NOLS Rations Manager Ashley Boone shows off their snack mix.
Let’s say you’re heading out to the great outdoors for a few days or longer. You’ve got your backpack. You’ve got your tent. You’ve got your rain gear and a good pair of boots.
What are you going to eat? It’s not an easy question to answer. Your favorite cast iron frying pan is too heavy to carry if it even fits in your backpack. And a lot of your favorite grocery store items are too heavy or too bulky or too fragile.
And your nutritional needs are different out there. You’re hiking in the sun and rain all day. And you’re sleeping in a tent through cold nights. Your body needs fuel. It needs calories.
We asked the people at NOLS how they feed their students. NOLS is the National Outdoor Leadership School. Their 40 acre Alaska campus is on an old dairy farm in Palmer. NOLS hires over 100 instructors who lead over 800 students on trips all over Alaska during the summer. They take them on backpacking trips, mountaineering trips, and sea-kayaking trips.
Some of the trips are one week long. Some are three months long. NOLS takes students to the Talkeetna Mountains, the Chugach Mountains, and Prince William Sound. Program Manager Caio Poletti is really excited about the new sea kayaking course from Whittier to Seward.
NOLS also provides training for astronauts. There’s a hallway in their main building lined with photographs of NASA astronauts who’ve graduated from one of their top-secret training expeditions.
NOLS courses are rigorous. Depending on the course, the weight students carry, including food, can be up to 45 to 60 pounds or 40 to 45% of their body weight according to their website.
Students burn a lot of calories on NOLS trips. Keeping them fed is important. Adventure nutrition is both a science and an art at NOLS.
Students carry enough food to last ten days. For longer trips, pre-pack bags are dropped off for them at pre-determined spots.
Ashley Boone is the rations manager at NOLS Alaska. She uses a computer program as a guideline for food distribution. The students need a diet that’s high in carbohydrates, protein and fat. Yes, fat, especially in the colder seasons. The software sorts out the general nutritional needs, but it does not do the daily meal planning.
Boone says that camp cooking is part of the adventure. She wants them to be creative. They have the tools to make quesadillas, spaghetti, pizza, even cake on their camp stoves. Campers cook in teams of three or four. They take turns cooking. It’s exciting when they develop their own recipes. One time, students came back with a new recipe for camp-stove butter chicken!
All Boone does is give them the tools. She gives them quick-cooking rice and pasta. She gives them tomato powder. She gives them cheese, chicken and tuna packets, summer sausage, butter, olive oil, and cake mixes. And she gives them spices.
Those spices are important. You use a lot of calories when you’re hiking in the mountains. You are not going to eat enough if the food is boring, she says.
So, how much of this applies to your five day backpacking trip? Not all of it. Boone says that when camping on her own, she might use a hybrid approach. She might even splurge and buy one of those expensive freeze-dried meals at REI. But she’s got the skills to cook a great outdoor meal of her own. If you’ve got the skills, you might as well use them.
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That’s it for today and the news on Page Two on Tuesday, July 7, 2026.
Image by David Cheezem:
NOLS Rations Manager Ashley Boone shows off their snack mix.