When Jeff Alt turned down day-old, burnt French toast offered up in a plastic sack, a fellow trekker accused him of not being a real thru-hiker. Thru-hikers on the 2,160-mile Appalachian Trail (AT) eat anything and everything! But having put on more than 1800 miles by that point, Alt knew what worked and what didn’t when it came to food.

In his book, A Walk for Sunshine, Alt highlights his cause (raising funds for a home for developmentally disabled and mentally retarded adults), the vast assortment of people he meets along the way (from trail angels to psychos), and the pros and cons of spending almost six months hiking through 14 states from Georgia to Maine – all the while tickling the funny bone with food tales on the trail.

It starts with the planning. “I didn’t know what I was going to eat tomorrow, which made planning 150 days’ worth of meals seem impossible.” He ended up creating 10 meals that he liked and filled supply boxes which would be mailed to himself along the trail with these same meals – 2 freeze-dried dinners, 2 Lipton dinners, 1 spaghetti dinner, 1 couscous, 2 mac & cheese and 2 rice.

Breakfast for the AT champion included a fine selection of Kudo bars, granola bars, breakfast bars, Pop-tarts, cereal and grits. Lunch was a variation of smoked sausage, cheese, crackers, dried apples, dried bananas. Snacks included energy and chocolate bars. Dipping a Snickers bar into a jar of peanut was a surprise hit too!

That’s trail cuisine, sustenance out in the wilderness. In town, the food tales take on legendary status. At one of Alt’s first hostel stays, the owner yells into the bunkhouse that breakfast was ready. “The four of us nearly got wedged in the doorway together with the excitement of a hot meal.”

But even all-you-can-eat blueberry pancake breakfasts with sausage, OJ and coffee can’t keep the weight on an AT thru-hiker. Alt lost 15 lbs in the first month. He countered by downing a meal of steak and potatoes that would feed four. He would order a crab cake appetizer, bowl of soup, prime rib dinner special, baked potato and salad with Thousand Island dressing and still find space to finish his sister’s salad and chicken.

“Our outlandish appetites from the calories we were burning had given us thru-hikers the eye for a good buffet,” Alt notes, as he adds that the cooks struggled to keep up with the demand. Between Alt and another hiker, they polished off “three large pizzas, several pounds of lettuce, salad dressing, and several other consumable products...”

At one point he covers 48 miles of trail in two days just to make it to one particular restaurant before it closed for a long weekend. Of course he did justice to the endless roast beef, half chicken, coleslaw, baked beans, potatoes, corn, green beans, rolls and hot fudge ice cream sundae that graced his table.

I laughed out loud when he shares the story about arriving in a town with a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream outlet. “How can ice cream be labelled factory-second? Ice cream is ice cream. I plowed through two pints. Then I went across the street for my other two cravings, pizza and beer.”

A Walk for Sunshine is a book that not only highlights Alt’s worthy cause, it provides a glimpse into one very unique diet plan!