moon navigation

How to use the Moon to Find Direction at Night

Remember this helpful tip if you are ever lost during the dark when the moon is visible in the sky: mentally draw a line that connects the endpoints of the crescent moon and then extend this line to the horizon. This point where it touches the horizon indicates South.

grocery store

Not Marketed as “Backpacking” Food: Everyday Grocery Items for the Trail

Suppose you are going on a last-minute overnight backpacking trip and have no backpacking food in storage. In that case, you’d be surprised to know how many choices you have at your local grocery store besides the Knorr dry pasta and rice meals, ramen noodles, and meal bars.  Everyday Grocery Items Suitable for Backpacking While these items are not marketed as backpacking foods, they serve well on the trail or for traveling. For a hot meal, the general rule is to look for instant items with a cooking time of 10 minutes or less. Non-instant food that requires prolonged simmering […]

spring hiking

Hot Weather Hiking Tips

Your hiking companion won’t hike in the bitter cold, so you compromise by taking the winters off. When spring arrives, you are eager to hit the trails. You head away from home at every opportunity. Life is good. But now summer has arrived and it’s blazing HOT! If there is Heat, the diagnosis is Sweat Moisture will seep out from your skin and your clothing will feel damp and clingy against your skin. You’ll wish for clouds to capture the intense radiant heat blazing down from that luminous yellow disk in the afternoon sky.  The sweat on your forehead will drip past your eyebrows and burn your eyes. Dried sweat […]

cooking bag liner backpacking

Avoiding Dishes in the Backwoods: Cooking Bag Pot Liners

You may already know that Outdoor Herbivore is against the use of heating foods inside of soft plastic. It doesn’t align with our view of producing backpacking food made from high quality, organic ingredients, and subsequently urging hikers to pour boiling water inside a plastic bag to reconstitute it. This is why we do not sell our food in stand-up cook pouches. But cooking liners are rated for much higher temperatures (up to 400 degrees F), so does that make them safer for hot food? Out of curiosity, we decided to look at the feasibility of using cooking liners as an alternative […]