Expedition Planning Calculator

Multi-day expedition planning lives or dies on weight budgeting, so this calculator itemizes every major category rather than producing one opaque total. Daily caloric need starts at a 2,500-calorie baseline and adds a per-level bonus for terrain difficulty plus a cold-weather bonus (30 calories for every degree below 5°C) to account for the extra energy cold conditions demand. Food weight then converts those calories using a 5-calories-per-gram density typical of freeze-dried meals and energy-dense trail food; if resupply is available mid-trip, the calculator only sizes your carried food for 3 days at a time instead of the full trip, which is usually the single biggest weight lever in the whole result. Fuel is sized at 60mL of white gas per person per day (enough for two hot meals and hot drinks) and converted to weight using white gas's roughly 0.7 kg/L density, plus a fixed stove-and-cookware allowance that grows slightly for larger groups.

Water carry — not total water consumed — scales with temperature (more liters carried between sources as it gets hotter) since the model assumes refill sources exist along the route. Shelter weight benefits from group economies of scale (a shared tent costs less per person than solo shelters), while sleep-system weight is set purely by temperature — it scales linearly with group size with no per-person discount for larger groups — and clothing weight per person is likewise set by temperature bands. Finally, daily travel time is derived from a 4 km/h base hiking pace, slowed by both terrain difficulty and any per-person pack weight above 10kg — so a heavier expedition doesn't just feel harder, it's modeled as genuinely slower per kilometer.