Isle Royale: Meal Planning

A big part of any backpacking trip is meal planning. I volunteered for this since I really wanted to keep the weight down as much as possible. The other guys were happy to let me do this. I surveyed everyone to determine any food allergies, as well as their individual hot button issues, like what's more important to you...tastiness, variety, ease of prep, weight etc. It was unanimous. Light weight and easy food was most important.

I kept it fairly simple. I researched a number of sites () and determined I should target a calorie intake of 3,000 to 4,000 calories per day. We were planning for some potentially arduous days portaging & kayaking/hiking across the island & I wanted to make sure we had adequate fuel in our food.

Our menu ended up being:
Breakfasts, either granola or oatmeal, with powdered milk added.
Snacks throughout the day were: pop tarts, granola bars, trail mix, jerkey, hard candy.
Lunches were: Logan bread squares and peanut butter.
Dinners were freeze dried meals for 3 nights, and ramen noodles with dry potatoes mixed in for 4 nights. Ideally we'd catch fish to replace as many ramen nights as possible.

Of course the snack foods could augment any and all meals as desired.

The amounts I chose of each of these items provided an estimated 3,500 cal/day. The cost came to a total of $176, or $44 per person. Total weight was approximately 45 pounds...or just over 11 pounds per person for 8 days. Not too bad.

Once we packed everything up, we made a last minute call that we didn't have enough jerkey...then I decided we needed more trail mix. This was a mistake. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach when packing for a trip! We didn't eat any of the extra trail mix, and though the extra jerky was a decent idea, we could have done without it.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet I used to figure all this out. I didn't clean it up much. If you've got questions, let me know.

A number of resource links.
Adventure Allan's
Backpack45
Thru Hiker (recipe for Logan bread) which most really liked on this trip...thanks Robin for making it.
Andrew Skurka
Nutrition Data (used to determine cal/oz)