This Gas Station Freebie Will Change Your Backcountry Hydration
This article originally appeared on Outside
Outside's Trail Magic hiking columnist Grayson Haver Currin is attempting to bag the triple crown of hiking. He's already thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, with one more to go: the Continental Divide Trail. He'll share notes from the field as he walks with his wife for the rest of the year. Here's his second file, just after they finished hiking through Glacier National Park. Tune in on Outside's Instagram to follow his journey.
Have you ever wondered, just for entertainment's sake, what a pond filled with dead mosquitos would taste like, especially if the lukewarm water in which their bodies bob is laced with just a little sulfur? Not long ago, soon after crossing the Wyoming border into Yellowstone National Park on my southbound trek of the Continental Divide Trail, I had the bona fide pleasure of discovering the answer before I'd even imagined the question. For anyone who cares, it tastes earthy and eggy, maybe like dissolved loam with an uncanny aftertaste of sadness.
Still, I knew the water from this glorified mud puddle would be the last relatively cool beverage I would find for miles on a hot afternoon spent circumnavigating the park's hydrothermal vents and warm streams, so I'd simply need to deal. Reaching into a pocket, I grinned knowing I had a tiny paper packet of help: .8 grams of crystallized lemon called True Lemon, made by ingredient company True Citrus. These little packets have become a backcountry hack that has changed my on-trail hydration. You can often find them for free in gas stations. I dropped the crystals in the bottle, shook it twice, and swigged again. The mosquitoes, the sulfur, and the soil--all gone, or at least masked.
As the True Citrus origin story goes, at the turn of the millennium, a man named David Schleider was having lunch with his father at a diner near Baltimore. He ordered an iced tea and examined the wan wedge of lemon perched atop the glass. How long had it been sitting on the counter before it arrived at his table? He glanced at the orderly row of sugar packs and creamers and had an epiphany: crystallized lemon, always fresh. For four years, Schleider toiled over the task in his kitchen, trying not only to turn lemon into a solid but to make it taste real, like the paragon of fresh-squeezed citrus. Four patents and a quarter-century later, True Citrus is now a miniature flavoring empire: 11 unsweetened flavors (including lemon), caffeinated drink mixes, lemonade and limeade, all sold in over 45,000 stores.
"David had to walk through a thousand things to get it just right--getting it shelf-stable, getting it to be homogenized, whether you bought our product today or two years ago," says company CEO Robert Cuddihy, who has held the position for half a decade now. "It took 20 years for it to become an overnight success."
On the afternoon I dipped my bottle into those little Yellowstone pools, I'd just eaten lunch at a nearby trailhead, stuffing myself with all manner of salts, starches, and sugars in preparation for the 15-mile afternoon journey into the backcountry. My last water had gone to the day's second strong cup of Folger's instant, so I was properly buzzed. I didn't want more electrolytes or nutrition; I just wanted to feel like I wasn't drinking a tepid solution of mosquito carcasses. And that simplicity, for me, is the beauty of True Lemon. It's a flavor made from non-GMO fruits, nothing more. This is all the (crystallized) juice, without the squeeze.
So often in backpacking and endurance communities, we focus on how many tasks one item can manage. And for good reason, of course: Everything weighs something, so the less things you carry, the less weight you move. Every drink powder, then, is laced with a half-dozen attributes, all announced on the packaging in bold type with exclamation marks in overabundance: caffeine or collagen, electrolytes or vitamins, "clean carbohydrates" or "extreme energy." Again, sometimes you just want water, plain as that may sound, especially after a heavy meal on a hot day.
I first encountered True Citrus in its lime form, one of the many flavoring agents tucked inside Mountain House's dehydrated Pad Thai. In an outfitter in the charming little northern California town of Etna, along the Pacific Crest Trail, I finally spotted the lemon packets, for sale for a quarter each. I bought enough to learn I would buy them again, but I haven't needed to. I soon started to spot them stuffed alongside the complimentary ketchups and creamers in gas-station chains, especially at Love's Travel Shops.
On the Florida Trail, True Lemon was my salvation for swamp water; on the Arizona Trail, where hikers and cows drink from the same muddy pits, True Lemon helped offset the acrid aftertaste from swills of diluted bovine excrement. Each time these paths neared an interstate, I'd hope not for a McDonald's or a Starbucks but instead for one of the 644 Love's locations, so as to stuff my steadfast condiment bag with more True Lemon.
When I was a kid, my mom would head to bed each night with a tumbler of iced water, a slice of lemon floating near the surface. These days, I question the dental consequences of this particular nightcap. And at restaurants, she would inevitably ask a server for extra lemon until it seemed she had acquired the entire fruit, one wedge at a time. Her habits have, in turn, become my own, as I'm now the one at home forever slicing a lemon to throw into whatever I'm drinking.
On trail for five months at a time, eating the same foods out of the same bags, week in and week out, you start to crave whispers of domesticity. It's hard to hike with your cat, impossible to see the friends and family you've left behind. But you can still go to bed with a plastic bottle full of lemon water, without having to pack an actual lemon into the woods and out again.
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