The honest answer to "how heavy is this thing?" changes every single day. You start out carrying a week of dinners and finish carrying wrappers. Pack Hiker works out your backpack weight at the start of each day and shows it right on the itinerary.
It's built from three numbers, and it's the same maths for everyone in the pack:
base weight + water you're carrying + food still in the bag
Each hiker has their own figures — you set yours, your packmates set theirs.
Your Base Backpack Weight
Set this once, on the Gear tab, in the Your Backpack card. It's everything that isn't food or water: pack, shelter, sleeping system, clothing, cooking kit, electronics, first aid, the lot.
Include your fuel here. Gas canisters, metho, tablets — there's no way for the app to know how many of your meals need a stove, so fuel lives in your base weight. Weigh the canister you're actually taking and add it in.
Nothing else on the Gear tab carries weights. The gear list is a shared reminder checklist the hike admin builds; your base weight is your own private number, and it covers the things you carry that were never on anyone's list.
Water
Water is heavy and personal — a litre is a kilogram, and no two hikers drink the same. Pack Hiker handles it in three layers, each one beating the one below it:
- Your figure for that day — set on the itinerary day itself, in 100 ml steps
- The trip plan's suggestion for that day — see below
- Your usual carry — the fallback you set once in the Your Backpack card
So set your usual carry, then override only the days that are different: the dry stretch where you're tanking up four litres, or the day you're walking beside a river.
Suggested Water For Everyone
The hike owner and co-admins can set a suggested water carry for any day — useful when whoever planned the route knows there's no water for 25 km. It applies automatically to every member who hasn't set their own figure for that day, so people who never open the panel still get a realistic number.
Your own figure always wins. If a suggestion is showing and you'd rather use your usual carry, one tap swaps it back.
Food
Not everyone wants to weigh every muesli bar, so there are three ways to record food weight — you only need one. Pick whichever suits you on the Food tab.
| Mode | What you enter | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Detailed plan | Every item, in the meal grid | Planners who want per-meal control |
| Daily totals | One number per day | "About 800 g a day" — most people |
| One total | One number for the whole trip | "6 kg of food, sorted" — divided by days |
Switching modes doesn't delete anything. Your detailed plan stays exactly where it is if you try daily totals and change your mind.
How Food Drops Change The Curve
Food weight isn't just "what you eat that day" — it's everything you're still carrying. A unit of food is in your pack from the moment you pick it up until the moment you eat it, so day 1 carries the whole leg and every food drop resets it.
- Detailed plan and Daily totals — tag a meal or a day to the drop it comes from, and it's carried from that drop onward. Anything untagged is carried from the hike start.
- One total — the total is spread evenly across the days, and the drops split it into legs automatically. Nothing to tag.
That's what makes the number fall through the week and jump back up on resupply day.
Reading It On The Itinerary
Every day card shows your backpack weight for that day, in an outlined pill next to the day's distance. Tap it and you get the full breakdown — base, water, food, total — plus the controls to set your water for that day.
In Day focus view it gets its own ribbon under the day header, with the breakdown spelled out in line.
A ~ in front of the number means something's still missing — no water recorded for that day, or no food weight at all — so the total is a floor, not a promise. Fill in the gap and the tilde goes away. If you haven't set a base weight yet, no number shows at all; there's nothing meaningful to add up.
Who Can Do What
| Action | Who |
|---|---|
| Set your own base weight & usual water | Every member, including view-only |
| Set your own water for a day | Every member, including view-only |
| Choose your food mode & weights | Every member, including view-only |
| Suggest water for everyone | Owner & co-admins |
Your figures are yours — nobody else can edit them, and setting yours never changes anyone else's.
Note: Backpack weight is worked out for real members only. Pack Shadows — the placeholders for people who haven't joined yet — don't get one, since nobody's there to say what they're carrying.