food lbs/day – for a nine-year old and a grown-up on a low-mileage trip?

[Katherine .]

For my last trip with my son, I packed waaaay to much food. We do about 3 miles a day, 6 tops (though I carry most of the gear, so I am burning more calories for that..). He’s not currently in a growth spurt.

How much for him?

How much for me? For my solo trips 1.5 lbs/day for me works great. But those are 15+ miles/ per day trips, so how much might I ratchet that down?

[Lester Moore]

How much extra food did you have per day? That would give you a good idea how much food per day you’ll use next trip. If you want to run some numbers, then you could assume about 1000 cal/day is enough to sit and do nothing all day, and roughly 3500 cal/day is a fairly typical backpacking daily food allotment. So, that split out to 2500 cal/day for the hiking, and 1000 cal/day for being awake basically. If you’re hiking 3 mi/day (20% of your typical 15 mile day solo trip), then that works out to 500 cal for the hiking, plus 1000 cal/day for base needs, or 1500 total cal per day. Seem a little low IMHO, so you might error on the plus side and shoot for 2000 cal/day, which would be approximately 14 ounces (0.86 lbs) of food per day.

[Katherine .]

@satori – thanks for that calculation. Maybe 2 lb /day for both of us would be conservative/generous?

unfortunately I eyeballed our food quantity last time when we set out, and came back with 3 lbs (after 3 day). Usually I’m more methodical. we have two more trips lined up, so I can use the soon one to fine tune for the late-summer one.

[MJ H]

In my experience, kids that age vary widely from day to day in how much they eat and this variation happens for no reason that I was able to discern. And being stuck on a multi-day trip with a hungry boy sounds very unpleasant.

[Ben H.]

Yup, my experience aligns with MJ.  Usually my kids don’t eat very much, but one trip (1.5 miles in, two nights hanging around the campfire, and a 1.5 miles out) we walked out with 5 M&M’s.  I am not sure which stars aligned, but I bring the extra food now to keep them happy.  It’s not too hard to hike with kids so the heavy pack isn’t a problem.

[Katherine .]

Yeah, he hasn’t recently, but he can get really hangry. I’ll accept the overpacking. And this trip is going to be twice as long as the previous.

[BlackHatGuy]

hangry – adjective – when someone is hungry and angry at the same time, usually the hunger causing the anger…

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