Gluten-Free Backpacking

My boys are in scouts so they do a lot of backpacking. Both of my boys are gluten-free which typically has limited their choices for dehydrated meals. While my husband goes on an on about how delicious the Mountain House Lasagna was my boys complain about being limited to 3 choices. That was not the case on this year’s big trip!!! Due to COVID-19 their 50 miler with scouts was cancelled so we decided to turn it into a family backpacking trip. For multiple reasons beyond our control we ended up going 32 miles, which given the conditions, was a pretty darn good haul! We had such a great time and since mom (that’s me) came along this time we had a lot of good gluten-free backpacking food to choose from!! No, I didn’t make the food, I just put a little more effort into finding variety 🙂

Scroll to the bottom to see our list of essential and trip tested backpacking items with tips, tricks and links to find them. Happy trails!

Dehydrated Meals

Our favorite dehydrated food brands are Mountain House, Backpacker’s Pantry and Good-to-Go. The top 3 pictures show my favorite meals on the trip. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the backpacking size Mountain House Mexican Style Rice & Chicken on Amazon but they do have it in the XL #10 size can for survival & emergency food. Their shelf stable meals are backed by a 30-Year Taste…always good to have on hand in my opinion!!

You will notice most of these meals say “2 servings”. They are quite large so my husband and I would often split a meal while my oldest son would eat the whole thing himself. The ability to split with my husband was great because that means one less meal to carry between the two of us! Most of the time the 2 serving option is only slightly more expensive than the 1 serving option so it just makes sense! Also, I usually just buy the case of 6 from Amazon, that way everyone in the family has the option of taking each meal and the left over packets serve as food storage or prep for the next gluten-free backpacking hike!

Backpacker’s Pantry and Good To-Go are new brands to us so we don’t have as many on here but the ones we tried were pretty good and they appear to have many more gluten-free options available. I prefer lots of flavors and seasonings, there were a few somewhat bland meals which others may prefer so I noted those next to the picture title.

Other Gluten-Free Backpacking Treats

Essential Backpacking Equipment

These are all items we all use when we’ve been on family and scouting backpacking trips not just random items picked out from Amazon. Some items can be shared such as the jet boil (we recommend one jet boil for every 2 people) and the Katadyn water filter (one per group of up to 15 people – be sure to bring a spare filter if your trip is longer than 2 days or if your water source is not clean). Tents fit up to 2 people and not everyone needs a chair if you are trying to minimize weight.

We highly recommend getting the insulated sleep pad, even if you are in mild temperatures. On one of our trips we had one insulated and one non-insulated sleep pad. Promptly upon returning home we returned the non-insulated one and bought another insulated one! The temperatures barely got down to the 50’s at night during that trip but the insulated pad made a huge difference!