they’re used to package things like pickles and mayonnaise—or you can get them for too much money from hardware stores, paint stores, or beer-making supply stores.

Just be warned that it’s not okay to ship stove fuel by US Mail. You can ask UPS and Fed Ex, but I doubt they’ll go for it either. You’ll either have to buy your fuel from the pack station, pay the pack station to drive into town and buy fuel for you if they don’t ordinarily stock it, or find a store that sells it near the post office.