Mock me if you must, I eat almost nothing but honey now, and it is the best decision I have made about the backcountry in twenty years of walking it.

Here is how it started. I was bonking. Every long day in the Ashridge network, somewhere past mile four, the bottom would fall out of me. Dried fowl, hard cheese, the dense little ration bricks the gear stalls sell at robbery prices. Nothing held. Then an old forager up past Misthollow watched me chew a strip of jerky like it owed me money and said, flat as a fern flat, “You are eating like a predator, eat like a bee instead.”

So I did. I stripped my food kit down to honey and not much else. And let me head off the letters right now: it does not have to be Dorran honey. Clover honey from the northern Downs works just as well (yes, I know the whole region is currently brawling over it, I do not live under a rock). I carry the clover honey in a wide-mouth flask, I take a pull every forty minutes whether I want it or not, and the bonk has simply not come back. Honey is, when you think about it, exactly what it claims to be: the concentrated work of an entire colony, a whole season of wildflowers rendered down into the lightest, densest fuel a body can carry. The prized Dorran honey gets its particular character from the wildflowers on the one ridge above Brannock Crossing, which is exactly why there was never much of it to begin with. What is so great about it is that it does not sit in your gut like a cheese wheel. It goes straight to the legs. For the deep routes, where every ounce in the pack is an ounce you haul up the switchbacks, nothing else comes close on weight to energy, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

I will say the thing I know you are waiting for me to say. Yes, you can overdo it, and no, I am not a hospital fae, so do not take a trail columnist’s word as gospel for your whole life. Bring some variety for the multi-day trips. Listen to your own body, which is better at this than I am. But for a hard day out and back in the old growth, honey is the most honest fuel I have ever carried.

And here is my final confession. I try to eat a slice of honey cake for breakfast every single morning, the proper Downs kind, the one the whole region has lost its mind over this spring. I say try, because the cake wants real Dorran honey and three eggs, and between the queues and the bare egg baskets that is a battle some mornings. I hoard, I barter, I bake a small one and ration it, and on the mornings the shortage wins I make my peace with toast. But when I can get it, I have it with my tea before the sun is properly up, and I walk out the door already fueled for whatever the forest has planned.

People will try and tell you cake is not a breakfast. People are wrong. It is honey, eggs, and good butter, which is to say it is exactly the breakfast a person who plans to spend the day climbing a ridge should be eating, and I would rather start a hard day on a slice of that than on anything else in this region. Try it for a week, you’ll see.

Kael Dunwick is the Whispering Groves section’s backcountry travel and gear correspondent, here straying into trail nutrition and the unglamorous business of staying fueled in the field. He is not a healer, a hydromancer, or your mother, and trail-fuel experiments are undertaken at your own risk. Honey recommendations, and complaints about them, can be sent by owl.