Opinion: Mystic Pizza

The boy and I went into the Bob Marshall Wilderness the other week on a four-day trip where I learned one of life’s more valuable lessons: That cold pizza starts to go a little sour after three days in a 90-plus degree heat.

I actually expected the pizza to mold, but surprisingly, it didn’t. The cheese just started to get a sort of pungent taste, but it wasn’t entirely bad.

I cooked two large Super 1 pizzas before we left and ate all but one piece over the course of three days. (The last day was a short one and we were out by 9:30 a.m.)

Actually, I take that back. I met two Continental Divide Trail through-hikers (Stoked and Peppermint) who were northbound and I gave them each a piece as well as a homemade oatmeal bar with chocolate chips, cranberries and almonds.

CDT hikers call that sort of food “trail magic.”

I don’t know if what I offered qualified, but they ate it all.

(As an aside, most CDT hikers have separate trail names. I don’t know how that all got started, but it’s a thing with them, and sort of fun.)

The oatmeal bars, by the way, are just the oatmeal cookie recipe on the oatmeal box, with the extra stuff thrown in. Rather than make them into cookies, I just poured it out into an ungreased 13-by-9-inch pan and baked them for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees. They were the best food, by far, of the entire trip.

The boy doesn’t really like cold pizza and his first choice of trail food is actually peanut butter and jelly.

Typically I’d just made a few sandwiches ahead of time, but this time we packed the bread, peanut butter and jelly all separately. You can buy peanut butter and jelly in squeeze bottles, which makes it convenient.

The sandwiches are much better this way, but of course, it adds up in weight, which, in the final analysis, seemed worth it, particularly since the boy was carrying all that stuff and I was not. He was also carrying about eight apples and four small tangerines. Don’t look at me like that. He really likes apples and I am not going to carry them. I’m fine with cold pizza, thank you very much.

At any rate it was pretty fun trip into the Trilobite Range, aside from the heat. One day we had thunderstorms, including the big boomer that caused the lightning that started the Dean Ridge Fire.

I’d like to say we were hunkered down in our tents when the storm blew through, but we were not. We were racing down a mountainside we decided to climb and just made it into the Krummholz when we got drenched in hail and rain.

By the time we reached camp the sun was back out. We built a small fire to dry our clothes out a bit, ate dinner and were in bed before it was entirely dark.

The next day we hiked almost all the way out, but it was so hot and our feet were still wet, so they started to turn to mush. After about 13 miles (it’s 18 miles out) we made camp along the Spotted Bear River, cooled our heels and that evening fished until dark. We hooked one nice one, turned a couple more and had fun with a few small trout as well.

The wind picked up that evening and you could see smoke in the air.

I wish I could say I’m getting used to summer after summer of fires, but I am not.