H iker hunger: the never-fully-satiated feeling of an empty stomach that occurs when you can’t keep up with the 4,000+ calories you burn each day on trail.

What you decide to eat on the Pacific Crest Trail is just about as personal of a decision as it gets. In this post, I will detail what I decided to eat and why, but know that your preferences will likely be different from mine.

As far as my initial approach, I did not count calories for my resupply, factor in a good ounce/calorie ratio, or, in full honesty, focus too much on nutritional value. I didn’t have extensive backpacking experience, so I pretty much just read blogs and picked out food for my resupply boxes that sounded good. Once on trail, my tastes and calorie intake changed, so I adjusted. Everything about this trail is about adjusting. With that in mind, here are the basic things I ate on trail, why I stuck with them, or why I changed my mind about them:

Trail Foods I Enjoyed

BREAKFAST

Breakfast was the meal that I had the most difficulty with figuring out what worked best for me. There were a couple of factors at play: I wanted it to be fast to eat so I could get going quickly, I didn’t want to cook in the morning, I needed it to have enough calories, and I wanted a quick clean up.

So many to choose from

Bars: This was by far my most typical breakfast on trail. I had no interest in cooking early in the morning and was much more focused on packing up camp. Bars were great because they required no cooking, no clean up, and I could eat them while still laying in my sleeping bag. In fact, I used chewing as a tiny way to get my body moving and awake early in the morning. My favorite breakfast bars were ProBars and Gatorade Whey Protein Bars because they were filling and packed more than 300 calories. Belvitas: Before I relied solely on bars, I used Belvita breakfast biscuits for quite some time on trail. The perks were that they were tasty and oddly filling for how small and light they were. At first I ate only one 230 calorie package in the morning, but I eventually bumped this up to two packages for more calories. The cons were that they were very crumbly. I would spend time shaking out my tent to get the crumbs from breakfast out. Eventually I switched to bars because they were just easier to eat. But if you get tired of bars, I still recommend Belvitas. I’ve tried all their varieties and have liked all of them: traditional, protein soft-baked, sandwich, bites. Bites are the least crumbly.

LUNCH

Lunch was the simplest meal of the day. I veered from my staple of a tuna wrap on a couple of occasions, but for whatever reason I never got sick of them. Lunch was also a great time to graze through all my delicious snack foods.

Lunch in Washington

Tuna/salmon tortilla wraps: This was overwhelmingly my most typical lunch on trail. This was partially due to the fact that I took a gamble and bought 40+ tuna packets off of Amazon to put in my resupply boxes. But I credit it more to that I never got sick of the meal. If I had lost interest in tuna, I would have dropped them in hiker boxes and figured out an alternative. But it stuck. For my wraps, I would pair one packet of tuna with a crushed salty snack like Cheez-Its or potato chips and maybe a dash of hot sauce and wrap it all together with one large flour tortilla. This was not my entire lunch, of course, as I boosted my calorie intake with other snacks (detailed later). I ate so much tuna that my mom grew concerned and swapped out some tuna packets for salmon packets, harder to find and a bit more expensive, but they contain less mercury. If I die from mercury poisoning, I will credit it to my time on the PCT. My favorite flavors were Lemon Pepper and Tuna Salad. Cheese tortilla wraps: For variation, I tried packing out a block of cheddar cheese to use instead of/in addition to my tuna packets. It’s not dangerous to pack out a block of (hard) cheese for a couple days out on the trail. The cheese does “sweat” and become somewhat of a oily mess, so that’s why I cut it out. If your terrain permits it, you can cool off your cheese by refrigerating it underneath snow. Just remember (or ask a friend) to dig out your cold cheese before heading out. Ramen: Ramen is a tasty, quick option for lunch. You can either spend time cooking it with your stove, or simply re-hydrate it 30–60 minutes before you plan to eat lunch. If you are rehydrating using a Talenti gelato jar like I did, be warned that one pack of ramen will rehydrate to the very top making it difficult to eat with a spoon without noodles spilling over. Because I often ate hot ramen for dinner, I didn’t eat it for lunch very frequently. My uncle’s dehydrated soups: My wonderful, thoughtful uncle sent me some packets of homemade, dehydrated chilis and white bean soups for me to eat on trail. I tried to cook these for dinner a couple of times, but they took a long time to rehydrate on the stove. I was too impatient to wait for these delicious meals to cook at dinner, so I simply started to rehydrate them in my Talenti jar when we stopped for our first morning break. After a couple hours, they were ready to eat cold at lunch. I loved having a meal that someone else cooked just for me. Thanks, Uncle Matt.

SNACKS

Snacks are everything on trail. When you’re walking 12–14 hours a day, you are burning calories at a far faster rate than what you’re taking in. It’s simply unfeasible to sit down and eat multiple meals every few hours, so that’s where snacks come in.

My snack strategy was broken by morning and afternoon. In the morning, I would put three bars in my left hipbelt pocket that I would eat every 1–2 hours as I became hungry. That is separate from my breakfast bar, so I estimate that I ate 1,000+ calories in bars alone before lunch. In the afternoon, I would swap out the empty bar wrappers with a small plastic baggie filled with non-bar snacks, listed below.

I typically never stopped walking when I ate bars, except for when I ate at a water filtration break. I put snacks in my left hipbelt pocket since I kept my phone, inhaler, and knife in my right hipbelt pocket, as I used my phone in particular more often than I ate snacks (I am righthanded, for context).