Memories in a Sierra cup

Many a meal was eaten from these Sierra cups and titanium spork.

I recently ran across the Sierra cups I used to take on backpacking trips in California’s Sierra Nevada. During the 1980s, when I lived in Los Angeles, my friend Bob and I went to the mountains maybe 3 times a year and so logged a lot of miles—and meals.

The typical trip was 3 days, 2 nights. We’d drive up the night before and sleep in the desert off US Highway 395 so we could get an early start. Dinner the first night was something fresh, like a steak, or heavy, like chili from a can. The next night we’d eat one of the poor quality freeze dried meals that were available at that time. When we made camp each evening we’d put on water to boil and cook tea, a Knorr’s dried soup and quick brown rice to stretch our entrée in that order. We’d also prepare a quart of powdered milk on arrival and later use that to make a batch of instant pudding. In the morning, breakfast was more hot tea (instant coffee tasted terrible in the metal cups) and packets of instant oatmeal (apple cinnamon was my favorite). All of this was eaten from the Sierra cup, wiped clean between courses.

Our most ambitious trip was a traverse from Tuolomne Meadow in Yosemite to Devil’s Postpile National Monument, on the eastern side of the mountain range. We planned it for five days, left our car in the parking lot at Devil’s Postpile, and hitchhiked to Tuolomne. Our packs were much heavier on this trip. The first night we hung a bear bag using proper technique but the bear was smarter than we were, leaving us only a package of crackers and a couple of cans of sardines. We decided to complete the trip anyway with our limited rations and did it in three very long days.

All of this sounds quite spartan in retrospect but at the time the food was satisfying and it was a whole lot of fun.