Zip Lock Bags on Canoe Trips

[yknpdlr]

I always had them in my flight suit! They come in really handy after about 2 hours of low level flight!

When I used to refuel fighters on long overwater deployment flights, There was a time when one said to us, "hey, watch this...." as he performed a barrel roll off our wing. Impressive. Then one of us said "hey, watch this....." while apparently nothing much visible happened. "What was that?" "Well, the pilot just left his seat and went back to the can to take a leak and then to the galley to grab a sandwich...." Since my son was a fighter jock I can tell these stories.

Zip locks? Dozens and dozens. Most of my home dehydrated food is double bagged, When they get full and bulky for a hiking crew meal, I always fold over the top and put a thick rubber band over to keep it closed. Dozens and dozens of rubber bands. I always tell the student cook to slip them on their wrist for ease of later disposal and reuse.

 

[LanceR]

Here's a good source for odd sized bags...

https://www.clearbags.com/bags/food

Best regards to all,


Lance

 

[Seeker]

I try to do like Turtle with the colored bag system, but I tend to pre-pack my meals in ziplocks... e.g., my breakfast is oatmeal, so i put a half cup of oatmeal, a tbsp of Nido powder, a tbsp of brown sugar, and a handful of raisins in a bag, roll it up, and that's a breakfast. I often tuck a teabag in with it, so i'm not looking for that elsewhere (i'm very uncoordinated when i wake up, and truly hate mornings.) My lunches look like MREs... a ziplock containing a bagel, jerky/landjaeger, tea, cocoa, or soup, cheese stick, and some dried fruit. Dinner is mostly Hawkvittles, so they're self contained. I'll take all my breakfast bags and put them in a plastic shopping bag of a color, and do the same with the lunches and dinners. My variation is a 4th bag which contains snacks, drink mixes, and (in a zip lock) some paper towels. I calculate about 3 sheets per day, mostly to wipe out my pot.

Other than meals, I don't use a lot of them for organizing anything... I rely on a simple one-big-compartment pack design for things like cookware, shelter, bedding, food bag, and clothes, inside a garbage bag if backpacking or drybag if canoeing. I prefer 3 outer compartments (two small one large) as carriers for water bottles and as a 'junk drawer' containing everything else. The junk drawer items that can't get wet go in a small orange dry bag. the others just go in the pocket. My hatchet tucks in with one water bottle, and a saw goes in the other if long, or in the junk drawer if short/folding. My cell phone goes in its own dry bag in my pocket. Spare batteries get taped together and dated for rotation, in the orange bag, along with my TP, First Aid Kit, repair kit, pad and paper, and headlamp. Things like sunscreen, bug spray, compass, bungies, cordage, spoon, sheath knife, water treatment, hygiene kit (toothbrush, paste, comb, soap, washcloth, pack towel) etc, don't care if they get wet, and go loose in the junk drawer. Sometimes the hygiene kit goes inside the pack.

I did just get a nice Sea To Summit drybag with integrated pack harness for Christmas, which has no outside pockets, but that's just for canoe trips, and I'll keep my water in a small pack that gets attached to it during portages. The rest of the system will stay pretty much the same.

 

[Chip]

Thank you to all who replied to this post. It is interesting to learn that I'm in good company in my reliance on zip-locks. I appreciate the good suggestions on different ways to pack a food barrel and to learn a other uses for these handy little sacks we call zip locks.

Zip locks were invented in the 50s, first became commercially available as cooking bags in the 60s and then became popular for food storage in the 70s. It is always amazing to me to consider that people have been canoe camping for hundreds of years without all the gear we have now. Zip locks are just one example of gear that didn't exist and now all of us use.

Here's two more reasons to carry zip-locks: to have someplace other than the woods to leave used toilet paper--I know, I know, leave no trace, but if you can't do that, at least don't litter the TP, and to have someplace to store any edible mushrooms you run across.

 

[scratchypants]

I only use zip locks for items that need extra protection from moisture - cell phone, permits, tp, etc. For food I use cheap, commercial restaurant, plastic bags - $10 for 500.

 

[Black_Fly]

How do you guys solo trip with such food packs? I have to combine food with other items or I won't have the room in just 2 packs.

 

[Bothwell Voyageur]

We'll use large ziplocks for organising meal groups but dry meal ingredients will go in wax paper bags, taped up with paper masking tape. The great thing about these is that they burn really well so can be used for fire lighting. We do use small ziplocks for wet ingredients like pastes though true liquids go in Nalgene or other similar bottles I borrow from the surplus stock we have for taking water samples. Not surprisingly we also use my own barrel organisers as well so worries about colour coding individual bags, lined with Refectix these also make decent coolers.

 

[yellowcanoe]

How do you guys solo trip with such food packs? I have to combine food with other items or I won't have the room in just 2 packs.

One 30 l food barrel and one pack. I seem not to pack compactly so my 115 liter pack does for everything else.

 

[TrailBlaser]

Memaquay's hygiene thread prompted McCrae's toiletries thread. I'm crediting McCrae for prompting this zip-lock thread. My toiletries go into a zip lock.

I use a lot of zip locks. Besides toiletries, there's spare batteries, books, maps, phone/camera juice pack and cables, coils of string, tube of sunblock, toilet paper and so on. Then there's the kitchen box and food barrel. S&P shakers get their own bag, as do the grubby sponge and dishwash, the bag of matches and the tea bags.

Last trip, I overdid it with the food barrel. It was my first time with a food barrel and I couldn't figure out how to load it so that I could find food items. So I built a zip lock bag for every day of the trip. Other than the first and twelfth (last) day, each bag had a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so it mostly didn't matter which bag I pulled out of the barrel. This daily approach meant bringing 11 bags of breakfast rather than 1 container with 11 servings. Same thing with lunch, which was mostly protein powder. So, 12 gallon bags, and besides dinner, each of those held a breakfast bag and a lunch bag--34 zip locks in all. There were also 6 zip locks of trail mix. And I had a TJ's pounder plus chocolate bar in it's own zip lock. Organizationally, the bag-a-day method worked well, but it was wasteful and by the end of the trip I had quite a collection of empty zip locks. Also, the bags resulted in a lot of wasted space in the food barrel, which didn't matter on this trip.

So, in all, I think I had 50 or 60 zip locks along on that trip. That seems excessive to me. I should obviously rework my food packing, where I could save about 35 bags. I'll still use zip locks for my toiletries and for protecting items and keeping like things together. I also use the bags to keep cords and cables from intermingling. But I think I should be able to pull off a trip with 20 or less bags. Still a lot. Way more than any voyageur ever packed.

Am I alone in my use/abuse of ziplocks?

On my recent 10-day Adirondack trip I took a 30L barrel. I used labeled gallon ziplock freezer bags inside the barrel, one for each day. Each bag contained breakfast, lunch and dinner for the day. I used the two barrel buckets that came with the barrel as well - one with a ziplock containing beverages (coffee, tea, hydration powders, hot chocolate etc.) and the other had a ziplock in it with snacks. I put the last day's bag in the bottom and worked back up to the first day's, then the beverage bucket and the snack bucket at the top. When the ziplock for the day was done, I just put it back in the barrel for use on the next trip. I put the barrel a good distance from my camping/sleeping area and perhaps being overcautious (or maybe a bit silly), I did bring a rope and tied the barrel off to a tree (even though I am certain a determined bear would have no problem freeing it). I had no major carries on this particular trip and I liked the way the system worked, so I will probably use it again for similar trips.

 

[Ralph]

As with most people, we use a lot of zip locks that mostly get re-used at home, usually they get re-used several times. We differ from most in that we carry our lunch in a 1/2 sized pail with a Gamma Seal lid. We find it handy to grab at lunch time and we replenish it as needed from the main food storage.

 

[Keeled Over]

Love the zip locks.

Use for toiletries and all manner of food stuff in the barrel. I was even putting my factory sealed beef jerky in them, and then in the barrel, until the fine folks here straightened me out.

I put my granola bars, snacks, mini Snickers and all in a couple of old screw top peanut butter jars.

I start my trip with a couple of empty zips nested, and then as the trip progresses I put my trash in it till full, and by that point either the peanut butter jars or another zip is empty so I start using that one.

I only use freeze dried food any more so the only dirty dishes I have are long handled spoons. Following a meal I rinse my spoon and slide it between the 2 nested zips, at least until my Pringles can is empty. Then the spoons ride in the empty can.

I always bring 2 sets of my meds just in case. They are in screw top bottles but I also put the bottles in a small zip lock. One set of meds goes in the dry box and the other in the barrel - just like zip locked toilet paper.

 

[yknpdlr]

For those who think that bags can be odor proof I have a story. I have heard that a bear's sense o smell is 7 times better than than of a blood hound.
I was an Air Force air crewmember (navigator) when we flew into the Philippines one day with a load of airmen passengers on a KC-135. Now the regulation required us to let local instpctors on board before we can deplane ourselves or our gear. So the local gendarmes brought sniffer dogs (German shepards) on board to look for drugs or other contraband. One airman's bag alerted one of the dogs in particular. The bag was torn apart and it was found to contain a sealed can of tuna fish buried under masses of clothing and other items as the offending smellable object that interested the dog. After that I am under no illusion that any plastic bag can prevent dogs or bears from scenting on it, no matter how well it is packed.

 

[PacketFiend]

For those who think that bags can be odor proof I have a story. I have heard that a bear's sense o smell is 7 times better than than of a blood hound.

I dropped some pocket lint on a trip once. An eagle saw it, a deer heard it, and a bear smelled it.
(adapted from a proverb of unknown origin)

I will admit to using a copious amount of ziplocs on trips. I've become quite adept at sucking all the air out of them and creating a passable vacuum seal with just my fingers and lungs, probably because that's how I freeze all my meat at home to prevent freezer burn.

In addition to all the ziplocked food, I take an extra dozen each of two or three sizes of ziploc bags, and I almost always use at least most of them. I try to reuse them when I can, but to be honest, I usually don't. On a couple of trips we've premade things like pancakes or bannock and ziplocked them, but only because we were rationing food and it was necessary. I really don't think using too many ziplocs is any different than using freeze dried packages in terms of the waste produced, and usually, freeze dried meals will make more waste than me dehydrating it and putting it into ziplocs.

Ziplocs are just too cheap and useful - and where necessary (because they're cheap), burnable too, if you really need to eliminate the odour.

 

[Barry1954!]

Likewise. Lots of Ziplocks in various sizes as above. Including anything in a small plastic bottle or tube that could potentially leak; sunscreen, bug juice, Bronners, cooking oil. Book(s) and journal go in a small flat dry bag made, along with reading glasses and pen.




Like Turtle and Griz I segregate breakfast, lunch, and dinner foodstuffs into different colored stuff bags in the barrel, along with a 4[SUP]th[/SUP] stuff bag that contains stove and cookware. The bags are different colors, but because I pay no attention to colors each stuff bag drawstring has a plastic key tag, “LUNCH” or “BREAKFAST”.

Post meal I just shuffle the next needed stuff bag to the top of the barrel. If (when) the bags shift around in an emptying barrel I can just reach in, pull out a drawstring and see which bag I have hold of from the barrel depths.

The each individual meal in a separate Zip-lock wouldn’t work for me. I bring a variety of foodstuffs and don’t know in advance what exactly I want to select for any meal before I sit down to make it, or how much I want to eat at that time. If I Zip-locked each day’s pre-planned meals I be stealing the breakfast from one and the dinner from another and have a lot of Zip-lock search and inspect after a day or two.

The other household godsend is rubber bands. Wrapped around the Zip-lock containing the bug dope or Bronners, around tarp poles so thay don’t rattle, around the journal to keep the pages from flapping when I write on windy days.

When I take a rubber band off it gets wrapped around a canteen so I know where I put it for reuse. And so I don’t stick it in a pants pocket, where I will pull something else out and leave a Hansel and Gretel trail of rubber bands on the ground around camp.

Rubber bands YES ! I make thousands from motorcycle/bicycle inner tubes "ask your nearby MC shop for old ones", use them on your rolled clothes, towels , Roll tents/mattress/bedding tightly them wrap with ranger bands ie. innertube bands compacts them ever more . Larger tubes "truck/farm machinery etc." can be cut into strips for rubber rope.

 

[LarrySw45]

Here's two more reasons to carry zip-locks: to have someplace other than the woods to leave used toilet paper--I know, I know, leave no trace, but if you can't do that, at least don't litter the TP, and to have someplace to store any edible mushrooms you run across.

In the same Bag ?
Larry S

 

[Alan Gage]

I use a lot of zip locks, mostly for food. All my food is dry ingredients and it's stored in separate baggies (inside barrel bags for easier organization). I use both gallon and quart sizes.

As each bag is emptied out they're stored inside another empty bag. At the end of the trip I have one or two baggies full of empty baggies. Since I was only using them for dry ingredients most of the baggies are reusable.

Alan

 

[TrailBlaser]

As noted, I use a lot of ziplock bags, the main reason being that I find it an easy and inexpensive way to organize my food. The little bit of additional odor protection they provide I consider a secondary benefit. I like that I can easily label them (with a sharpie), see the contents of each and reuse them on subsequent trips.