Food Planning for the West Coast Trail

I’m about to embark on a 7-day hike on the iconic West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. Planning out the rations for multi-day hikes such as this one involves 2 stages:

1. The research: I’ll look at factors like hiking companions, whether we’re sharing meals or not, allergies, weather, length of trip, etc., to help me formulate the meal plan.
   • Hiking companions: In this case, I’m sharing most of my dinners with one other person, except for two that will be shared among three. Lunches, breakfasts and snacks are all individual.
   • Length of trip: We’re looking at 6 nights, so I’m accounting for 4 x 2 + 2 x 3 = 14 portions and 6 dishes for the dinners. Additionally, for longer multi-day trips, I’ll aim to minimise the total weight as much as possible by pulling from my set of ultralight, quick-cooking recipes.
   • Allergies: None I’m aware of.
   • Weather: The forecast is for temperatures between 10-20 degrees Celsius throughout our entire trip. This brings up the question of things melting and potentially going bad. There will be one rainy day, so a warm evening drink of some kind might be nice. It does not seem like any day is particularly hot, but there will be some sun. I’d carry some electrolytes for such weather. Colder temperatures (for eg., in the shoulder seasons or winter) also increase caloric requirements, so that’s something to also keep in mind in general, but isn’t a big factor here.
   • Intensity: This feeds into the caloric needs calculation. We will have a fairly even split of chill days and intense days, but I’m not expecting to get to peak hiker hunger. Most of the recipes on the blog aim for ~600 calories per portion, and for this trip, that will be perfect, with the rest made up over the day with snacks and lunch.
2. The planning: To limit how many things I need to buy, I attempt to choose meals that have some ingredients in common, but also aim for some variety. Then I’ll try to determine whether some things can be packed together. For example, 3 of the meals on this trip will use split red lentils. Since I plan to pre-soak the lentils, I want to keep them separate from the other ingredients. I can just calculate the total servings of lentils I need and put it all in one bag. I’m also choosing to keep some things in their original packaging, to minimize the number of Ziplock bags I end up using.

Hiking Snacks

The best snack strategy, in my opinion, consists of a mix of sweet and savoury snacks. Dividing that into two textural categories, chewy or crunchy, we get the following 4 quadrants with some examples in each:

	Soft (chewy)	Hard (crispy/crunchy)
Sweet	Gummy candy Fruit leather Dried mangoes, raisins etc Protein/granola bars Apple chips	Trail mix Hard candy Chocolate bars M&Ms Cookies Peanut brittle or chikki (or sesame variety)
Savoury	Mushroom jerky Babybel vegan cheese Olives	Chips (potato, banana, yam etc) Pretzels Salted nuts Seasoned rice crackers Crackers Popcorn Wasabi peas

I like to pull from all the categories to give myself variety. Generally, I tend to prefer savoury foods, but can’t beat the energy boost from something sweet in the middle of an active day. I dislike sweet oatmeal and I’d rather eat a bar of some sort (granola/protein/fruit/chocolate) for breakfast. And finally, sometimes you just need a treat, so candy and chocolate are paramount.

This brings us to:

• 2 bars per day (1 for breakfast, 1 for an afternoon snack), including 4 snack-sized homemade date-and-nut pucks
• 2 small bars of chocolate
• 1 packet mushroom jerky, to be rationed throughout the week
• 1 small packet honey mustard pretzels
• 1 bag of vegan gummy candy
• 1 pack dried mangoes

The Meal Plan

Breakfast

I’m not big on breakfast, so I’ve packed a bunch of protein bars etc., that will suffice.

Lunch

Our first day starts late in the morning and our last day ends around 1 pm. Depending on how prepared I am, I might buy a sandwich for the first day, or just subsist off a protein bar for the last day.

Thus I only need to plan for 6 lunches.

A half-dozen pack of bagels easily solves that problem. I’ll be pairing that with: store-bought dehydrated hummus, home-made dehydrated hummus (recipe coming soon!) and a block of vegan cheese (to be shared with one person).

Dinner

These are the 6 dinners I’m carrying

1. Upside down shepherd’s pie
2. Thai green curry with rice
3. Coconut couscous with red lentils
4. Khichdi with instant rice and red lentils
5. Pad Thai
6. Mushroom coconut ramen

This gives me a decent variety of flavours and ingredients, while also enabling me to combine some ingredients together for optimised packaging. For example, the spice mix for the coconut couscous and khichdi are pretty similar, so I just made one double batch of it. Similarly, I’m using coconut milk powder across four recipes and red lentils across three.

None of them require fresh ingredients. However, I shall be carrying a couple of peppers and snap peas for the Thai green curry and rice, so we will aim to prepare that in the first day or two (the curry paste is also perishable).

Besides that, we can choose which meal we feel like each day. Some meals are a bit heartier than others, some are heavier (in terms of weight), and some are slightly more elaborate.

Drinks

For shorter trips, I might consider carrying a camp beer or a hip flask of Fireball. This time though, we’re keeping it non-alcoholic. We’re carrying: instant coffee, electrolyte tabs and maybe a warm night-time drink or two, such as herbal tea or a soup mix.

Complexities

The planning for this trip has been fairly straightforward, but some potential complications that may arise are

1. Vastly different caloric needs: These are situations where another person in the group needs very different calories from you, and simply double or tripling the portions would not work. If you have a good idea of exactly how much more another hiker in the group needs, you can approximate the quantities from there on with a bit of math.
2. Allergies: I’ve gone on trips with people in the past who are allergic to certain ingredients, which is what led to the creation of the gluten-free and soy-free categories. Things can get more challenging if you’re dealing with a risk of anaphylaxis. Fortunately, I’ve never been in a situation where that was a concern, but I’d probably not take the risk of preparing meals in that case and ask them to bring what they know is safe for them to eat. Anaphylaxis in the backcountry is scary and potentially life-threatening.
3. Special ingredients: I get most of the ingredients for my recipes from regular grocery stores, and my aim is make vegan cooking in the backcountry accessible without requiring anything special. However, not everything is always available. For example, coconut milk powder was strangely out of stock this time so I substituted it with creamed coconut. Sometimes you can just skip that ingredient or replace it with something else. Otherwise, try a different recipe!

Happy planning (and cooking and eating)! I’ll try to write up a trail report after the trip and share what worked and what didn’t.