When I get up in the morning, I like to have a good strong cup of coffee.  Or two.  And after a day of hiking, exploring and fishing in the wilderness I like to relax and have a drink.  It helps to take the edge off the aches and pains. 

However, bringing drinks (in liquid form) violates all the lightweight backpacking principles. So the trick is to find a drink that tastes good and adds the minimum of weight to your backpack. If you’re one of those folks that prefers unadulterated scotch, you’re in business. You can’t get much more weight efficient than straight liquor.  The real challenge is if you like mixers in your drink.

The standard approach – at least in my backpacking group - is to mix Crystal Light with (insert your favorite liquor here).  Crystal Light comes in a dozen different flavors, and tastes reasonably good, but it gets tiresome after a while.  And Crystal Light just isn’t that creative.

So that brings me to the quest to find a drink mix that tastes good but is mostly alcohol to minimize weight.  I have tried a different mix on almost every backpacking trip.  Some mixes worked and others have been, let me say, lacking.  Usually, if things work well, the drink of choice will accentuate the trip but one trip and drink stands out in my memory.  In this trip, the drink was the trip.  This hike was during the early season on the west-side of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. 

I knew the weather might be questionable so I picked a drink mix with an appropriate name, Stormy Weather.  Trust me, I picked the drink to match the weather.  My buddies think the drink actually caused the weather. If you try one of these drinks you’ll understand why they reached that conclusion.

Stormy Weather

3 ice cubes, cracked (alternate approach called for here)

1 ½ measures gin

¼ Mandarine Napoleon liqeur

¼ measure dry vermouth

¼ measure sweet vermouth

Orange rind spiral, to decorate

Put the ice cubes into a cocktail shaker and add the gin, Mandarine Napoleon and dry and sweet vermouths. Shake to mix and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Decorate the rim of the glass with the spiral of orange.

We kept running into bad weather on this trip.  It rained during the hike in.  Then we took a side trip up to Fly Trip lakes for fishing and we got stuck under a tree in a hail storm.  When we got to our destination, Spangle Lake, it was covered in snow.  Then on the way out we had to navigate 5 river crossings with a jet-black sky and the sound of thunder all around us.  The river was almost waist deep and raging.  I’m sure we will all remember those river crossings for many years to come.

The trip probably sounds like a disaster but it was a blast!  One of the appealing things about backpacking is that something unexpected almost always happens and the ensuing challenge is unlike anything we normally meet in our very-controlled daily lives. 

I remember in this trip how each night we would build a small fire, laugh and talk about the day’s adventure and then break out the Stormy Weather.  As gnarly as that drink tastes, it was perfect for the trip.  Stormy Weather is now infamous in our hiking group.  I’m still undecided whether to retire Stormy Weather like the jersey of talented football player or to bring it out one more time and risk the ensuing weather.