The Hiker Food Formula

I heard a lot of silly and irrational sounding theories regarding food, and calories, and frequency of eating, and more things I don’t care about on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Despite my detailed explanation of the hiker food situation, I felt it necessary to share the following hiker food advice. Not because I followed it, or support adherence to it, but because it provides novice hikers an arbitrary point of reference for deciding what to put in their mouths and chew on along the PCT.

So without further ado:

How exhilarating.

Basically, all this post is devoted to telling you is that many thru-hikers consider 100 calories per ounce to be the magic number. Simply put, divide calories by ounces and see if your result equals 100 or more. If it does, you may put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow.

So who are the heavy hitters when it comes to winning the math behind hiker food?

• Peanut Butter
• Basically any nut (or combination of nuts)
• Olive oil (I found olive oil to be impractical on the trail)
• Snickers (then Milky Way, then 3 Musketeers)
• Chips (Doritos, Pringles, Fritos, Ruffles, etc.)
• All M&M varieties
• Practically anything associated with Little Debbie
• Pop-tarts!
• Most cheeses (yes, you can pack out cheese)

But, ounces, calories, grams, that’s a lot of things to remember. I think I might need a useless app on my phone to figure all this out.

No, you don’t! If you can learn how many ounces are in a pound (16), how many pounds are in a kilogram (2.2), and how many grams a kilogram is (1,000), then you will be ready to impress everyone with your magical and calculator-less math skills.

Here’s a cheat sheet for all those tricksy units of measurement:

Happy eating!