Trail Magic: Vol. 2 ✨

Updates and Happenings from Thruhikers

May 08, 2025

Tim’s OFF on the Ozark Trail!

Welcome back to Trail Magic, our newsletter to update all of you on what’s going on in our outdoor world. Since the most exciting event for us right now is Tim’s attempt to set the unsupported Fastest Known Time on the Ozark Trail, we’re going to focus this edition of Trail Magic entirely on that!

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This is only our second Trail Magic newsletter, so we wanted to remind you about these regular musings we’re sending out on a ~monthly basis. We’ll talk about our favorite gear, share recipes, talk about recent adventures, and much, much more.

In each Trail Magic post, we’ll always touch on (3) core themes:

FOOD: If you know us, you know we love good trail food. That’s why we make our own. Here, we’ll share our favorite recipes (new and old favorites) to inspire your very own dehydrated and freeze-dried culinary endeavors.
GEAR: We love to share more about our favorite gear — especially in the ultralight and cottage brand categories. Here in Substack, we’re sharing our unfiltered takes on what works… and what doesn’t.
ADVENTURE: Want to know what trails we’re hiking, where we’re going next, and what (big) adventures we’re planning? Here’s where we’ll dive into these details.

FOOD

We developed a brand-new recipe for Tim’s Ozark Trail hike: freeze-dried quiche! The inspiration behind this recipe was to come up with something as satisfying as a meal, but as easy to eat as a bar.

After having great success using our Harvest Right Freeze Dryer to make freeze-dried pies and enjoying them dry & crunchy, we put on our thinking caps to figure out if there is a meal that would work in the same format. That’s when it hit us that quiche might be just the thing!

We eat a plant-based diet, so we figured out how to make mock-eggs out of mung bean flour, miso paste, spices, and water, and then used these to mix up four different quiche flavors: chorizo-broccoli, fajita, mushroom-spinach, and potato-chorizo. All of the details to make the chorizo-broccoli quiche are in this video, but let us know if you’d like a written version – if we get enough requests, we’ll put it on our website!

GEAR

As for many long-distance hikers, water filtration is a topic of frequent discussion for us. We’ve tested tons of water filters, and on 99% of our trips we go with hollow-fiber filters like the Platypus Quickdraw (our favorite) or Sawyer Squeeze. But for his FKT attempt, Tim is using iodine tablets!

The reason for this is to save time. When Renee set the unsupported FKT on the Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail last summer, she wasted a TON of time sitting next to streams filtering water. Over the course of a long trip, any water filter will slow down as it gets filled up with sediment, and there’s only so much you can do in the field to clear it out.

Based off of Renee’s experience, Tim decided to chemical-treat his water so that he wouldn’t have to do any manual filtering. He’ll just drop the tablets into his water bottle, then throw the bottle back in his backpack, and wait 30 minutes until the water is safe to drink. A common complaint about iodine tablets is that they introduce a chemical taste into the water, but for ~4 days, he’s confident he’ll be able to handle it!

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ADVENTURE

Ozark Trail FKT Attempt

As of right now, Tim just posted his starting video for his [hopefully] record-setting hike on the Ozark Trail! His goal is to complete the 230-mile trail in 4 days, averaging just under 60-miles per day. That gives him a little bit of breathing room to set the record – it is currently 4 days, 11 hours, and 28.5 minutes (51.4 miles per day). That’s more miles per day than he has ever hiked, so time will tell if he can do it.

The trail won’t be a walk in the park: it has plenty of elevation gain, it can be overgrown, it’s full of ticks, and it crosses an enormous number of streams. But, it’s a special trail for both of us because we spent a few years living in Columbia, Missouri, not far from the Ozark Trail, and while there we hiked it every chance we got. We even volunteered on a crew to do some trail building on the Ozark Trail back in 2017.

Tim’s very excited to see if he’s capable of joining the club of people who set FKT’s, and as the trip has approached he’s gotten more and more nervous about whether or not he has it in him. I (Renee) warned him that he’d get nervous as the trip approached, and it’s been interesting watching him get more and more nervous as it comes up. Let’s hope he can do it!

We will have a long Youtube showing how Tim prepped for the Ozark Trail our Youtube channel soon!