TrailCooking started a long time ago, in 2001, though it looked nothing like it does now. This all came from eating awful meals on the trail in 2001, which is an origin story for so many outdoor companies. Choking down awful freeze-dried meals that hadn’t changed since the Boomers found backpacking in the 70s, and the legacy brands came to be. There were only a few companies making the meals, and they were all awful. They didn’t change because no one demanded it. Have your lasagna and spaghetti, which tasted as if they came out of a can with a big “B” on the label. Beef stew, that reminded you of salty Dinty Moore. Gluey Beef Stroganoff. Salty gravy with turkey, mashed potatoes that were watery. Gourmet it was not. It was low-quality food in mylar bags.
I had started backpacking again in 2001. In college, I went on a couple of trips, but it took me a few more years to get back into it. I remember choking down an awful meal on this lake. It was one of the prettiest places I had been to, but all I can remember, food-wise, is: why did I buy this meal? Not that I remember exactly what I was eating….that one I blanked out.
My path wasn’t food – about selling meals – it would become about how to make food on the trail. In an era when online shopping was in its infancy, you couldn’t find many freeze-dried or dehydrated ingredients yet. How to shop in grocery stores. How to pack up meals. And the biggest was when FBC (Freezer Bag Cooking) was born out of it all.
And 5 cookbooks plus the hundreds on the website.
But all that came out of those early trips, where I almost wanted to starve instead of eating. That summer, I started looking at ancient cookbooks for hiking/backpacking. There weren’t many, and most were from the 1970s, featuring men in denim jeans and sweatbands. The Hippy Hut™ was alive and well in those years. But I did take some ideas from those tomes, and some of the earliest recipes I created were influenced by them.
In the summer of 2001, I found the forums on the Backpacker Magazine website and slid right into it. We were years away from Facebook and similar. But it did have a section on trail food and cooking. And I started sharing what I was making that year. I had a tiny scanner for photos, which I used to scan my 4″x6″ photos shot on film from my trips. I’d post those sparingly, and my favorite recipe of those years got shared.
Some of the first recipes I shared were these ones.
One of my first was had at this lake:
My tent is in the middle. That night, along a lake in the Olympic Mountains, I noshed on a box of Stove Top Stuffing with a tiny 3-ounce can of chicken added and a pouch of freeze-dried green peas. It was sooo gourmet. I had a long way to go, for sure.
But I never stopped – every trip I created something new.
In 2002, I would create the first version of what would eventually become TrailCooking. It didn’t have a name then. Just a static page with a couple of tiny photos, and a few recipes. The world was still small. It then became FreezerBagCooking.com and would stay that till 2009, when we expanded it to TrailCooking.com. In the fall of 2006, blogging became a thing, and I suddenly had both a blog and a website. The photos were still few and tiny. What a time now in 2026, where you can have as many photos as you could desire! I laugh, but it was so frustrating then. When a blog post might have 2 to 3 photos at most, and they were tiny.
Over the years, TrailCooking has ebbed and flowed with my life. Family for me always comes first. I often don’t write unless I feel it in my bones. The homeschooling years of my boys took a lot out of me. Some years, the site functioned on its “evergreen content” – the recipes and how-tos, versus me writing in-depth. Our site was hacked twice, and both times I rebuilt it from the ground up. But I never stopped, once I started. It just changed, with what interested me. I am not a young backpacker anymore, and I am more likely to be in my trailer at night – but what doesn’t change is my love of outdoor cooking.
I can’t guarantee how long I will be writing and producing, but I’d like to think this: 25 years is a long time. I am pretty proud of myself. I came into it with little writing or photography skills and could barely find my way around the internet. A hobby I blundered into gave me a career.
And for that, I really appreciate everyone who has supported my work over the years.
~Sarah