We are TrailFare

We are TrailFare – Me (Emily), my husband Leroy, and our two daughters, Anna and Alice. We’ve decided to add a blog to our website to share some of our adventures and how our family tries to make the most of what we’ve got. We are planning a family bike trek along the Kettle Valley Rail Trail early this spring, but more on that later. First, a little backstory on how we got started.

In 2018, we decided to take our then 11-month old daughter Anna on a two week truck camping trek on the Alaska highway – Cassiar highway loop. We didn’t have a camper, but we found an inexpensive Coleman tent at Canadian Tire big enough for Anna’s portable crib/playpen, us, and our 11 year old dog. We had invested in a large dehydrator after we got married, and I set to work making a few dried camping meals that would mean we could store less food in a cooler and more in a dry storage bin. I had several batches of spaghetti sauce – knowing Anna loved her noodles – and some Butter Chicken and Chili packaged up in vacuum sealed packages ready to add to our other staples of rice, sugar, coffee and bread. We were never too far from civilization along the road, so could stock up on milk, eggs, and ice for the cooler every few days.

I hadn’t been up the Alaska Highway since I was kid, and it was Leroy’s first trip up that way, so most of the scenery was new. After a bit of a rough start with wasps at the W. A. C. Bennett dam in Hudson’s Hope, we spent our first evening eating steaks and salad at a rec site on the far side that boasted fossilized dinosaur tracks along the nearby creek. We ate the meal IN the tent, I might add – to avoid the wasps – and did find a few dinosaur tracks before turning in for the night.

By the time we got to Liard River Hotsprings provincial park we had a pretty good system going. Before we left we had purchased a number of Plano Sportsman’s trunks – which stack beautifully and have wheels on one end to move them around – into one of which we packed our “Camp Kitchen” and in another the tent and airbeds. On arriving at our next camp, Leroy would set up Anna’s playpen while I dealt with her needs. Then he would set up the stove and propane tank, unload the cooler and dry storage from the truck, while I got Anna settled with some toys and started figuring out what was for dinner. Our dehydrated meals were VERY handy – in one pot I could add the dry food, get it simmering with some water, and in another cook some rice or noodles to go along with it. While that was going I could cut up some carrot sticks or other veggies we had on hand if I was feeling fancy and keep Anna entertained while Leroy set up the tent, airbed, and sleeping mattresses. Within half an hour, we had a hot meal, a fresh camp, with only a few plates and a couple of easy pots to clean up. This gave us way more time to enjoy exploring the areas, try out some fishing, and share a good book in the evenings. We did spend a few nights in hotels so we could get cleaned up and tour places like Whitehorse more easily, but the highlights were definately spent camping – particularly those places off the beaten track like the Haines Pass and Morely Lake.

We started TrailFare as a business in 2020 after my husband, Leroy, got the idea to make and sell some of the dehydrated meals we had enjoyed on that road trip in 2018. By then, Anna was two, and we had another daughter, Alice, who was about six months old. We looked into provincial requirements and soon realized that it wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. First, because our meals had meat, we were going to need to make them in a commercial kitchen – so it wasn’t something I could do in my spare time with two kids. Second, monitoring the food safety of a dehydrator sufficiently to meet a commercial standard was going to be too hard. We started looking into purchasing a freeze drier, renting a kitchen, and figuring out provincial and federal food packaging laws.

Freeze dried food has several huge advantages over dehydrated. The best part is that it rehydrates SO much faster than dehydrated food – five to ten minutes sitting in hot water as opposed to simmering on a stove for half an hour or more. The product is better too – freeze drying typically maintains most of the nutrients and texture of the original meal as it takes place while the food is frozen, rather than at higher temperatures that keep cooking the food while dehydrating. We got our first freeze dryer in December of 2020 and started testing and perfecting our first four recipes.

By the spring of 2021, Alice was old enough to do a little more camping. We went once in the fall of 2020, but mostly had done day trips out fishing on lakes around Vanderhoof. After one rather sleepless night on our questionably leaky airbed in our tired Coleman tent on the ground that fall, we had looked into rooftop tents over the winter. Leroy had done a lot of research and we bought the larger Smittybilt Overlander tent and installed it with some custom built “feet” on the back of the truck so we could fit the dog crate underneath. Pretty slick. Eager to try it out, we were camping at our favourite fishing lake by May 10. We were plenty warm but I’m pretty sure there was a thick layer of frost on everything when we got up in the morning. This is where the freeze-dried meals really shined – hot coffee, bagels, scrambled eggs and sausage, all ready almost ready before I was out of the tent with the kids and NO dishes beyond cups, plates, and cutlery.

In early June we realized we needed some better pictures of our food for our website and, having tested out our new setup, decided to go further afield. We headed up to Germansen Lake north of Vanderhoof for a weekend trip and some views of the mountains. Leroy had been hauling logs out that direction most of the winter, but I’d never been to Germansen Landing and was curious about the area. It was a long drive and everyone was tired and hungry when we pulled into our campsite, but we had the rec site to ourselves and worked on getting things set up. The kids played by the lake throwing rocks with the dog, I worked at setting up the camp kitchen, and Leroy got the tent opened up. We made a fire, boiled some water, and supper was ready. We had rehydrated at least one of each of our meals to use for the photos, so there was lots to go around and everyone could have what they prefered. Anna, now three and half, piped up “Mom – I like camping food!” while enjoying her favourite – stroganoff. We managed to get all our pictures and eat dinner before the rain we saw in Manson Creek caught up with us and we hid out in the tent listening to the thunderstorm outside. We were treated to a beautiful rainbow after it cleared and enjoyed the fire and hot chocolate with the kids before turning in for the night.

The next morning, Leroy got up and was working on breakfast and a fire while I tried out some fishing from the canoe offshore. We got some photos of the scrambled eggs while it was still sunny, having some fun looking at the mountains through the binoculars with the kids. While we were enjoying our coffee around the fire, we were treated to a surprise visit from a cow moose and her calf that came up the beach. I guess she couldn’t hear us as the wind had picked up and the lake had gotten rough. We got a few pictures before she saw us and beat a hasty retreat. After that the wind was pretty cold so we packed up and decided to go back home a different way and make a loop. I still wanted to see Germansen Landing so we traveled north to the Omenica river before driving out towards Mackenzie and the Parsnip reach of Williston lake. We had crossed the Nation river on the way up from Ft St James the day before, now we got to see where it emptied into the reservoir for the Bennett Dam we visited three years earlier.

We got busy with the business over the rest of 2021, and are now working on adding two more meals. Its a lot of work, but we’re excited. It has also been a while since we’ve done a longer trip like the Alaska Highway, so this year we have decided it’s time for another. Our kids love camping and biking – why not put the two together? They are too small to hike or pedal very far themselves, so we have a great bike trailer from Wike that they ride in. We looked into bike treks that we figured we could do with them and figured the Kettle Valley Rail Trail fit the bill. It was an old rail line between Brodie and Midway, so there are no really steep grades. After looking at the various sections and the scenery we most wanted to see in the Myra Canyon, we’ve decided to tackle a shorter 215 km section from Pentiction to Midway. We are currently in the planning and gear-gathering stage, so we’ll be making posts about what we think of the gear and what we learn about the trip before we go.

Stay tuned!