Is it pretty safe to assume that there will be lots of extra hiker barrels at each of the stops? Do most of you plan to resupply from these barrels and thus pack less with this in mind?
you said August? They will have more food in the hiker barrels than they will know what to do with. And anything they don't have to transport out for disposal is less work for them.
In early season, when the hungry PCT crowd comes through, they limit the amount you can grab, but in July and later, we pretty much were looking at entire resupplies in 5 to 6 barrels full of things people didn't want. They even sort it for you, from non-food (nice batteries, etc) to factory packed to repackaged food. If you're not afraid to eat somebody's home brew granola mix, you can fill up several bear cans. The factory wrapped stuff moves pretty quickly, but every time we were there in recent years, there was way more than we would have wanted to add to our packs.
Reds and VVR have much smaller hiker barrels, because, well, they have a store to sell you the same or similar stuff.
