Food

Camp Sheppard was unique in its activities. There was not another program in the United States that offered 7 day expedition style climbs of glaciated volcanic peaks. On climbs of Mt. Rainier scouts spent 5 of the 7 days on the ice, roped together weaving between seracs and crevasses as they worked their way to the summit of Washington StateÕs highest mountain. But, climbing Rainier was not the only outing offered at Camp Sheppard. Climbs of the lesser volcanos, 9766Õ St. Helens, 12,011Õ Mt. Adams, 10,7??Õ Glacier Peak and 10,???Õ Mt. Baker as well as the none volcanic massiff of Mt. Stuart were also part of the climbing program. And for the less adventurous or younger scouts week long hikes of 50 miles and more were leaving camp each Sunday morning. Camp Sheppard also offered an Òin campÓ program, the Conservation Camp, where scouts bunked in the cabins at camp and worked to improve the facilities and natural environment around camp while earning merit badges. During the winter, Camp Sheppard hosted a winter camp. During the months of December through March scouts spent Saturday night in the cabins warmed by oil furnace heat and the days inner tubing and sleding on the slide hills prepared and groomed by Max.

These varied activities offered under the umbrella of ÒCamp SheppardÓ all carried a common thread, the same thread necessary to all living organisms engaged in the activity called life. The participants in these activities had to be fed. Whether sliding down an inner tube run or kick stepping up the side of a bergshrund, fuel is required to supply the body the energy needed to complete the task. Of course, because this was a camp for boys, the food not only had to supply the energy for the immediate task, but it also played its role in supporting the growth process. This meant calories, and lots of them. And to supply these calories in an organized and somewhat tasty manner a menu must be planned, the food must be purchased, prepared and served. Most institutions would have hired a nutritionist to plan the menu, a manager to see to the purchases and a cook to prepare and serve. But, this is the Boy Scouts under Max Eckenburg, and if the guiding philosophy of ÒProviding the ChallengeÓ applies to leading climbs up mountains then it can certainly be applied to food. To Max, making sure you have something to eat is a real life situation, the perfect challenge. He did not have to provided this challenge, nature reminds a teenager of it constantly with growling stomachs, and unsatiable hunger. All he needed to do was be sure to step aside and let the kids leading the program take responsibility for all aspects of the menu for the varied programs at camp. And he did. Of course without his leadership and knowledge a group of a dozen kids trying to plan a menu for winter camp or a summit climb is certain disaster, but with some guidance from the side, a little training and then the very real need for a nutritious meal hanging over their heads the procurement and production of meals becomes one more training exercise in the development of the staff.

Winter Camp

It snows at camp. A lot. From December to March Sheppard is blanketed in snow. The combination of kids and snow means sliding. The White River valley that camp is nestled in provides ample hills for death defying rides on inner tubes and sleds. But, a few hours of flying across the surface of wet snow and landing in a heap at the bottom of a run can create a very wet and hungry kid.

In 1965 when Camp Sheppard opened for winter camp, feeding 300 kids a weekend presented a problem, for camp had no centralized kitchen either to prepare the food or to serve it. Our vision of a scout camp dining hall, with its rows of tables with happy campers sitting shoulder to shoulder on benches singing songs, laughing and eating is not a model that fit at Camp Sheppard in the winter. The lack of a dining hall or the funds to build one meant something else would have to be tryed. The solution was unique and worked well.

Max converted the garage attached to his ranger residence into an adhoc kitchen. Some large industrial stoves were brought in, counters built, a few refrigerators were plugged in and a sink or two installed. The store room off the side of the garage became home to cases of canned stew, peaches & tomato soup, loaves of bread, little plastic jelly containers, bins of oatmeal, boxes of sandwich cookies and paper cartons. The refrigerators were stuffed with butter, milk and eggs. There was not room in this one car garage to serve 300, so Max proposed to have the scouts eat in the huts they were sleeping in and invented the two bin system, the cold box and hot box system to support this idea.

The cold box/hot box system worked like this. About noon on Saturday the garage came to life as staff from the summer program began directing the scouts from the Order of the Arrow (OA), a elite group of scouts selected for their leadership abilities and character, in the preparation of the evening meal: canned beef stew and real milk cocoa heated on the stoves, canned peaches placed in paper cartons, loaves of bread, cubes of butter placed in paper dishes and sandwich cookies for desert. While the 30 gallons of stew and 30 gallons of cocoa was slowly heating on the stove the Òcold boxesÓ were prepared. Paper plates, styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, forks and knives, metal serving ladels and spoons, paper napkins, 1/2 gallon sized paper cartons of peaches, bread, cookies, and the jellies were counted out to match the number of inhabitants in each cabin and placed in fiberglass bins, the Òcold boxesÓ. One bin for each cabin. By 5:15pm Max had the green 65 Ford four wheel drive pickup with the snow plow on the front, chains on all four wheels and the canopy over the truck bed backed up to the garage door. The garage door was thrown open and hot air from the cramped and overheated kitchen billow out into the cold, snowy night. Max, dressed in a green beret, plaid wool shirt, suspenders and jeans and high topped danner boots puffed on his pipe near the rear of the truck overseeing the OA kids loading the Òcold boxesÓ into the rear of the truck, putting the boxes for the last cabins in first. When the last box was loaded Max would go over the hand signals to be used to tell him when it was safe to go and stop, then remind the kids riding in the back of the truck to be safe and in a cloud of exhaust and pipe smoke the truck would move out into the dark snowy night to deliver the boxes to the cabins. While the deliveries of the Òcold boxesÓ were being made the remaining OA kids and the summer staff in charge, shut tightly into the now resealed garage, would feverishly fill 1/2 gallon paper cartons with hot stew and place them in the Òhot boxesÓ, Coleman portable ice chests. They would also be filling 2 gallon thermos bottles with hot cocoa. Some of the empty # 10 tins that previously contained stew or peaches would be filled with hot soapy water, sealed with a plastic lid and placed next to the stew in the Òhot boxesÓ to be used by the scouts in the cabins to clean up after the meal. When Max returned with an empty truck he backed up to the garage, the door was flung open again and the Òhot boxesÓ were slid into the back of the truck along with the thermosÕ of hot cocoa and back into the night rumbled Max and his crew.

By 6:30 it was assumed that all in the cabins were finished. As Max stopped the big green truck outside each hut, the OA staff would run up the snowy steps and through the front doors, retrieved both ÒhotÓ and Òcold boxesÓ along with the thermos and return to the truck, slide the boxes to the front of the truck bed, jump in the back of the truck, give Max the correct hand signal for ÒgoÓ and lumber to the next hut. When the last hut was serviced the truck would back up to the garage and the cleanup of the boxes in preparation for breakfast would commence. Breakfast was served in a similar fashion, with scrambled eggs, oatmeal and toast filling the hot boxes instead of stew.

Max had eaten powered eggs during his life and vowed it was not something he was going to subject on others. So, early Sunday morning the great crack off began. 450 eggs, 1 1/2 per kid were individually cracked by the hands of the OA staff, the contents of the shells dumped into a very large aluminum cooking pot. Double boilers fashioned from nested 24Ó x 36Ó x 4Ó baking pans were set on the big stoves and the scrambled eggs slowly began to cook. The oatmeal was cooked in a large aluminum pot, about 15 gallons for the morning meal. The trick was to cook the oatmeal without burning it to the bottom of the large vat. The toast for 300 was produced with what can only be called an electricians nightmare. 10 four hole toasters were plugged into the outlets of the garage and it was the job of 2 OA kids to keep them in constant production until all the metal 9 1/2Ó x 20Ó aluminum cake pans with sliding aluminum lids were full and placed in the Òhot boxesÓ. The engineers at GE had not designed their toasters for this level of production. After about the 4 round the toasters were so hot that they would not accept new bread, or if they did, they would spit it out long before it was brown, even at the highest setting. A rotation of producing, overheated and cooling toasters had to be established to keep production going. When the toasters got overheated the chrome finish on the outside got too hot to touch. OA workers learned to quickly bump the toasters into the desired positions with quick touches to avoid burns. The plastic bread sacks and hot toasters made for an interesting combination. As if by magnetic attraction an errant bread sack would find its way to a hot toaster and melt itself to the outside. All the toasters bore the badge of overuse, melted and deformed breadsacks glued to their sides. The older the toaster the thicker the coating of plastic, as if some geological process was at work laying sediments in layers year after year.

Lunch at camp was easy. If it were not for MaxÕs fervent belief in something hot at lunch, there would have been no need for cooking. But, each Sunday morning saw the stoves cranking out CampbellÕs tomato soup, about 20 gallons of it. No matter how much you might want to, you cannot rush tomato soup. 20 gallons of soup must heat slowly and be constantly stirred. If the hot boxes for lunch went out at 11:30 the soup had to be on by 9am.

The first time I cooked soup at camp Max gave me the instructions about heating the soup, and I listened, but I was 17, and I knew better. There is no way it could take two and a half hours to heat a pot of soup. No way. At 10:30 we dumped the cans of soup concentrate in the big aluminum pot, added the correct amount of whole milk, hefted the pot up onto the big industrial Wolf gas stoves, turned the burners all the way up and assigned an OA kid to stir the pot while it heated. While it was heating we busily filled the cold boxes, counted slices of cheese and meat and prepared for delivery.

Our OA member faithful stirred the soup. The pot was 30 inches deep and 20 inches across. The soup filled it over half full. With that pot up on the big stove the lip of the pot was better than 5 feet off the floor. Arms get tired from lack of blood when they are held at head height or greater and an hour of stirring certainly wearies the mind. I am still sure to this day the he stirred continuously for an hour. I equally certain that the spoon he stirred with never came with in a foot of the bottom of that pot.

At 11:15 it was time to pour the soup into the thermos jugs for their trip to the cabins. We eased the hot pot onto the floor. For the first time in an hour the mouth of that pot was below nose level. The vapors rising to meet us did not smell like lucious tomato soup. There was the distinct order of charcoal. Burnt soup. Not scalded. Not overheated. Burnt. Visual inspection showed indication of foul cookery, but none of us in the kitchen were quite willing to taste test it. The clock showed that heating a new batch was out of the question, even if we made eight small batches in small pots and employed all 8 burners on the two Wolf industrial stoves.

These are the moments that make great leaders. A crisis. A chance to weigh alternatives, take input from collegues and subordinates, weigh their information and then act decisively. And hopefully, correctly. We could just serve lunch without soup someone in the group suggested. Yes, we could. It is only a small part of the lunch, most younger kids donÕt particularly care for Tomato soup, so it would probably not be missed. A good course of action. But, MaxÕs firm belief in the value of a hot meal to warm the soul after a hard day on the sleding hill had been delivered in the pep talk and improptu training seminar given the previous morning. MaxÕs words carried a lot of weight, even in the face of foul smelling burnt soup.

ÒSomeone might be hungry and cold enough after sleding to eat this, and there is no point in just throwing it away if someone might eat some. LetÕs send it out and let them decide whether they want to eat it or notÓ. Decisive leadership. That is what Max wanted. Grab the bull by the horns, wrestle it to the ground, take control. All the right moves. Just the wrong decision. That wrong decision became apparent as the bottom of the pot became exposed while filling the last of the thermos jugs. Fully 1/2 inch thick, the layer of jet black burnt tomato soup glistened in its coating of the aromatic red liquid. By this time the smell was overpowering, but the decision had been made and there was no second guessing.

Max stood at the back of the truck and watched as we loaded the cold boxes and thermosÕ into the truck. No mention of the soup was made. A hand appeared around the end of the truck, gave the right signal and the truck began its macabe deliveries.

A measure of the success of the meals served was taken by inventorying the amount of uneaten food returned to the kitchen from the huts. Often the cold boxes came back nearly empty. A few slices of meat or cheese in each box, maybe a half a loaf of bread. Usually quite a quantity of oatmeal returned at breakfast. A large number of the dry sandwich cookies always came back. We had learned that the only way to eat them was with a milk or cocoa chaser, but we were experience dry sandwich cookie eaters having endured them all summer and on multiple winter weekends. The kids that journeyed to camp only once a year had not acquired a taste for, nor the proper eating technique to down more than a bite or two of the hard bisquit type cookie.

I guess in retrospect I am not surprised that the thermosÕ came back full. However, at the time I was surprised. I was sure that there were starving, sliding hill crazed kids and adults who needed a warm meal in their bellies in spite of the foul taste. I believed in MaxÕs words. A warm meal is very important. I guess being edible is equally important.

I spent countless weekends at camp during the winter supervising the cooking of the meals, and yet this one sticks in my mind more than any other, for this is the only time I can remember Max actually raising his voice and scolding me. I can vividly remember him cornering me in the back of the kitchen and asking how I could serve burnt, inedible soup. He was very upset and he showed and voiced it. It is the only time I can remember him visibly upset with an action I made. This is not to say I didnÕt screw up before or after, many times, but this was the only time Max scolded me. And I deserved it.

Summer Camp

What we ate at summer camp can arguably be called the envy of people everywhere. Even now I envy what we ate back then. On the rare weekend when I would make it to Seattle in the summer I would describe to my brothers what I had been eating each day at camp and they would look me up and down, shake their heads in disbelief and utter those same words I heard from everyone who heard our menu, ÒI wish I could eat like that!Ó I remember during the winter months describing to a team mate on the wrestling squad at our high school what my summer eating habits entailed. He was absolutely sick with envy. DidnÕt matter who you talked to. What their occupation was. Who they hung out with. They all stood amazed. Ò6500 calories a day!? Good God, I wish I could eat like that! How do you stay so thin?Ó

6500 calories a day. You could eat continuously from dawn to dusk, litterally. As much as you could consume. However, because this consumption occurred while on climbs and hikes this meant the limiting factor was not how much you could eat, but rather how much you could carry. All expeditions at camp were week long, 7 days start to finish. Each member of the group had to pack a weekÕs worth of provisions. And, in 1969 this meant dryed food, not freeze dried. What few prepackaged dehydrated foods that were available at that time were expensive and not very nutritious. They might be fine for someone to eat for a few days in a row, maybe even a week. But the staff at camp were on the trails and mountain slopes 10 weeks a summer;70 days in a row, accumulating over 450 miles of hiking and several major summits during this time. We needed food that would not only sustain us, but because we were between the ages of 15 and 19, we needed food to help us grow. The menu at camp was built around the needs of the staff first, the clients second.

The base line requirement was 6500 calories a day. This was needed to maintain weight, help with muscle and brain growth and to keep the staff healthy and alert during the 10 weeks the program ran. Protien, carbohydrate and fat content were the next priority after calorie content. Due to the calorie requirement, the fat content of the menu was high by todayÕs standard. In 1969 cubes of butter wrapped in aluminum foil and put in sandwich bags were taken to put into the morningÕs oatmeal. Cheese and crackers, both high in fat were the staple of all lunches, and fatty canned meats or cheese were part of every dinner. Protien came from meat. Canned meats, such as kippered snacks, sardines in oil and deviled ham or chicken were put on crackers at lunch. Dinners had canned ham or canned corned beef. Carbohydrates came in simple and complex forms. Hot cereals at breakfast, crackers at lunch and pasta, rice or instant potatoes at dinner. Simple carbohydrates came from sugar. Brown sugar for morning cereals, Kool-Aid and hard candies at lunch and Kool-Aid and pudding at dinner. Both breakfast and dinner had nearly unlimited quanities of hot cocoa. Some dinners were equiped with Jello to be served as a hot drink. Fruits were included in the diet via dried apples or apricots at breakfast, raisins, dried apples or bananas at lunch and dates or dried apples at dinner. The menu was devoid of vegetables, especially fresh ones. There was simply no way to keep them from going bad during the week. Outside of vegetables, the menu, adapted from MaxÕs experience on McKinley and put together with the help of climbers from members of Seattle and TacomaÕs Mountain Rescue groups, was well suited to the strenuous output and nutritional needs of the staff.

To create a nutritionally sound menu to sustain the staff through a long summer of climbing, some factors had to take second place on the priority list behind calories and nutrition. One of those was weight. No one who packed a weeks worth of Sheppard meals would argue that the food was light. Typically the food was bagged in cloth bags about twice the size of a paper lunch sack. Into it went all the food for four people for a single meal. A party of twelve would consume 9 of these bags a day, or 49 during the week, meaning each member carried 4 or more, along with other group gear such as tents, stoves, tarps, ropes, pots, etc. A typical meal, safely secure in its tied cloth bag weighed upwards of 6 pounds, meaning on Sunday morning a fully loaded pack had a minimum of 25 pound of food on board for the first dayÕs hiking.

Someone had to put these food bags together. Within the cloth bag for a dinner such as macaroni and cheese for four were found individual bags of cocoa powder, macaroni noodles, dried fruit, powdered milk, powdered pudding mix, a brick of cheese in a plastic bag, a half a cube of butter and a package of Kool-Aid. These individual bags were filled by the staff, then put into plastic bins with slide tops and castors on the bottom. When a meal bag was constructed the bins containing the individual elements of the meal were called upon to supply the components of the meal. With 49 bags required for a group of 12 and upwards of 50 kids out on hikes each week, a lot of food had to be bagged each week. A rough count gives an idea of the magnitude of the food bagging chore.

During the week 6 dinners and 6 breakfasts were eaten. Each required cocoa. That means 12 bags of cocoa were required each week for four people. If fourty people were out each week, then the requirement for cocoa for the week would be 120 bags. For the summer program of eight weeks, 960 bags of cocoa. Similarly, bags of rice, mashed potatoes, macaroni, dryed milk, jello, hard candy, raisins, dryed apples, dates, oatmeal, cream o wheat, zoom, cheddar cheese, and butter were needed each week. No one was in camp during the week to prepare this food as generally everyone was out on the trail leading scouts or providing support for those trips. So most of the food bagging occurred on Saturday night in the food bagging room, a back corner of the kitchen.

The food bagging room was 20 feet long and 10 wide. There were counters on all four walls with shelves below and above. A center island also had counters with shelves below and above. Under one portion of the counters the shelves had been left out. Into this space rolled the plastic bins that would receive the plastic bags of cocoa, macaroni noodles, raisins, hard candy, etc.: the components that would be brought together to form a meal. A key fixture in the food bagging room was a good stereo, complete with record albums or cassette tapes of camp favorites: Led Zepplin I, II and IV, Iron Butterfly, Black Sabbath, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jimi Hendricks, etc.

The procedure went like this. After returning from a week of hiking or climbing I would carry my pack to the equipment hut (one of the winter huts dedicated to the storage of staff hiking and climbing gear) and dump my gear in a bunk, grab my dirty clothes and head for the laundry room. While my clothes were washing I would shower, then stop by the kitchen, check the schedule of hikes for the next week and the number of kids on each one. From this I could tell how many food bags of each of the three dinners, three breakfasts and three lunches would be needed for the next week. Some quick calculations would then determine how many individual bags of cocoa, macaroni, dryed milk, jello, rice, mashed potatoes, etc would be needed for the week. With the arrival of another staff member, we would begin filling baggies of the food stuffs. To bag cocoa one person would remove a Glad Alligator bag from its box, hold the opening open with his fingers while the other staff member would scoop out about 3/4 cup of cocoa powder and dump it in the bag. Then the person holding the bag would quickly tie a knot to seal the bag shut and lightly toss it in the roll around plastic bin. Each person would count the bags as they were tied shut until the desired number was reached. Then the menu would be consulted to find what food needed to be bagged next. The stores were brought down from the shelf and the bagging continued. All this was done to the steady throb of screaming guitars played at maximum decimal levels by the ever present stereo as if the beat of the music set a tempo to the repetative motion: scoop-dump, scoop-dump, scoop-dump for the scooper, hold open, squeeze the air out, twist the top of the bag then spin the bottom, tie an overhand knot in the top, drop the finished product in the bin, hold open, squeeze the air out, . . . and so on. Hour after hour. On any given Saturday afternoon and night upwards of 900 baggies of food had to be prepared. When the whole staff had finally arrived at camp from their various hikes of the past week the food room will fill with the smell of fresh showers, and the stories of events that had happened during the week on each of the hikes or climbs. Bowls of ice cream and stacks of sandwich cookies would litter the counter and quick mouthfuls would be taken between the the filling of one bag or the tying of another.

When at last all the individual bags were prepared, then the construction of the meals would begin. The counters would be cleared and the food bags would be layed out side by side down the length of the counter. If it was a ham and rice dinner each staff member would take responsibility for one component of the meal. Someone would place one can of ham on each cloth food bag, someone else would open the bin full of the freshly filled bags of instant rice and place one bag on each food bag. One bag each of cocoa, dried milk, pudding, dried apricots, Kool-Aid, gravy mix, and butter would join the ham and rice to complete the meal. Once each food bag was adorned with its complement of components the bags would be filled, tied shut and placed in one of the fiberglass bins used as Òcold boxesÓ during the winter program and placed in the walk-in cooler. A sheet of paper with ÒHam and Rice DinnersÓ would be placed on top of the pile of food bags. The counters would be cleared again and the next meal would start production in a similar manner until 9 fiberglass bins sat full, each with a pile of similar meals resting inside. Now the leaders of the coming weekÕs hikes would grab a couple empty Òcold boxesÓ and begin counting out the meals necessary for his trip for the week. When his bins contained the food necessary for the weekÕs hike or climb he was leading he would place them back into the cooler with a sheet of paper taped to the top proclaming this box of food taken. Come Sunday morning the bins were carried to the hut where he would meet his group and the food would be distributed to the kids and staff participating in the trip.

Food bagging was much more than just a monotonous, repetative task. During the week leading up to the Saturday food bagging session the staff was divided, each out leading their own hikes or climbs. 4 staffers might have been leading a climb on Rainier, 3 leading a 50 miler between Snoqualmie and Stevens pass, 2 leading 11 year-old tenderfoots on a Greenwater Basin hike and 4 on a Sourdough Loop or Northern Loop hike in the NE corner of Mt. Rainier National Park. Food bagging was the weekly reunion. Other than the quick calculation of how many bags of each food were needed food bagging was a mindless, repetative task. But it was the weekly reuniting of the staff, it was a social session. The stories and tales of the previous weekÕs adventures, of whiny scouts and heroic deeds, of finding lost routes and great fishing spots, of snow pack reports and great glisades would flow as fast as the cocoa powder. Everyone had to shout to be heard above the music, but no one cared. It had been a week in the wilds without the stimulation of music, isolated from the rest of the staff and the outside world. Everyone was hungry for news of what the others had been doing, to hear their favorite songs and to share their tales. The room was small and cramped, but inviting. All the shelves were wood, as were the counters. People would pair up with their closest friend during the bagging of the individual food stuffs and under the umbrella of loud music discuss in privacy the details that were not for the general staffÕs consumption. When it came time to assemble the individual meals, it became a more circus atmosphere as each staffer took responsibility for getting a particular food such as rice or cheese into the meal bag. This assembly line procedure required everyone to move down the counter dropping one individual food bag on each meal bag, a sort of food bagging rumba line. If bagging the individual bags were private counseling sessions, the meal bagging was group therapy. The occasional good natured tussel for position in the line or space on the counter erupted. Sometimes the bins could not be rolled down the aisle due to overcrowding. Now the food bags were thrown to their destination meal bags, an aerial conveyer belt with a thrower and receiver, the thrower remaining stationary over the bin while the receiver moved down the counter placing his catches on each successive meal bag.

As the food bins for the coming weekÕs trips piled up in the cooler the food baging party slowly came to a close. A full bin of food bags, carefully tagged for a particular trip and placed in the cooler signified that at least two, and as many as 4 staffers had completed their duties in the food bagging room and were moving on to the next activity in preparation for the coming weekÕs trip.

My favorite part of bagging food were the food fights. Nurtured through my youth on World War II movies, the sight and sound of exploding morter shells was an accustomed sight. A close approximation to exploding morter shells are small plastic bags of cocoa power bursting on impact with head, chest or wall and launching their contents in a massive cloud around the target.

Above the food bagging room in the kitchen was a room dedicated to group gear such as tents, stoves, ice axes, ropes and the like. It also served as a store room for cases of canned food and paper plates and bowls. I donÕt remember how the bags of cocoa got moved from the food bagging room to the upstairs store room, but I do remember that the cases made excellent bunkers when stacked like bricks. Open volleys between the two camps were well placed. It was found that by hitting the ceiling above the oppositionÕs bunker an exploding baggie of cocoa would rain its contents on the enemy position, coating the foes in a layer of sticky sugar and brown powder. With the enemy position softened up with a few ariel shots a frontal attack was launched on the enemy position under the cover fire from my partner. I stormed their position, hurling bag after bag of cocoa powder at point blank range. The air was thick with brown powder. Not a breath could be taken without the taste of chocolate. Chocolate tears of laughter ran down chocolate covered faces. Blinded by cocoa soaked eyes I returned to the cover of my bunker only to be attacked by the charging enemy. I lay on the vinyl floor tiles as bag after bag burst upon my back until the enemy was spent.

When the cocoa dust settled we found the ruins of war. A battle that could not have taken lasted more than 45 seconds would now require more than an hour to clean up. The floor was covered with cocoa, some places more than half an inch deep. The ropes, stoves, tents and ice axes had a sticky dusting of brown powder. War is not hell, cleaning up after war is hell.

These food fights did not end in the food bagging room. Trapped in tents during storms on Mt. Rainier wore heavy on the staff during the annual staff climb. Not wanting to waste a week of good weather in the months of July and August, the staff training climb always occurred in June, a month of exceptionally poor weather in Washington. The mountain always seemed to lure us, or allow us, to get to between 9,000 and 11,000 feet before closing the weather around us and forcing us to hole up for a few days waiting for a clearing. Sitting in an 8 x 8 McKinley tent for multiple days can play heck on a kidÕs patience. After chopping the tent platforms from the glacial snows we pitched the tents so that the tunnel entrances faced each other. We would tie these tunnel together so that one tent could look down the combined 6 feet of entrance into the other tent. Looking down this tube one could see into the center of the other tent. Usually all that was visible was the middle portion of the tent occupants, from the shoulders to the knees and the aluminum tent pole that stuck straight up the middle of the tent. This pole made a perfect target to intiate the explosion of a food bag. And what better food bag to explode than a lump of fused hard candy? Someone would quietly produce a length of surgical tubing from a first aid kit. The tubing was stretched horizontally across the entrance to the tunnel of the tent, held by a tent occupant on each side of the door. The gunner would place the lump of coagulated hard candies in the center of the rubber tubing and draw the weapon back until the projectile was resting against the center pole of the tent. This pole served two purposes related to the attack. One, it served to assure good aim on the enemies center pole and two, it acted as a governer to limit the use of accessive fire power on the part of the gunner. A good gunner could send a well placed volley smack into the pole in the other tent shattering the ball of congealed hard candies into shrapnel that would rain down on the unsuspecting inhabitants. Hand lobed plastic bag grenades of cocoa, sugar and whatever other food stuffs were handy would come flying back through the tube tunnel. This retribution was answered with a frontal attack through the connecting tube. Of course the first one through the tunnel and into enemy territory took a severe beating, but when the entire garrison had made it through the tunnel and the odds were even both sides suffered equally until spent and happy the entire group layed back and roared with laughter at the whole affair. A careful search usually found most of the hard candy before it got damp and began to stick to everything, although the occasional gooey piece showed up from time to time.

Eating on the trail for 10 weeks a summer had a profound effect on me that continues to this day. There are a number culinary habits that I can trace straight as an arrow back to Camp Sheppard. One involves wasted food.

At camp every calorie was precious. This high value was earned for two reasons. One, after climbing or hiking all day I was starving. I ate everything cooked and uncooked at every meal. Most meals a fight insued as to who got to pick the pot clean of every morsel of food left clinging to the inside. Cleaning the pots was easy after the scouring given by hungry spoons searching for small bits of clinging food. We carried bags of sugar to put on cereal, about 1.2 cup per bag. As the week progressed a number of half used bags of white sugar would begin to accumulate. Not for long. With head tipped back, eyes squinting into the sun I would pour the white crystals into my mouth. Not much on taste, but the energy was certainly welcome.

The second reason for not wanting wasted food can be seen on the rare occasion that food was left over. Disposing of the extra food presented a problem. Often it was easier to eat the left over food, even if already full, than to find a place to dump it. On a climb it could be dumped down a crevasse, if one was close enough to camp. But this required a belay to get to the edge of the crevasse for the dumping unless the crevasse was sufficiently deep and narrow. On the hikes one could burn the left overs in the fire or dig a pit and bury it. Neither solution a very welcome one.

This lesson of eating everything and wasting nothing has stuck with me. I scrape every bowl used in the preparation of a meal until it shows no trace of its previous contents. Cans of Cream of Mushroom soup are scraped with a rubber spatula to remove every trace of food before the can is crushed and recycled. A jar of applesauce must be turned upside down to drain its contents onto a plate, even if the creeping motion of the applesause takes 15 minutes to ooze down the side of the glass. I cringe as I watch my wife cook. Cans and bowls slathered with enough food to carry me 2 miles up the trail end up in the sink full of water and in the trash before I can rescue their contents. I used to comment on this waste, but we come from such different backgrounds that my words fell on ununderstanding ears.

Another habit I picked up relates to menu selection. At camp we had only three different meals on the menu. We repeated these same three meals twice a week, all summer long. 25 years later I can still tell you to the smallest detail the make up of every meal, whether it be canned ham, instant rice, brown gravy, chocolate pudding, koolaid and cocoa of dinner one, or the Ritz cracker, cheddar cheese, peanut butter, raisins, hard candy and kool aid of lunch two. This repetative menu has manifested in me little desire for variation in menu from day to day. I am perfectly content to cook a giant pot of tuna noodle cassarole and then eat it day after day, or to make the exact same thing for lunch everyday for months. Today, a rotating menu of three meals suits me fine. Unless shaken from my food stupor, I will eat the same thing everyday. My wife cannot stand the thought of the same meal twice in a row. She has succommed to repeated meals a few times, but after the second night she flatly refuses to be served the same meal a third night in a row.

Sometimes the quantity of food consumed at camp was startling. At the end of a staff week climb, another unsuccessful ascent of Rainier, we staggered down from Summerland in a driving rain after 3 nights on the upper mountain waiting for the weather to clear. For some reason, we had decided not to eat the lunch we carried in our packs, either because we did not want to sit in the rain to eat it when we could plod the 5 miles to the trailhead and be back in front of a warm fire in the lodge and a hot meal in a few hours or because we wanted to hold out for the pancakes we had convinced ourselves we would cook when we got back. I think it was both. I remember hiking down the trail to the Fryingpan Trail head talking with Victor Smith about how wonderful pancakes with a fried egg on top tasted.

After the quick trip to camp in the back of MaxÕs 65 green ford 4x4 we bolted for the kitchen and the large commercial griddles on the Wolf gas stoves. While the griddles warmed, we mixed pancake batter to feed the 16 of us just returned. The tables were set with can upon can of fruit juice, the 48 oz cans that need to be punctured with a can opener that makes a triangular hole, one for pouring and one for an air return, syrup, canned peaches, plates and silverware. There was no eating contest here, nor any competition at all, just hungry staffers returning from a week on the mountain. Everyone ate a lot. Victor Smith ate even more. By the end of the meal Victor had eaten 28 pancakes, 15 fried eggs and many strips of bacon. Although no longer hungry, he was not full! I just got tired of cooking pancakes for him and told him enough was enough. Now I wish I had kept on cooking. I would like to know just how many he could have eaten.

My favorite food at camp was carrot bread. Denny FenstermakerÕs mom would cook carrot breads and send them up to camp by the box full. Each bread was the size of a small bread pan. We would freeze these prized possesions in the big walk in freezer, then when the food bins for a trip were prepared we would put 6 carrot cakes in with the bags of food, one carrot cake for each night of the trip. On Sunday morning we would divy up the cakes between the staff members. Out on the trail, after camp was made, dinner was cooked and eaten the sun was long gone and the kids were in bed for the night the staff members, side-by-side, snug in their sleeping bags would huddle around a candle, produce a carrot bread from a pack, unwrap the aluminum foil covered gem and break the loaf into as many pieces as there were staff on the trip. And while a gentle mountain breeze made the stars overhead dance, while the owls hooted to scare up a mouse, while the kids snored and the camp fire slowly died away we would stuff our mouths with our generous portion of carrot bread and savor the wonderful texture, the exquisite taste, the delicious extra calories for the day. To this day I would rather eat a ragged, torn hunk of carrot cake, a piece large enough to fill my mouth than an elegant looking slice. Serve it to me while IÕm snuggled into a mummy bag on an ensolite pad on a cool starlit night by the light of a candle or dying campfire and I am as close to heaven as a poor boy can be.

If I aquired a love for carrot bread while at camp, I also aquired a dislike for muffins. I suppose I liked muffins before I came to camp, but after a few weeks in camp my taste for the dry little puffs of cooked dough evaporated. Louise, MaxÕs wife, loved to cook lunch for the staff who remained in camp during the week while the rest of the staff were out on the trail or mountain. She cooked the same number of muffins every lunch, no matter how many were in camp, then stood guard over the table to assure every muffin was eaten before the meal could be called complete. Louise always cooked 24 muffins, two pans of 12. If only two of you were in camp, you ate 12 a piece before you were excused from the lunch table. If 10 were there for lunch that day, you each ate 2 except for 4 who ate three, then out the door you went. Was it too much of a good thing? No, just too much. We could not leave the table until the plates of muffins were empty. On occasion we would stuff our pockets, hidden beneath the table from LouiseÕs prying eyes, with muffins. This technique earned our freedom without the culinary suffering. Only the chipmunks who benefited when we emptied our pocket into the woods outside the kitchen knew our secret.