Rocked and Iced: A Chitina River Cookie Heist

I joined six other storytellers on the Bear Tooth stage last week as part of a fundraiser for Healthy Futures. I told this story from our 2012 trip from Yakutat to McCarthy by ski and packraft—370 miles in 30 days.

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Picture yourself in a boat on a river …
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

The Beatles, better known for their musical accomplishments, must have also spent time in the woods. I mean, they nailed it. How often have you been on a trail or on a river, enjoying friends and family, the scenery, and thinking about … food. Right? It is just a matter of time before someone is like, “Gosh, a hamburger sounds good.” And you think, yeah, a hamburger does sound good. For the rest of the trip.

So I’m in a boat, an inflatable packraft, with skis strapped to the sides and a pack strapped to the front. I’m on the Chitina River in the Wrangell Mountains, about 20 miles upstream from McCarthy. And I’m thinking about food. Big time. It is day 29 of a massive expedition. We started in Yakutat and paddled, skied, and climbed our way up Canada’s tallest mountain. We’ve covered 350 miles and are one day from McCarthy, the end of the most challenging and rewarding trip of my life.

We started with between 120 and 130 pounds of gear each, and about half of that was food. It was intimidating to plan thirty days of food, but we brought the stuff you would expect: trail mix, meat and cheese, cookies and crackers, dehydrated dinners. But I knew I would want a few treats—food that would be appealing three weeks in.

One of the treats was pizza. This wasn’t my first time bringing fast food on a mountain trip. A few years earlier, a partner convinced us to bring a ten-pack of Taco Bell bean burritos. This was, of course, a bad idea. The burritos weren’t very good to begin with (strike one). And then they froze (it was a winter trip, strike two). And then we realized that the best way to thaw the burritos was to sleep with them. Three guys in a two-person tent with ten burritos in our sleeping bags. You can do the math. Strike three.

But pizza is a different story. It is greasy enough that it is still malleable when frozen. And pizza has a nice mix of carbs, fats, and protein. So, I bought two pizzas from the Moose’s Tooth, folded the slices face-to-face so that the toppings were protected by the crusts, put the slices in zip lock bags, and then smashed the bags so that everything fit in the pack. “Pizza balls.”

My other treats were macaroons. I asked Janis at Fire Island Bakery for a custom batch of macaroons. We pay a lot of attention to calories on these trips, and coconut is one of the most caloric foods. Janis appreciated this project. She told me that the folks in the kitchen are usually trying not to put too much butter and sugar in the mix, but that for us they were celebrating, “More butter! More sugar!”

But it is day 29 those treats are long gone. We are effectively out of food. Graham recently boasted that he had a tortilla left, but when I questioned him for more details he admitted that it was, “Half a tortilla, crumbled up.”

We are approaching the Ultima Thule Lodge, an upscale fly-in lodge on the Chitina River. The lodge is run by the Claus family, and John Sykes, one of our team, is friends with Jay Claus. We are hoping to run into Jay and get invited in for a burger.

We don’t see Jay. We meet someone else, but he isn’t very helpful. He is surprised to see us and asks where we’ve come from. We are like … Yakutat. He shrugs and offers us some coffee. Does the coffee come with a burger?

Disheartened, we head back to the boats. But then we see Jay and he is like, wow, you guys made it, congrats, come on up for dinner, tell us everything.

We were too dirty to sit inside the lodge so they set us up at an outdoor picnic table. Paul Claus is apologetic because the kitchen is being redone and they only have access to the oven, so dinner is fish sticks and tater tots. We are like, FISH STICKS AND TATER TOTS!!!! Nectar of the gods. There are cookies and fruit too. We gorge.

We give thanks, say our goodbyes, and get back on the river.

The trip was long enough that our stomachs physically shrank. “Full” wasn’t all that much food. And our metabolisms were running so hot that we processed that food quickly. All that to say, we were only on the river for thirty minutes before I was hungry again. I looked over and saw John eating a cookie.

“Where’d you get that cookie, John?”

“Uh … I took some on the way out. Do you want one?”

I reached in my pocket and said, “No thanks. I’ve got my own.”

I looked over at Josh, who was peeling an orange. Graham was eating a cookie. This was not a coordinated effort, but we each stuffed our pockets leaving the lodge. Individually, maybe not that big a deal. But collectively, we pocketed something like 20 cookies. They had to notice.

I checked in with Paul after we got home—thanked him again, and was like, “So … uh … maybe you noticed that we took a bunch of cookies on the way out. I’m so sorry. Can I send some money?” Paul got a laugh out of it, had been happy to help. He even mailed me a sticker that says, “Powered by Grannie’s cookies.” He asked, “Why didn’t you just say that you were out of food?”

Why didn’t we say we were out of food? It didn’t even occur to us. Maybe it was because we just did a monster of a “self-supported” trip … but “self-supported” didn’t stop us from stealing a bunch of cookies! Maybe because we are all pretty introverted and shy. Or just young guys who didn’t want to look vulnerable. But it would have been so easy to ask, and they would have been happy to help.

I hope that sharing this story helps you avoid needing to steal from an open hand. And I brought a bunch of zip-lock bags in case you want to make pizza balls with your leftovers. Just track me down during the intermission.

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I didn’t have time to mention this in the live event, but this trip triggered a fascinating psychological shift in my relationship with food. For several weeks, maybe even months, after the trip, I could not stop snacking on any exposed foods. If the food was not in sight, no problem. But anything in site—fruit on the counter, a bowl of chips and dip, etc.—and I’d constantly graze, beyond the point of being full. John experienced the same thing. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, feast and famine, but was wild to experience back in the big city.