PCT Planning · Resupply

How many days of food do you need between PCT resupply stops?

Days of food isn't a property of the trail — it's a property of your pace. The same hundred miles is a four-day carry for one hiker and a six-day carry for another, which is why a number someone else used is only ever half an answer.

So what is useful here is a method rather than a list. It takes about a minute to learn, and it is the difference between a food bag that runs out and one you carry two spare dinners through the Sierra for.

The arithmetic

Take the trail miles between the stop you're leaving and the stop you're walking to, divide by the pace you'll walk on that stretch, round up, and add a day.

The rounding up and the spare day aren't padding. Rounding up is because you cannot eat 4.7 dinners. The spare day covers the things that reliably happen once or twice on a thru-hike: a fire detour, a snowed-over pass that halves your day, a stomach that quits, an afternoon spent waiting out a storm under a tree.

Hikers who skip the spare day usually skip it in the Sierra, which is the one place you can't walk out in an afternoon.

Your pace isn't one number

"Twenty miles a day" is a trail-wide average, not a daily reality. The terrain moves it around, and it moves it most in exactly the places where the carries are longest.

Here is what a nominal 20-mile-a-day hiker and a 25-mile-a-day hiker actually walk, by region:

The Sierra runs about 14% slower than the desert for the same hiker, and Oregon is the fastest ground on the trail. So a 90-mile stretch is a different number of days depending on where it sits — and if you price a Sierra carry at your desert pace, you are short by most of a day before anything goes wrong.

What the long carries actually look like

Most PCT stretches are three or four days. A handful are not, and those are the ones worth knowing before you're standing in a grocery aisle:

Those are walking days before the spare one, so read the 5.7s as "six days of food, seven if you're honest." And note how the same table punishes the slower hiker twice: more days on the trail and more weight to carry them with.

The ceiling that is easy to miss: your canister

A canister's weight is its obvious cost. The less obvious one is that it is a volume ceiling, and that ceiling binds in exactly the wrong place.

A rough industry rule is about 100 cubic inches per day of food. A BearVault BV500 — the common thru-hiker choice — holds 700 cubic inches, so roughly seven days, and realistically six unless you repack everything out of its wrappers. Smaller canisters are proportionally less: a BV450 is around four days.

Canisters are required in parts of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, all of Yosemite, the Inyo, Sierra and Humboldt-Toiyabe national forests, the Lake Tahoe Basin, Desolation Wilderness, Lassen and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie. The PCTA recommends carrying one the whole way regardless — the rules exist to protect the bears more than your dinner.

One legitimate trick: the first day's food doesn't have to fit. Eat it out of a side pocket on the day you leave and the canister only has to hold the rest.

Three things a plan can quietly miss

1. The miles to the stop aren't free. A lot of PCT resupply isn't on the trail — it's a hike out to a road, then a ride. Some of those exits are short; Kearsarge Pass is not. Those miles are walked on the food you're carrying, and they're on the wrong end of the carry, when the bag is lightest but you're most committed.
2. Mt. Whitney is food, not just a day. The side trip is 16.2 miles round trip with no resupply on it. On a 20-mile plan that's most of another day out of a bag you packed at Kennedy Meadows — which is why the row above jumps from 4.8 to 5.7.
3. The finish is longer than the map. Stehekin to the northern monument reads 61.4 miles, but you now walk 30.5 miles back to Harts Pass to get out. Pack for 91.9. This is the last carry on the trail and the one with no bail-out.

Buying versus mailing, briefly

This changes where the food comes from, not how much of it you need. But it changes the consequence of getting the number wrong: a bad estimate at a stop with a full supermarket costs you ten minutes, and a bad estimate at a stop where your box is the only food is a real problem.

So the practical rule is to be generous where the stop is thin, and let the supermarket stops absorb your mistakes. Getting the boxes themselves right is a separate problem, and a fiddlier one.

A note on weight, since it's the next question

Most thru-hikers settle between 1.5 and 2 pounds of food per day, climbing through the hike as appetite catches up with the effort. A six-day Sierra carry is therefore nine to twelve pounds of food alone, before water — and water in the Sierra is heavy in a different way, because there's so much of it you carry almost none.

That weight is the real argument for not over-packing "just in case" beyond the single spare day. Two extra days of food is four pounds you carry over every pass, to eat in a motel.