Benefits from Extra Food Drops on Pack Weights

Managing pack weight is an important technique for an enjoyable hike. See why in Seven Reasons to Reduce Your Pack Weight and how you can achieve this for your base pack weight in Five Steps to a Lighter Pack.

But there are also ways to achieve this safely (eg we don’t advocate carrying less water) during a hike without compromising comfort. Perhaps the easiest is by reducing the number of days food you are carrying each day. This can be achieved for many hikes by using intermediate food drops without changing your food. And the longer the hike the more the benefits - so we use here the Bibbulmun Track as a case study.

Sorry… but you still can’t take this with you!

The graphs below illustrate the daily combined pack weights for Helen and me for two different scenarios for our Bibbulmun Track hike.  In the blue is what we did with seven food drops. The orange bars illustrate what our combined daily pack weight could have been had we 12 rather than seven food drops.

The first graph illustrates the frequency of combined daily pack weights in 0.5 kilogram intervals.

There are at least 16 days when our combined pack weights would have been less. And importantly, these days are in the higher weight ranges (to the right of the graph where the blue bars are higher). A more detailed interrogation of the data (not really possible to display on a phone) indicates that the majority of these days have a weight saving of 2 kg or more).  There are of course then more days with lighter packs, so there are weight benefits to be made if desired.

This next graph presents the information as a percentage of pack carrying capacity, remembering that ideally, we like to stay under 90% of our carrying capacity for most of the time. And the blue bars are highest to the right where the weights are greatest.

For those viewing on a desktop or tablet, and love graphs… here’s the weights for individual days, and the food drop locations.