Considering a through-hike? In the midst of one right now? Thinking about an overnight camping trip? Throughout this journey I’ve gained knowledge and experience about the planning, gear, and skills needed for back country recreation. Aside from the FAQ, I upload hiker resources I find/develop to this page.
SnackPacker
Direct Download: xlsx, ods, or pdf
From Day 1 of my AT through hike, caloric intake was a challenge. Ignorant of the demands of endurance hiking, I spent the first weeks guessing at what works for trail fuel. After three weeks of staggered into town starving and malnourished, I knew choosing provisions blindly wouldn’t cut it. I needed to overhaul my menu with foods that could sustain the daily exertion without wrecking my metabolic and overall health.
After internet research and pondering my experience, I identified key attributes of the “ideal backpacking food”. Of course, there is the obvious weight efficiency component that dominates hiker culture these days. But even ultra-lighters aren’t toting gallon jugs of olive oil. Cost-effectiveness, nutrition, volume, dietary restrictions, and taste preferences all affect what a hikers choose to shovel from grocery store shelves into the bear bag. Given how many of those factors are elusive to quantify, I realized that diet is the most subjective of all “gear” selections. I know all too well how my attempts at an informed menu selection were clouded by flashy marketing and the allure of sucrose. I lamented “How could I ever achieve wise supermarket choices without reading every nutrition label, amassing a spreadsheet’s worth of data, and ranking each food with mathematical score?”
A software engineer by trade, that’s exactly what I did.
Over the course of a month, I crafted and refined a data-driven tool to convert my mental image of the perfect hiker meals into quantifiable scores. At last, this spreadsheet helped me prioritize dense, packable, and cheap calories while simultaneously verifying a balanced intake of vitamins, minerals, carbs, and fats. Minimizing the impact on cost and weight, I bumped up my daily intake by 1,000 calories and addressed previously-unknown sodium and calcium deficiencies. After sharing the spreadsheet with fellow hikers and receiving enthusiastic feedback, I refined the document into a broadly user-friendly format to share with anyone else interested, free-of-charge. Below you shall find a link to download a copy of the excel document. If you prefer, you can upload it into Google Sheets (even though the colors translate a bit funky, I tested that the core features still work).
However, a word of caution first. Meals are a subject that can’t and shouldn’t be boiled down into a soulless optimization problem. This is not an attempt to canonize the superiority of my bear canister contents, nor should you sacrifice the mental health benefits of your comfort foods to the altar of the “every ounce counts” gods. Play around with the settings until the ranking seems right to your sensibilities. Perhaps packability is not a priority, or you are incredibly budget-conscious. Add missing foods and tune the scores to your liking! Even when you’re satisfied with the ranking, don’t be afraid to bring along a certain snack even if it’s in the middle or bottom of the pile.