GailStorey.com » Love

Happy Holidays from Gail and Porter Storey

gaildstorey — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:27:48 +0000

Happy New Year, and let us know in the Comments how your 2010 was!

Thanksgiving Blissings…

gaildstorey — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:23:03 +0000

Awareness Rests in the Pumpkin Pause between Autumn and Winter

Porter Auditions for America’s Top Chef

gaildstorey — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:10:56 +0000

Porter did all the cooking on our 2,663-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail: hot mocha and oatmeal for breakfast, and gourmet dinners like ratatouille au rehydrated tofu, boeuf jerky stroganoff, and pan-seared wild salmon over udon in an Asian fusion sauce. (I carried the peanut butter and crackers for lunch.) Each evening, after our twenty-plus miles of hiking, he set up his wilderness kitchen of stove, ingredients, and spice kit and went to work. In this photo in the Sierras, he’s unpacked our food from our bear-proof canister (lower right) and wears a head-net because of the mosquitos:

Porter auditions for America's Top (Wilderness) Chef

My job as sous-chef was to stand by with water in case he set his pants on fire (happened twice). At home I do all the cooking, and his job is to decant the Malbec and watch it breathe.

Nevertheless. When he wants to cook, we have to go backpacking so he can try out his latest modifications to his latest ultralight stove. Here’s his 8 oz. stove kit, including a 1 qt. titanium pot, windscreen and stainless steel rods to hold the pot above the burner, his titanium ground protector (so as not to scorch the earth), ThermoJet alcohol burner on top of protector, and spoon to stir (the rods fit into the back of the spoon for storage):

8 oz. stove kit

Porter eats with his stirring spoon, and I have a plastic spork–a spoon with a jagged end for fork-like purposes. Mine is red lest I lose it in the dirt. But on our recent backpacking trip, I was dismayed to find my spork denuded of its jagged tines.

“I sanded them off to fit in the stove kit,” he said.

“?!”

Gail attempts spaghetti with fork-less spork

Whatever, it was delicious. Porter cooked it from a pasta recipe from Backpacker Magazine, except he made substitutions for thirteen of the fourteen ingredients. He did use pasta, though. The recipe also said to “drain the pasta,” but carry a colander? Fuggedaboudit. In any case, Porter used his highly insulated pot-cozy to retain heat and cook faster at high altitudes.

Porter in his man-cave making his pot-cozy

A Top Chef who makes his own cooking accoutrements? I’d vote for him, wouldn’t you?

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Just Rest.

gaildstorey — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:21:16 +0000

My mind can make a problem out of anything. So for a backpacking trip up Colorado’s Buchanan Pass Trail, I turn a peaceful getaway into a problem to be solved. It’s a do-over, actually, of our previous hike when we missed that trail and slogged up a boulder-strewn jeep road. It was sleeting, I was crying, my husband, Porter, had forgotten his jacket, two feet of snow dumped on us overnight, and our struggle out the next day included my sinking hip-deep into quicksand. More about that another time.

“How could we have missed this before?” I ask now at the well-marked trailhead.

He doesn’t answer. He’s deep in a thicket of thoughts.

Porter in the thicket of his thoughts

We continue up the trail. Some preoccupations fall off, others grow louder in the stillness: Did we lock the car? Should I be home working? Will we get to camp before dark? We’re in our thoughts, but want really to be in this lush green forest of aspen and spruce, fragrant with pine and dust. My mind–inside; nature–outside, and the bridge between the two feels broken.

The broken bridge

But the trail is more continuous than we think, over St. Vrain Creek, through bluebells, paintbrush, sunflowers, daisies and black-eyed Susans.

Climbing higher into the Indian Peaks Wilderness, we reach Red Deer Lake at dusk.

Red Deer Lake, 10,372 feet

No thoughts disturb its surface. Brook and brown trout swim in its deep blue. We sleep.

Dawn

This fir-scented dawn is both dark and light.

Morning, we climb rocky trail across alpine tundra to see what grows above treeline.

What grows

We reach the summit of Buchanan Pass, 11,837 feet.

The summit of love!

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be.

Just rest.

Video #1 of Our Hike of the Pacific Crest Trail!

gaildstorey — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:24:26 +0000

Check out this video of Porter and Gail Storey’s hike of the Pacific Crest Trail–2,663 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada, over the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington.

For future videos of our PCT adventures (!) fording raging rivers, crossing the Mojave, climbing frozen peaks, how-we-did-it tips, and the “meaning of it all,” sign up for updates under To Stay on the List.

We love comments. ;-D (If you’re a subscriber receiving this as a single post, just click on the post title to get to Gail’s blog and the Comment feature.)