backpacking planning

Food organized for a backpacking trip.

How to Plan Food for a Backpacking Trip

By Michael Lanza

You’re planning food for a backpacking trip—maybe for yourself or perhaps for your family or a small group of friends—and you have questions about how to do it. How much food do you need? What food should you bring? How complicated or simple do you want to make it? How do your food choices affect how much stove fuel you will need—or do you even need a stove? Drawing on decades of backpacking experience, this article will lay out some general guidelines and detailed advice that will help you plan food for all your backpacking trips.

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Rockwall Trail, Kootenay National Park, Canada.

Trail Foods My Family Devours

By Michael Lanza

One big lesson I’ve been reminded of many times in the backcountry (and have written about before at this blog, including in my “10 Tips For Keeping Kids Happy and Safe Outdoors”) is that a grumpy child is usually just a hungry child. But the challenge facing many parents who take kids out hiking, backpacking, floating rivers, or on any other outdoor adventures, is figuring out what to feed their children when there’s no kitchen or refrigerator handy. Here’s the approach we’ve used with our son and daughter through several mostly successful years of numerous wilderness trips.

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