What to eat in the Heat

Behind the Scenery

Planning a hike into Grand Canyon? What should you feed your body for strenuous exercise in a hot, dry climate? Preventive Search and Rescue rangers share their favorite trail snacks and pro tips how on to avoid a sufferfest in the heat. Explore how to fuel your body for the beautiful challenges of hiking in canyon country.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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WHAT TO EAT IN THE HEAT – Transcript

L: Leslie Grove

- unnamed guests B: Brendan Oates A: Anna Marini S: Stan Lindstedt

B: If you guys were to hike to the River and back in a single day, would you do anything differently? Anything the same?

- I wouldn't bring chocolate. - [Laughs] L: Hi everyone! My name is Leslie and I’m an intern here at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. If it wasn’t already apparent from my heavy breathing right now, I am recording this while on a hike. I’m making my way south on the Transept Trail towards the North Rim Visitor Center, and while I have a relatively short hike ahead me, I’ve stocked my backpack with a 48-ounce bottle of water and my favorite snack for a light hike – rice cakes with peanut butter.

You know, before coming to the North Rim earlier this summer at the start of my internship, I had never seen the Canyon before. And actually, I had never really spent a lot of time in the Southwest in general. I’m a Midwestern gal and the dry heat here in the canyonlands really took me by surprise, especially considering I went from living at 600 ft elevation to over 8,000 ft elevation here at the North Rim. Luckily, the North Rim offers a good amount of shade, but once you step out from under those protective branches, you can heat up very easily.

Knowing that this hot, dry, elevated… – and beautiful, I should add -- place would be my home for the coming months, I started asking around – “What are the best trail snacks?” / “How much water should I be drinking?” / “How much hiking in a day is too much?” Because, honestly, I had no idea. And it turns out that the answers to these questions vary a lot based on whom you ask.

You’re listening to a Grand Canyon Behind the Scenery Canyon Cut. Once again, my name is Leslie, and I’ll be hiking you through how I learned “What to Eat in the Heat”.

This podcast is broken up into 3 parts. First, I’ll share what I’ve learned about hiker rescue operations in the Canyon – covering instances of when people didn’t know what to eat in the heat. Next, I realize just how little biology I remember from high school, as I explore what goes on inside our bodies when we don’t properly nurture ourselves in the canyon climate. And last, I reflect on everything I’ve learned in putting this episode together. So, without further ado, let’s hit the trails.

I started off this project looking for a single, catch-all answer, like a cheat sheet, to how to best pack my lunchbox before hitting the trails in and around the Canyon. I chatted with both coworkers and Park visitors, and started with an easy enough question: “What is your go-to snack while hiking in Grand Canyon?”

Oh, and shout-out to my coworker Brendan for doing some awesome detective work for me on the Inner Canyon trails.

- Okay, so I have here… dark chocolate peanut butter with butter toffee peanuts- - It’s so melted! - It's so melted, you can't see into the bag. - When I’m doing a day hike in the heat, I specifically am looking for foods with a high salt content. My go-to food that I would never eat at home – which is delicious on a super-hot day when I’m sweating – are Vienna sausages. - Sometimes I love having the stuffed peanut butter, like pretzels? - Oh, okay. Oh, those are awesome. - Aw, they’re great. - I really like cheddar crackers. I am a snacker at heart, so I have a little jar and I put probably 5 different types of salty snacks in there, kinda little bit of a hodgepodge. And I like to have variety, because it’s really nice to make sure that you have something that you want to eat. - And I met someone who said they had trail mix and it was just gummy worms with gummy bears…? - Oh my gosh, hah. - So, yeah, technically still a mix! L: Do any of these answers surprise you? If you’ve hiked in Grand Canyon National Park in recent years, you, too, may have been asked this question, likely by a uniformed ranger with a group called PSAR, or Preventive Search And Rescue.

The goal of PSAR is to educate and support hikers descending into the Grand Canyon, who may be unaware of or underestimate the dangers posed by the hot, arid canyon climate. PSAR is intended to minimize the need to request emergency extractions by Search And Rescue (or SAR) teams, hence the “preventative” in Preventative Search And Rescue.

I spoke with 2 PSAR Rangers to learn about their experiences in educating the public about dietary health while hiking at Grand Canyon National Park. A: Everybody does PSAR whether they know it or not. It’s something that I think everyone does when they work for the Park Service if they interact with folks, from trail crew, maintenance, to people working the visitor centers or lodge folks.

L: I’m here with PSAR Lead Anna Marini, with how she first got involved with PSAR, and her approach to connecting with visitors when on the clock as a PSAR ranger here at Grand Canyon.

A: I’ve been a Park Ranger in the Park Service for nine seasons now.

I used to work in Big Bend National Park in West Texas. And it's a large park in landmass but small park in personnel and so everybody was kind of trained in a little bit of everything.

I was often interacting with people and I found that I really enjoy helping people plan their trips or giving them suggestions on what to do, how to stay safe, to make sure it’s appropriate for their entire family or their entire trip.

And I didn't realize PSAR was a thing until I heard about the Grand Canyon program through some coworkers and I kind of realized, “Wow, I could do this all the time. That's really cool.”

We try to figure out peoples why’s. You asked why I did PSAR, well I ask why they're here. You know, what do they want to see here today? And most people don't have a plan; they just know the beauty of Grand Canyon, right. Once somebody tells me, “Yeah, I don't have a plan for today,” and I say, “Well, let's make one together.” And usually people are receptive to that.

L: I pulled some numbers from the PSAR database to illustrate just how many people Grand Canyon PSAR rangers interact with in a given year. So, here goes: In 2019, PSAR rangers made over 160,000 general contacts with visitors, took over 21,000 preventative actions, and performed more than 700 hiker assists.

A: So, it's really cool for me to know that I was a part of those numbers since I was here last year, so that's kind of neat. But yeah, what does that mean? So, when we’re down on trail PSARing, we carry little clickers with us. And we’re keeping track of what we’re seeing.

So, general contact: we have had a conversation with somebody or even just a “Hello,” you know, with a visitor on trail. They recognize me as a Ranger. You know, I have my Ranger hat on, I have my shirt, my badge, everything. They possibly recognize me as somebody that they could ask questions to or get help from later – that type of thing.

L: When I had my coworker Brendan interview visitors in the Canyon for me earlier, he was having conversations with folks that are pretty similar to what a PSAR ranger would have with hikers during a “general contact”. Let’s listen in:

B: How’s the hike going so far? - It’s good – we started at sunrise, tried to beat the heat, we didn't really succeed in that. B: Yeah, it’s like… thermometer says… 140. - Yeah. Oh my gosh, that was very rewarding. I came back up here, like, after we got down to the River, hiking back up, just like every, every shady spot we stopped for like 5 minutes and hydrated. - Yeah. B: And when you guys were hiking down, did you see any of the signs, like the guy throwing up? - Yeah! - Oh, yes. The guy throwing up, that's sus’d me out. I was, like, I don't want to be that guy, I don't wanna be that guy…

B: Have you been that guy yet? - No! I’m hangin’ in there, I'm doing very well, I’m proud of myself.

B: Did those signs – I know you don’t wanna be that guy – but did those signs make you feel any different? - It definitely made me pay really close attention to how my body was feeling. - Yeah. L: So, that’s a playful example, I’d say, but sometimes those quick conversations, or general contacts, can turn into a more serious conversation, or a preventative action, based on what hikers’ responses are.

A: I ask, you know, what they have with them: Did they pack a lunch? You know, do they have snacks for everybody in their party? That type of thing. I find that people are so excited to get hiking that they don't stop by the market to get food for the rest of the day, or they don't realize how long they are going to be out so they didn't bring enough food, you know, for the whole day or their whole trip, or they don't know how far they're hiking, you know, and by the time they realize that they run out of food.

In that conversation, though, if we ask them what their plan is for the day, what supplies they have, things like that, and we turn that into more of a preventative conversation, like “Oh, I really don't think it's a good idea to go down to the River today and here's why…” or “I really think you need to have more food or water with you,” things like that, then we consider that a preventative action. So, we gave them 21,000 acts of knowledge, is how I kind of see that.

And sometimes, those preventative actions turn into a hiker assist later.

L: Volunteer PSAR Ranger Stan Lindstedt shares one such example of a hiker assist:

S: I was at the 3-mile rest house, and that’s what we call “the sweep”, we do that in the afternoon, and it’s pretty tough, because we’re down 3 miles in the middle of the summer. It can be really hot down there and almost every time I’m down there, I’m involved in what’s called a “hiker assist”, where we’re actually helping someone physically.

But I was there and a young man, a 25-year-old, came in, collapsed on the floor of the rest house, and started shaking. He wasn’t even planning on going to the river, but he decided spontaneously to do so. So, he had been to the river, was on his way back, and that’s when he collapsed in the rest house.

And he hadn’t been drinking anything, which is, you know, a phenomenal shock. And I was like, “Why weren’t you drinking?” And he said – and it’s important to note at this point he’s from South Carolina, and therefore what I’m about to say will make more sense – he said, “Well, because I wasn’t sweating.” So, his experience was that you’re wet if you sweat. And because, of course, in the super dry heat we have in the Grand Canyon, the sweat evaporates right away. That’s what it’s supposed to do, that’s why you sweat: to keep yourself cool. And he had been losing a phenomenal amount of water and was seriously dehydrated. Because he was 25, we could bring him back and within a couple of hours, he was fine, and he was able to walk out on his own. But it did require some intervention.

A: That 700 hiker assist number, that comes from people that we actually needed to help out. Whether that they just need a few more salty snacks to get out of the Canyon, electrolyte powder, they may need a Band-Aid for their blister, they maybe they completely forgot their water bottle and they’re on South Kaibab with no access to water – well, here's a water bottle for them.

Sometimes that hiker assist turns into a Search And Rescue incident. Search And Rescue is a little interesting term because it sounds like we’re actually having to look for them -- sometimes we do – and the rescue also sounds very dramatic as well. Sometimes that means we need to have an EMT or a paramedic come down and assess this person more.

You can kind of see how that changes overtime, right? You know, sometimes it's just the general contact but we may see that general contact later in the search and rescue. It’s kind of interesting. Sometimes I talked to somebody in the morning and then later in the evening I'm going to help them again.

B: And would you guys tell anyone who’s hiking to the River and back in a day, like, any advice? Besides not bringing chocolate? - Bring, uh… There's not water at the River! Bring as much water to the River as you physically can. - [laughter]

S: Most people understand that they have to drink. But what people understand less is that not only are they losing water in their sweat; they’re losing a great deal of salt. Sweat contains over a gram of sodium per quart of sweat, so you lose a lot. The more you sweat, the more dehydrated you become, and then you can get into these physiological conditions.

L: I’m chatting again with PSAR Ranger Stan Lindstedt, who, as my luck would have it, is a retired professor of physiology.

S: The messaging in the Canyon has changed in the last two years to – instead of “drink, drink, drink”, it’s now “drink when you’re thirsty.”

And that’s really important: is to, to not try to second-guess your own physiology. If you’re thirsty, please drink, and the other thing is, always pay attention to: are you urinating? And when you do urinate, is it really dark in color? – in which case, you’re not drinking enough. Or if it’s just completely clear, you’re drinking too much! There should be some color to your urine.

L: In a place like Grand Canyon, you are constantly reminded of how small you are. Just standing out on the Rim, I am minuscule. I’m an ant, you know? But when Stan explained to me what goes on inside our bodies on a cellular level… Oh my goodness, I am a giant! I am this huge organism with this entire universe inside of me.

And within that universe… there’s a lot going on – understatement of the year – but I… luckily, I had Stan walk me through it, to explain to me exactly what happens inside our bodies when we don’t sufficiently replace those salts we lose when we sweat.

S: So, the individual cells, are constantly communicating with your blood. And the concentration of the blood determines to a great extent what gets into and what gets out of cells. So, when you start messing around with the concentration of salt in your blood, what you’re really doing is changing the concentration of important constituents inside the cell.

And it’s inside the cell where life exists. So, you can think of the blood as this constant bath that’s trying to make life as perfect as possible for all of the cells, the hundred trillion cells, that make up a human body. As soon as we start changing the composition of the blood, we will change the composition of the cell.

And that can have super drastic consequences for the person that is under those conditions. One of those, that’s very dramatic, is hyponatremia, where now what happens is excess water goes into the cell, the cell expands and swells. And most of our cells, we can handle that, but the swelling of the cells in the brain can be fatal.

L: If you didn’t catch that, that term for extreme salt deficiency is hyponatremia, not to be confused with hypothermia, which is a whole different story and honestly deserves its own podcast episode.

S: If you drink too much, what you’re doing is diluting out your blood and “hypo-”, low, and “-natremia”, -natremia refers to sodium – so, you have a low salt content in your blood. And while that may not sound like it’s something bad, the consequence of that is that you’ll have swelling in the brain: cerebral edema.

And, any time that you have swelling in the brain, now you’re losing central nervous system function, and that can really, really escalate to a life-threatening situation, quickly.

People can – and have – in the Canyon died from cerebral edema.

So that one [hyponatremia] is the most serious – that isn’t the most common. What’s the most common are just people having heat exhaustion, where they are mildly dehydrated, they are… just… overcome with the conditions of the Sun and the heat.

Things that taste good when you’re losing salt are not necessarily things you would eat at home. And one of the things I eat exclusively when I’m on PSAR, are little cans of Vienna sausage. Turns out, that those tiny cans of Vienna sausage can contain 1,200 milligrams of sodium! It’s an enormous amount of salt. So, it’s a great replacement.

Some people like sweet things, some people like fruity things, some people just like a hard-boiled egg – whatever it is, that’s great, but the most important thing is to make sure that your salt intake is adequate and then the nutrition – as far as I’m concerned – is whatever tastes good to you. L: So, what did we learn? How can you avoid becoming a statistic? Let’s recap: as a rule, carry more food and water than you think you will need when hiking into the canyon… so that if your trip is extended unexpectedly, you’re prepared. And remember – pack something that you know you’re going to want to eat. As long as you’re keeping an eye on your salt levels, it’s literally to taste!

And if you run into a roving PSAR Ranger, say Hi! And have an honest discussion about your hiking capabilities, expectations, and supplies. PSAR Rangers, volunteer and full-time, can be found at trailheads and along the trails in the Canyon to help you make the best of your experience.

Remember: hyponatremia and dehydration are both serious conditions that can have lasting effects on your health. If you need help preparing for your hike, take a moment to chat with a PSAR ranger, park ranger, or park employee, any of whom would be happy to guide you in planning your trip. Like PSAR Ranger Anna says, “we all do PSAR” here at Grand Canyon.

Now, I’d like to take a moment to share something that I realized as I was investigating the world of Search and Rescue and emergency services here at Grand Canyon.

I count myself lucky – very, very lucky – that I have these resources at my disposal should I ever need them, but personally, moving forward, I am going to do everything I can to make sure that I am best-prepared for any hike that I undertake: in terms of water, food, gear, buddies, everything, so that I minimize the chance of having to call on these emergency response teams.

You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, but I think it’s important to communicate that every time a ranger or EMT sets out on an emergency mission, they are putting themselves in harm’s way in order to get that sick or injured person to safety.

Every extra case of water bottles or life-saving bag of chips is carried into the canyon by PSAR rangers themselves, and when an injured hiker is unable to continue their hike out of the canyon by themselves, it’s PSAR rangers who literally help carry that person out. Or, it’s an emergency responder who has to navigate on a helicopter through the canyon, which is very dangerous, by the way, in order to airlift someone out.

So, before hitting the trails, ask yourself: o What brought me here? o How have I physically and mentally prepared myself for this hike? o What supplies have I chosen and why? o Have I had an honest discussion about my abilities and expectations for this hike with my hiking mates? o And how can I hold myself accountable so that emergency response resources can be directed towards those in serious need? If we all take the time to prepare ourselves for our hikes and listen to our bodies, we can all have an amazing experience visiting the Grand Canyon. This has been a Behind the Scenery Canyon Cut. A Grand-Canyon-sized thank you to Anna Marini and Stan Lindstedt of Grand Canyon PSAR, Ranger Brendan Oates of the Inner Canyon District, and everyone else who lent their voices to this podcast.

Here at Grand Canyon, we gratefully acknowledge the Native Peoples on whose ancestral homeland we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today.

For more information about Preventative Search and Rescue operations at Grand Canyon National Park, refer to the Emergency Services webpage at nps.gov/grca.

If you enjoyed this podcast, I encourage you to listen to “Canyon Kinetics”, another Behind the Scenery Canyon Cut I produced, in which I interview Anna, Stan, and others about the biomechanics of hiking in a place like Grand Canyon.

Alright, I’m gonna get back to my hike. I’ve been sitting for a while. See ya next time.