Best snacks for a winter day hike – and why you should pig out on them

Mixing carbs and fats in snacks is a good idea for winter
hiking with kids.

Arguably one of the many fun aspects of a day hike in winter is that you can snack – and not just a little snack, like you might enjoy on a summer walk.

Your body uses more energy on a winter day hike than in summer. First, more exertion is required to move over snow, and secondly your body must generate heat to keep itself warm. Because of this, you can burn around 100 more calories an hour than you would during a summer hike on the same trail.

To keep up your energy, during winter you’ll want to mix carbs and fats in your snacks. If you stick only to carbs, you risk a sugar crash in which you’ll become sluggish and cold. Being tired on a trail is never any fun, but when your body struggles to stay warm during a winter hike, that’s problematic.

Some great snack carb/fat combos for a winter day hike include:
g Nuts and dried fruit – Almonds, walnuts, and pistachios provide the fats while dried fruit work as carbs.
g Nuts and chocolate pieces – The sweets give you carbs while the nuts again offer up the fats.
g Candy with cookie wafers – The frosted or chocolate portions provide the fats while the cookie wafer is the carb.

And don’t worry about eating larger portions of these snacks than you would during summer. You almost certainly won’t gain weight because the body actually needs the extra intake of food.

Finally, don’t forget water with those snacks. You’ll need extra water on a winter day hike not just to help to metabolize the nuts, fruits and candy but also to ward off dehydration. Hikers often don’t realize that dehydrating oneself in cold weather is just as easy to do as it is on an extremely hot day. Due to the freezing temperatures, moisture is locked up in the snow, and so the air is desert dry.

Read more about day hiking with children in my Hikes with Tykes guidebooks.

Bring healthy snacks when hiking with kids

Among the many wonderful things about hiking, at least for the kids, is that snacking between meals isn’t frowned upon. Unless going on an all-day hike in which you’ll picnic along the way, you want to keep them fed, as hungry children can lead to lethargy and whininess. It’ll also keep toddlers from snacking on the local flora or dirt.

Before hitting the trail, you’ll want to repackage as much of the food as possible as products sold at grocery stores tend to come in bulky packages that take up space and add a little weight to your backpack. Place the food in re-sealable plastic bags.

Bring a variety of small snacks for rest stops. You don’t want kids filling up on snacks, but you do need them to maintain their energy levels if they’re walking or to ensure they don’t turn fussy if riding in a child carrier. Go for complex carbohydrates and proteins for maintaining energy. Good options include dried fruits, jerky, nuts, peanut butter, prepared energy bars, candy bars with a high protein content (nuts, peanut butter), crackers, raisins and trail mix (called “gorp”). A number of trail mix recipes are available online; you and your children may want to try them out at home to see which ones you collectively like most.

Salty treats rehydrate better than sweet treats do. Chocolate and other sweets are fine if they’re not all that’s exclusively served, but remember they also tend to lead to thirst and to make sticky messes. Whichever snacks you choose, don’t experiment with food on the trail. Bring what you know kids will like.

Give the first snack within a half-hour of leaving the trailhead or you risk children becoming tired and whiny from low energy levels. If kids start asking for them every few steps even after having something to eat at the last rest stop, consider timing snacks to reaching a visible landmark, such as, “We’ll get out the trail mix when we reach that bend up ahead.”

Read more about day hiking with children in my Hikes with Tykes guidebooks.