Eating A Buffalo A Day

I've been working on something behind the scenes for quite a while, and we're getting close!!!

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I'm looking for a handful of people who have collected extensive personal health and performance data over months or years.

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I was a little kid the first time my dad took me into the Boundary Waters. My brain has never been quite the same.

There's no signal up there. No engine noise. The wind decides whether you paddle today and the rain decides whether you sleep dry. You shoulder the canoe and the pack and stumble across a portage trail while the mosquitoes eat every inch of exposed skin, because the next lake isn't going to come to you. We'd wake up to a moose standing in camp. Eagles overhead. I could hang over the side and watch fish cruising 15 feet down through water so clear it looked fake... then catch them. I paddled close enough to a moose to hear it tearing up swamp grass for breakfast.

You don't visit that kind of nature. You get absorbed into it.

Next summer I get to hand that to my own kids. We just signed up as a family of four: 12 days, roughly 150 miles of canoeing, kayaking and portaging through the Boundary Waters with a family scouting crew. I'm already pacing the house mentally packing.

And somewhere between booking the trip and building the gear list, a different expedition elbowed its way into my head.

Lewis and Clark.

Here's what I remember from grade school history: two guys, a couple of backpacks, some canoes, paddling up the Mississippi and sketching a map of the West. So I went digging. I was wrong on almost every count. Wrong river (it was the Missouri). Wrong headcount. Wrong scale by a factor I still can't wrap my head around. This wasn't a camping trip. It was a 2-year mobile logistics operation.

The Corps of Discovery pushed off from Camp River Dubois near St. Louis on May 14, 1804. They got back September 23, 1806. That's 862 days and roughly 8,000 miles, with a permanent crew of about 33 people and 40-plus at the start.

Their lead boat wasn't a canoe. It was a 55-foot keelboat with 22 oars, a square sail and storage lockers, backed by two pirogues hauling 8 to 9 tons each. Floating freight trucks. And they were driving them up the Missouri against the current. When the wind died they rowed. When rowing failed they poled off the river bottom. When that failed, men climbed out, walked the bank and dragged the boats upstream on ropes. They called it cordelling. I call it the worst leg day in American history.

Then came the Great Falls of the Missouri in June 1805. Clark surveyed the portage at 18.25 miles. That number is almost meaningless. They built crude wagon wheels out of cottonwood, made multiple round trips hauling boats and tons of cargo, and burned about a month doing it. Prickly pear shredded their moccasins. Hail, heat, grizzlies, rattlesnakes. Lewis wrote about men dropping into sleep the moment they stopped. At one point the wind got so strong they hoisted a sail on a canoe they were dragging across dry ground.

Through 862 days of that, they lost exactly one man: Sergeant Charles Floyd, most likely to appendicitis, in August 1804. One.

That's not luck. That's a team that got up every morning and solved the next problem.

Clark actually weighed the food on departure day.

Historians put the full load at nearly 7 tons of dry goods.

It wasn't close to enough.

Run the modern math. The 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities puts hard rowing around 5.8 METs and portaging around 7.0. Plug in a 165-pound Corps member and a hard upstream day lands near 5,000 calories. A day of hauling cargo pushes toward 6,600. Historians working from a completely different direction, what the men actually ate, landed on about 6,000 calories per man on strenuous days. Exercise physiology and the historical food record, two separate lines of evidence, meeting in the same place.

Now multiply by 33. Every day.

One buffalo. Every day. Not to feast. To operate.

This is the part that rewired how I see the whole expedition. Hunting wasn't something they did after the real work. Hunting was the propulsion system. No calories in, no boats moving. George Drouillard was so good at it that Clark admitted they could barely have survived one winter without him. At Fort Mandan, six hunters went out for 15 days and came back with 34 deer, 10 elk and 5 buffalo... about 2,000 pounds of preserved meat.

Over the full trip, one reconstruction from the journals counts roughly 396 elk.

And food acquisition burns food. Find it, track it, shoot it, butcher it, carry hundreds of pounds back to camp, smoke it, guard it from wolves, load it on the boat. Every elk had an energy cost before it delivered a single calorie.

They did pack an 1803 protein shake. Lewis bought 193 pounds of "portable soup," meat stock boiled down into a dried brick. About 231 calories per ration. The entire supply worked out to roughly 21 rations per person... for two years. A man burning 6,000 calories would need 26 of them in a single day. The whole stockpile would have fed the crew at full output for less than 24 hours.

The Corps didn't carry enough food to cross a continent. They carried enough to survive the gaps between landscapes that could feed them.

My Garmin weighs a few ounces and tells me where I'm standing in about 4 seconds. Lewis needed a crash course from some of the best astronomers and surveyors in the country just to get started.

His navigation kit:

Latitude was the easier half. Shoot the sun at noon, run the tables, you know how far north you are.

Longitude was brutal. You need to know the exact time back at a reference point, which meant a clock that had to be wound every day, on a river, in the rain, and observations of the moon against the stars that could take hours to work out on paper.

So the day-to-day work fell to Clark and plain old dead reckoning. Every straight stretch of river got a compass bearing and an estimated distance, logged in the journal. Then the next bend. Then the next. If you've ever done orienteering, it's the same skill: take a bearing, count your distance, hit your next point. Now do it thousands of times in a row for two years, with no chance to check your answer against a satellite.

The payoff: Clark estimated the distance from Camp River Dubois to the Pacific at 4,162 miles. The National Park Service credits him with missing by just 40 miles. That's roughly 1% across a continent!!!

And this wasn't some magical perfect GPS. On one 600-mile stretch of the Missouri, a later survey found him just 11 miles off. On the Yellowstone, he overestimated a section by hundreds of miles. Lewis even managed to miscalculate observations that, when corrected by modern historians, located a Montana river mouth within about a mile.

These guys were measuring a continent one compass bearing, one river bend and one mathematical headache at a time. Sometimes they were astonishingly accurate. Sometimes they were wildly wrong.

No satellites. No digital maps. Just instruments, notebooks, knowledge shared by Native peoples, and an extraordinary amount of patience.

Here's where this lands for me.

Next summer my family carries a Kevlar canoe that weighs around 40 pounds. The Corps dragged 30-foot dugouts across Montana. We'll open 700-calorie freeze-dried pouches. They sent Drouillard into the trees to find tomorrow's elk. My GPS answers in seconds. Clark spent his evenings with a compass and a pencil. We can carry 12 days of food on our backs. They had to build a moving food economy for 2 years.

Technology didn't erase the physiological cost of exploration. It moved it. Off our backs, into factories, supply chains and satellites we never see.

We haven't become weaker humans. We've built systems that hide how expensive exploration used to be.

But the Boundary Waters still doesn't care about any of that. The wind still decides. The mosquitoes still feast on the portage trail. My kids will still have to shoulder a pack and walk to the next lake because nobody is coming to carry it for them.

That's the part I want them to feel. The same thing my dad handed me, and the same thing Lewis and Clark felt 862 days in a row... the moment you realize your own body is the engine, and it's a lot more capable than you thought.

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Go find your edge. That's where resilience lives.

— Dr. Dave

Guild of the Wild — The frontier of human possibility. Field tested. Truth told.

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