Summit Day Meal Plan

In town most of us are accustomed to eating three square meals a day. In the mountains sitting down for an hour to eat a big meal is not practical for several reasons:

• If the weather is nasty you will become uncomfortably cold if stopped for too long.
• On technical terrain there may not be a comfortable or safe place to stop.
• The gut-bomb that follows a big meal will impede your ability to keep going.
• You may not have time in your itinerary to cook or prepare food.
• Stoves and fresh ingredients are heavy.

I’ve developed a meal plan that I use for hard days that seems to work well for me. By “hard days” I'm referring to summit day or any day where I expect heavy exertion with few rest stops. This is all food that can be eaten on the go or during short breaks.

My standard summit day meal plan:
• Pemmican bar (400 cal)
• Two 5oz bottles of homemade gu (300 cal. each)
• 1000 cal. bottle
• Snack bags: one salty, one sweet (~500 cal. depending on what I put in these)
Total: 2500 calories

The snack bags serve to satisfy cravings if I get tired of eating liquid food. I find that having one bag of savory snacks and one bag of sweet snacks gives me options to suit my mood. Sesame sticks, Kettle Chips, Doritos, dried apricots, dried cranberries, Reese’s Pieces, and peanut M&M’s are some of my favorites.

In addition to the above trail food I’ll have a normal dinner in camp at the end of the day. I sometimes use Muscle Milk Collegiate mix as a recovery drink within the first hour of reaching camp. This is a high protein body building drink that helps muscles repair after a hard day. I’ll also have a good multivitamin some time during the day to make up for some of the vegetables I’m not eating.

Pemmican Bar

Pemmican bars (a.k.a. Mealpack ® bars) are a high calorie energy bar. There’s ~400 caloies in each of these, which is more than some dehydrated backpacking meals and twice as much as the ubiquitous Cliff-Bar. They’re made of all natural ingredients with no preservatives.

I like to eat these for breakfast on the trail when I’m not up for preparing food. They are made by Bear Valley and can be purchased at REI or Whole Foods. My favorite flavor is the original Fruit ‘N Nut.

Homemade Gu Recipe

For on the go calorie replenishment and electrolyte replacement nothing beats the convenience of energy gels.

My homemade gu recipe is made of maltodextrin powder, Cytomax, and water. The commercially available equivalent most similar to this recipe is Hammer Gel. I’ve found that it’s easy and much less expensive to make my own.

Cytomax is a powder that’s mixed with water to make a sports drink similar to Gatorade. It comes in several flavors and is readily available at sporting goods and nutrition stores.

Maltodextrin powder is a powder that can be purchased in bulk online or at home-brew supply stores. It’s the main ingredient in many commercially made sports nutrition products such as energy gels or body-building drinks. It’s also used during the bottling process to add body to beer.

Maltodextrin powder is basically broken down corn starch that serves the body as ready to use carbohydrates requiring very little digestion, so it can be eaten on the go without causing an upset stomach.

To make the gu I put one scoop of Cytomax in a ½ cup measuring cup, then add maltodextrin powder to top it off. I then add this mixture to ½ cup of cold water and stir it until the powder is mostly dissolved. Finally, I pop this in the microwave for a few seconds and then stir to fully incorporate the maltodextrin. This makes exactly enough to fill one 5oz sport flask.

There are a couple options for carrying your gu. I use a Hammer Nutrition sports flask. There are several types of these available; I like the Hammer Flask the best because it has small ridges on it that make it easier to grip with gloves on. Another option is Cophlan’s squeeze tubes. Others have had good luck with these, but the idea of one of them popping open in my backpack and squirting sticky sweet syrup all over everything is too scary for me. I like a good solid plastic bottle with a screw on lid, although I still always carry them in an outside pocket of my pack just in case.

One flask of gu has about 300 calories. I usually try to consume one of these every hour for the first hour or two along with my water. After the first two hours I’ll switch to a different concoction which includes protein to prevent my muscles from digesting themselves—The 1000 calorie bottle.

1000 Calorie Bottle

What I call the 1000 calorie bottle is basically a Nalgene bottle filled with a beverage that provides about 1000 calories.

In a 32oz Nalgene bottle add:
29g maltodextrin powder
1 scoop Cytomax
1.3c soy protein powder
Fill the rest of the bottle with water

The mix dissolves best in cold water, but I find that even if it clumps up at first it will end up well mixed after shaking around in my pack for a while.

This mix is intended to provide carbohydrates from the Maltodextrin powder and electrolyte replenishment and flavor from the Cytomax. The soy protein helps prevent the body from harvesting protein from muscles during sustained activity. One bottle is adequate to cover about 4 hours of activity without additional caloric intake.