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

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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