Plan the meals. Pack the bag. Know what it weighs.
Outpost is a backpacking trip planner that holds the parts you are currently keeping in a spreadsheet, a notes app and your head. Your meals day by day. Your packing list. Your gear and what it weighs. The tasks that need to be done to get you to the trail.
You supply the trip details. Outpost does the adding up.
Free. No card, no trial clock, nothing behind a paywall.
Meals, planned by the day
Outpost helps you create a meal plan for every day you are gone, four slots each: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks.
Fill them in and the numbers follow. Calories per meal, per day, and for the whole trip. Water per meal, so you know what each stop actually costs you before you decide where you are filtering and how much fuel to carry.
Search a catalog instead of typing nutrition panels
Start typing and Outpost searches meals from popular backpacking food brands, with the calories, the water and the dry weight already filled in.
Your own meals are in the same search. Outpost puts your usual breakfasts first when you are filling a breakfast slot.
What your pack actually weighs
Start from a proven checklist or build your own. Either way the list is a template you keep, and each trip tracks its own packed and not-needed statuses. Next trip, the list is clean again.
Link a list item to the gear that fills it and the section header starts keeping score: "2 of 3 assigned, 2 lbs 9 oz."
Your gear closet, weighed once
Weigh a thing once and it is weighed forever. Add it to your gear inventory in grams, kilograms, ounces or pounds, whichever you think in, and Outpost shows it back in whatever unit you prefer.
Type an item name and Outpost suggests the category. It knows a Half Dome is a tent.
Then your food counts too. The trip's pack weight is gear plus meals so the number on the screen is the number on your back.
Reminders before you leave
Keep track of the steps necessary to get to the trail: share the plan with your emergency contact two days out, check the forecast, pack your pack the night before.
Then it keeps an eye on it. A nudge the day a task is due. A nudge a few days out if your meal plan still has food nobody has bought.
Paste a link and Outpost pulls in the title and the picture, so the permit link and the forecast link sit with the trip instead of in a browser tab you will lose.
Reminders are only sent in-app by default. Email and push notifications are available if you want them.
The trip plan prints itself
This part takes no extra work, because you already did it.
Everything above is on one printable page: the trip, the dates, the meals, the checklist, and the details somebody needs if you do not come back. Add your emergency contact and the ranger station, and Outpost writes the escalation in plain words so nobody at home has to decide when to worry:
"If not returned by the morning of Aug 29, call Grand Teton NP Backcountry Permits Office at (307) 739-3309."
Print it. Leave it on the counter. Put a second copy in your car.
What goes on the sheet
Every trip has a card for the things a search would start from:
- Your emergency contact, by name and number
- The ranger station or land manager to call, by name and number
- When you expect to leave and when you expect to be back
- Your vehicle, so it can be found at the trailhead
- Your permit or route number
- Everyone in your party with optional contact information
- Freeform notes for anything else worth knowing
Outpost tells you when the card is still missing something, so you find out on the couch instead of at the trailhead. Print the details on their own, or add the tasks, the meal plan and the packing list. Checklists can print blank so you can tick them off by hand.
Still works with no signal
Install Outpost to your home screen and it opens like any other app. Once you've loaded a trip, its meal plan, packing list and trip card stay readable with no signal at all: at the trailhead, in a valley, or anywhere your carrier does not reach.
Already using LighterPack?
Keep it. Seriously.
LighterPack is very good at everything it does, and Outpost does not try to replace it. If shaving grams off a list is what you came for, LighterPack is already the right place.
Outpost is for all of the other trip details. The meal plan. The water math. The tasks. The permit number and the ranger's phone number. The page your partner has on the fridge while you are gone.
Running both is a completely reasonable way to live.
Built by someone who uses it
I'm Josiah. I build Outpost, and I plan my own trips in it.
This summer I went solo through Grayson Highlands, Virginia. Outpost had the meals and the pack weight. Every number here is from the plan I actually carried.
Grayson Highlands, VA · 2 nights solo · 26 lbs 14 oz · 4,403 cal
Outpost is free
Everything on this page is free to use. Every trip, every list, every meal plan, every printed page. No card and no trial clock.
How Outpost makes money
When a meal in your plan came from a brand we track, you will sometimes see a buy link next to it. If you use it, Outpost may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Those links are labeled where they appear.
Your data is not the product.
Your account and your data
Sign up with an email and a password and you are in.
- Keep your information secure with optional two-factor authentication
- Download everything you have ever put in Outpost, as one file, whenever you want
- Delete your account and we wipe all of it from our servers
Start your first trip
Name the trip, pick the dates, and Outpost lays out the meal plan and the pre-trip tasks for you. Fill in your meals and it plans the calories and the water you need to carry. Link your gear and it tallies the weight.