The Bircher Muesli Mutiny

Howdy to all of you super-outdoorsy souls who are already planning your menu for this spring’s camping, climbing, rafting, bicycling, kayaking, or hiking trip. It’s a general truth that dehydrated meals are the way to go when you’re going to be carrying any kind of weight on your back or in your boat . . . and it’s also true that while some of these expensive, ready-made meals that you buy in outdoor stores are pretty darned good, others are, at best, kind of mediocre. Why not set mediocrity aside and start each day on the trail with a fresh and energizing cup of Bircher muesli? It’s easy to make, and it tastes great.

Bircher muesli is one of those camp meals that tastes good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It is a wholesome and creative choice that satisfies and that is super easy to make. If you roughly follow the script of oats, fruit, coconut, honey, nuts, and berries, you will end up with a good muesli. It is easy to pack and you can prepare a ready-mix in advance of your trip.

And the best part? Muesli doesn’t require any cooking, which makes it an ideal choice for those trips that are going to include some dry camps. Healthful, tasty, and easy to prepare . . . you can’t get it wrong.

I started making my own version of Bircher muesli the summer that Mitch the Mobius joined our trail crew as camp cook. Our crew worked trail up in the high country, so the work season was short. We made summer base camp at one of the high lakes once the snow receded and the supply horses could make it up the trail. We operated as trail rovers who performed trail maintenance, cleaned up camp sites, and packed out a whole heck of a lot of annoying garbage from people who didn’t know how to think straight. They were willing to carry the full containers, cans, and wrappers uphill, but they couldn’t be bothered to carry the same empty and lighter packaging downhill? We never could figure this one out.

Depending on our destination, we might have to pack some overnight gear to cover the necessary miles — but, as a rule, we generally did our best to return to camp each night to eat around the fire and sleep in our roomy and dry, canvas wall tents.

We had it pretty good in camp, as it was stocked at the beginning of each season with gear and supplies, compliments of Sam, Jim, and Katy — our much-appreciated district pack horses. At the beginning of the summer, we had brief and glorious access to butter, eggs, cheese, and cream . . . and we even had an ice cream maker for our end-of-season Ice Cream Feed — the snowfields providing us with the “ice” to freeze the cream. The ice cream ran a bit on the soft side. Still, it was pure 100% wilderness luxury.

Mitch the Mobius was what you would call an Unknown Quantity. He came from Havre, Montana, and was a self-professed jack-of-all-camp-cooks. I don’t know about the veracity of his self-professing, but one thing we were quick to learn about Mitch: He was an ace bull-shitter who ruled camp with a Mighty Spoon.

What Mitch made, we were to eat . . . all according to the Rules of Mitch. And that was that. His was a simple system: Whatever we didn’t finishing eating the night before was added to breakfast. Whatever we didn’t finish eating at breakfast was added to dinner. And so it went. If this doesn’t sound so bad, I ask you to think back to your past few meals. And imagine combining them all together. Trust me. It’s a bad idea.

Mitch wasn’t that great of a cook to begin with . . . and then add to this Mitch’s Recycled Leftovers . . . well, dinner started to feel more like a punishment than a satiating pleasure. Example: If you’ve ever had Montana chili added to your morning oatmeal, you’ll know what I mean. Think about it. It was a real quandary: do I add brown sugar and powdered milk to the concoction? Or hot sauce? It was always a tough choice, one that we didn’t feel we should have to be making. I mean how hard is it to make a simple, decent, edible meal with traditionally-accepted ingredients?

No matter how much complaining we did, Mitch stuck to his Zero Tolerance Policy of Leftovers. Mitch added dinner macaroni to breakfast scrambled eggs, and he then stirred said macaroni-scrambled eggs into the beef barley soup for dinner. There was no end to the ludicrous chain of combinations. Leftover morning coffee was used as the liquid ingredient for dinner cornbread . . . coffee-cornbread would get crumbled into the next day’s breakfast pancakes . . . coffee-cornbread-pancakes would be torn and then stirred into dinner biscuits.

I think you get the idea. You had the sense that what had been served for our first night in camp was still morphing itself in Mitch’s Petri Pot of Anthropological Proportions — resulting in a marathon of strangeness that would only end when we ate our final camp meal in early September.

The more we complained, I swear, the more we were subjected to Mitch’s One-Man Campaign of Retaliation and he made even larger portions at mealtime . . . meaning that even more Special Ingredients were destined to be added to Mitch’s next Mazy Meal. And on it went. We were caught up in Mitch’s Infinite Mobius Meal Plan of Frugal Retribution. As I could see it, there was no solution to the dilemma other than to take up fasting.

This is when I started to make my own Bircher muesli. I could guarantee that I was going to start my day off right with food that wouldn’t sucker-punch my gut later in the morning. And it was simple. I would soak my muesli in my mess kit the night before and hang it in the bear bag. Voila! Instant healthful breakfast awaiting my morning.

The rest of the crew became privy to the Revelation of My Bircher Muesli Breakfast and, before you knew it, we were all hoisting Survival Quantities of muesli up the cable in the bear bag each evening. The result? Mitch’s leftovers started to back up on Mitch in a big way. Even Mitch couldn’t think of what to do next with his Salami Corn Salsa French Toast Chicken à la King if we weren’t going to consent to eat it.

Plus, the side benefits of us planning on muesli for breakfast is that we could snack on some of the raw ingredients for lunch when we were out on the trail. Muesli: a win-win choice. And a big Paleo Prize for us Rebels with a Righteous Nutritional Cause.

It all came round right when the district’s horse wrangler came up the hill to pack our gear out for the season. It was Tradition that the wrangler would come bearing berries for pie and fresh heavy cream for the ice cream maker. All of us were quite vocal, along with some strident cussing, that Mitch was not to lay the breath of a single fingerprint on our end-of-season Berry Pie a la Mode. No, as much as we all knew the rules of the trail to respect the camp’s Cookie, Mitch was not going to throw a tangle into our Ice Cream Soirée.

Which just goes to show the power of Tradition. We were willing to endure substandard, frugal, gut-bomb meals for an entire season . . . but mess with our pie and ice cream? We became a pack of mama bears protecting our beloved cubs. The season was concluding, and we realized that we had somehow survived Mitch’s splenetic temperament and gastronomic combinations, for better or for worse.

The crew was happy that Mitch didn’t return to camp the following summer. We heard that he fell in love with some woman from Missoula whom he met while grocery shopping in the meat department of Safeway and they were fixing to get hitched. We wondered if she knew what she was getting into, what with Mitch’s extreme frugality and hardline philosophy, but who can say who or what wins out in the ways of love? Still, we joked around the campfire that the wedding cake would likely have chunks of beef stew in it. Congratulations, best wishes, and happy trails.