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.
Everyone's Backpack
Under your own card is Everyone's Backpack — one line per hiker, ordered from the heaviest backpack down. Each line shows four figures, with a bar so you can see the gap between two people before you read a single number:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Base | Their base weight — gear only, no food or water |
| Average | Their mean carry across every day of the hike |
| Heaviest | Their peak day, and which day it falls on |
| Lightest | Their easiest day, and which day it falls on |
Handy when you're deciding who carries the tent, or spotting the packmate who's quietly signed up for 22 kg on day one. Average is the load they'll actually live with; heaviest is the one they have to be able to lift, which is why the list is ordered by it. Base weight is the fairest column to compare like-for-like: it's pure gear choices, and it isn't skewed by somebody choosing to carry four litres of water.
On a narrow screen the outer columns drop away, so a phone keeps Average and Heaviest.
Missing Figures
A No water or No food pill next to someone's bar means exactly what it says — they haven't recorded that part yet, so every figure on their line is a floor rather than a real number. The ~ in front of each figure means the same thing; the pill just tells you which one to go and fix.
No water is worth a moment's thought, because it takes three misses at once: no figure for that day, no suggested carry for it, and no usual carry to fall back on. Setting a usual carry in Your Backpack clears it for the whole trip.
It's read-only. Everybody sets their own figures, and yours never change anyone else's.
Day-by-day figures stay where you can act on them — your own are on the itinerary, one on each day.
Water
All the figures below are shown in whichever units you picked in your profile — see Miles Or Kilometres. Metric is used here for the examples.
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 round steps (100 ml, or 8 fl oz on imperial)
- 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 collect it until the moment you eat it, so you leave the trailhead with the whole first leg and every food drop starts you over.
- 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 climb again after every resupply.
Resupply Day Is A Light Day
You normally walk to a food drop, so Pack Hiker assumes you collect it at the end of that day. The new box starts weighing you down the next morning.
This catches people out, so it's worth saying plainly: the day you reach a drop is one of your lightest, because you arrive on the last scraps of the old box. Your heaviest day is the one after it — the morning you shoulder a fresh week of dinners.
There's one exception, and you don't have to do anything to get it: if that day's breakfast comes from the new box, you must have camped at the drop and left with it, so it's in your pack from that morning. (The breakfast itself still doesn't count — you open the box and eat it on the spot.)
That single check is all it takes, because a food drop always holds the food from the moment you collect it forward. Pick it up over breakfast and the box has that breakfast in it; pick it up at lunch or at camp and it doesn't. Your meal tags already say which, so there's nothing extra to set.
One total has no meal detail to read, so it always assumes end of day.
Reading It On The Itinerary
Every day carries its own backpack ribbon just under the day header — the total, then the base, water and food it's made of, spelled out in line. It works the same way in both itinerary layouts. Tap it and you get the full breakdown plus the controls to set your water for that day.
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.
Out Of Reception
Your own numbers can be changed offline — base weight, usual water, a day's water and your food totals. They're saved on your device and sent the next time you have signal, which is the point: you're most likely to want tomorrow's water figure while sitting in camp with no bars.
The one exception is the admin's suggested water, which belongs to the whole pack, so it waits for a connection like food drops and the itinerary do.
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.