How to Plan Your Food for a Thru-Hike: my 10-step process for the Great Divide Trail

I outline my 10-step process to thru-hiking meal prep and provide downloadable versions of my meal plan for you in this post (including links to recipes I used).

Once I purchased my permits for the Great Divide Trail, I knew food preparation needed to start. My brother had been encouraging me to eat fully plant-based for a couple years, as he had incredible health improvements when he started eating that way. He is a Type I Diabetic and has spoken about his health journey. Click here to learn more. He was my inspiration for tackling this hike fully plant based. Follow him on Instagram here.

I am also allergic to dairy products, soy and chickpeas. I knew any store-bought freeze-dried meals wouldn’t be exactly what I needed. And I also just love eating my own meals and dehydrating them myself.

We have a consumer grade dehydrator from Canadian Tire. When our friends left to travel South America, they leant us their dehydrator as well. So, I got started on planning, prepping and cooking. Find my 10-step process and downloadable documents below.

Step 1: Decide on recipes for dinners

I wrote out a list of my favourite plant-based recipes and ones that I knew would dehydrate well. I gathered all the recipes I needed in one place. I decided on 12 different recipes to have variety. But my trail friend Avocado only made 3 different recipes and when I was with him on Section B he was still very pleased with his meals. I personally wanted variety so that I was getting as many different vegetables as possible over the duration of the hike.

All the recipes available to you are detailed in the document I have attached to this blog post. As a brief summary, the meals I decided on were chili, tagine, curry, Pad Thai, pasta, goulash, burrito bowl, Mac N’ Cheeze, vegetable stew, lentil soup, pesto pasta, and red lentil curry.

Step 2: Assign each dinner recipe to a night on trail

I then randomly assigned each recipe to a night on trail. I tried to spread them out for variety. I ended up just grabbing and eating whatever I felt like eating each night. I was really happy that I had arranged it so that each section had a variety of dinners for me to choose from.

Step 3: Determine the number of servings I needed to make

This step was a bit trickier for me because Brian was joining me for half of the hike. I had to count the number of single servings I made for each meal (for when I was on my own). I then counted the number of double servings we needed for the time Brian would be with me. You can see this reflected in my Recipes Used table, there are columns for Single and Double servings.

GDT-Vegan-Meal-Plan-2020. Download: Excel // Download: PDF

Step 4: Write out ingredients lists for shopping

Based on the number of servings I needed, I then wrote out how many ingredients I would need to make a big enough meal. I did a massive grocery shop with the cart absolutely full to the brim.

Step 5: Start cooking

I cooked sometimes 2 or 3 meals per day. I would make up the meal, we would eat it for dinner that night, and then I would put the rest on the dehydrators.

Step 6: Dehydrate

We used the reusable trays that came with the dehydrators and then lined the others with parchment paper. We would love a more sustainable solution for this.

The dehydrators would run for 12-18 hours to dehydrate the meal completely. The noise can be a bit irritating, so keep that in mind.

Step 7: Vacuum seal

I decided to vacuum seal our meals because I wasn’t sure what the storage areas at the resupply would be like. I didn’t want little rodents attracted to our resupply boxes if we could help it. I didn’t like how much plastic this step used.

Step 8: Organize all meals

I then organized all the dinners according to where I had originally allocated them in each section. This meant that I placed a group of dinners into each resupply box. This was a very satisfying step to see the results of all my hard work.

Step 9: Shop for the rest of the food

I decided I would eat a mixture of different snacks and meals for breakfasts, lunches and snacks. I didn’t specifically pre-plan this shop. However, I had been testing out many different backpacker foods over the last few years and I knew what I liked and didn’t like.

Brian and I went into Save-On-Foods and absolutely filled the cart with lots of our favourite snacks. We bought more than we thought we needed. We figured having excess was better than not enough.

We were also fortunate to have Brian’s mom prepare us beautiful homemade granola bars and smoky nut-mix. These were amazing!

Step 10: Organize all the breakfast, lunch and snack mixture into sections for resupply boxes

A couple nights before I started trail, I organized all of the mix and match snacks, breakfasts and lunches. I spread them out evenly between sections, keeping in mind the sections I needed double of everything for Brian.

On my actual days on trail, I would simply eat from my snacks for breakfasts, snacks and lunches. I only had one official breakfast, which was a store-bought freeze-dried oatmeal.

That’s it folks! That was my entire 10 step process to prepare my food for the trail!