Arctic Circle Trail food: how to fuel Greenland's 165km crossing

Quick answer: Plan on 3,500 to 5,000 calories a day on the Arctic Circle Trail and carry all of it from the start, because there are no shops in the 165km between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut. A realistic 10-day food bag of about 3,700 calories a day, plus one spare day, weighs about 8.4kg.

The trail runs from Kangerlussuaq, near the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, to the coastal town of Sisimiut on the Davis Strait. There are no resupply points, no road access, almost no phone signal and a chain of small, unstaffed huts that can't be booked. Most thru-hikers take 7 to 10 days, and daily calorie needs depend on pace, pack weight and weather. This guide covers how to plan the carry, what a 10-day food bag weighs item by item, and how to eat when the weather pins you down.

Written by James Frost, founder of Flaming Phoenix and the maker of Phoenix Bars. Updated November 2026.

The trail in numbers

The Arctic Circle Trail was established in 1998 and runs entirely north of the Arctic Circle through one of the largest ice-free wilderness areas in west Greenland. The highest point is about 450 metres, so this is not a technical mountain trail in the GR20 or HRP sense. What makes it hard is the isolation and the conditions. The first 17km or so out of Kangerlussuaq follows a gravel road; after that it is single track marked by cairns, with river crossings and boggy ground. The trail crosses traditional Inuit hunting grounds that are now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The huts are spaced roughly 11 to 22 kilometres apart and have only a few bunks each. Some hikers add an extension east to Point 660 on the edge of the ice sheet before they start. The hiking season runs from mid-June to mid-September, and the fastest known time is under two days. Most hikers walk it east to west from Kangerlussuaq and finish in Sisimiut.

The ACT sits at the opposite end of the thru-hike spectrum from the GR20 and the HRP. The GR20 is short and technically intense. The HRP is long and partially resupplied. The ACT is short by HRP standards but completely self-supported. That makes its fuelling problem a pure carry-density calculation: everything you eat is on your back from the first morning.

The five constraints that define Arctic Circle Trail fuelling

Every ACT planning decision flows from five constraints. The order below reflects how much each one shapes the carry. Solve them in this order.

Constraint one: zero resupply means the bag is the trek

There are no shops between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut. None. Cicerone's guidebook and the official Arctic Circle Trail website both state this in unambiguous terms. The Hiking Life's resupply notes are blunt: bring everything except stove fuel, which can be bought at the Kangerlussuaq supermarket across from the airport.

This single fact has three consequences. First, your starting pack weight is the heaviest it will ever be on the trip, which is the opposite of a resupplied trail, where you eat down between villages and refill every few days. Second, you cannot recover from poor food planning by buying more on the trail. If you run out on day six, you walk hungry for two days. Third, your carry needs to include a one-day emergency buffer, which Cicerone and most experienced trip reports specify as non-negotiable. Greenland weather can pin you down at a hut or in a tent for 24 hours at any point in the trek.

With no shops for 165km, calories per gram decide your food plan. The densest high calorie bars reach about 4.5 calories per gram, above the rough 4.0 line that separates efficient trail food from heavy filler, so 3.6kg of them carries about 16,000 calories. The same calories split between bread, cheese and tinned tuna would weigh about 8.6kg, well over twice as much. The fuller logic on this density question is laid out in our calorie-dense foods guide, which is the right primer before you finalise the carry.

Constraint two: cold and unpredictable Arctic conditions

The ACT can feel like 30 degrees Celsius in mid-summer sun, or it can snow in late August. The Detour Effect's solo hiker logged snow in Sisimiut two days after finishing in late August 2024. The temperature range across a single 10-day window can be 40 degrees. Average late-summer daytime temperatures sit at 5 to 10 degrees Celsius with nights dropping to minus 5.

Cold affects fuelling in three ways. First, cold days cost more: heavier clothing, wind and keeping warm at rest stops all add to the daily burn, so aim for the high end of your daily target even though the terrain is gentler than alpine trails. Second, many energy bars harden below freezing, which is why cold performance is one of the measures in our ranking of the best energy bars for expeditions. On a cold morning, keep chocolate and any snack that stiffens in the cold in a jacket pocket so it is easy to bite. Third, gas canister performance drops sharply in cold. Liquid fuel stoves are more reliable below freezing, but most ACT hikers use gas because it is widely available in Kangerlussuaq.

The wider cold-weather fuelling logic is covered in detail in our polar expedition nutrition guide. The principles scale down well to a 10-day Arctic trail.

Constraint three: pack weight ceiling

Realistic ACT pack weights for thru-hikers are 12 to 18 kilograms, including food, water, fuel and a 3-season tent rated to minus 5. The Detour Effect packed 15kg as a 5-foot-5 solo hiker. Stars and Wildflowers carried 19 to 23kg for an unguided couple. Guided trips quote 19 to 23kg as standard starting weight.

The maths is unforgiving. With a base gear weight of around 8 to 9kg (tent, sleeping bag, mat, stove, clothes, electronics) plus 0.5 to 1.5kg of water on most days, you have roughly 4 to 9kg of weight available for food. At 4.5 calories per gram of carried food, 8kg delivers 36,000 calories, which is 3,600 per day across 10 days and already inside the 3,500 to 5,000 daily range. At about 3 calories per gram (a typical supermarket mix of bread, cheese, tinned tuna and biscuits), the same 8kg delivers about 24,000 calories, 2,400 a day, and you finish the trail well short.

For carry planning on longer expeditions, see the ultra-endurance and expedition nutrition guide.

Constraint four: hut bunks are not guaranteed

The huts on the ACT are small, have only a few bunks each and can't be booked, so they fill on a first-come first-served basis. The Arctic Circle Trail official site, Cicerone and every experienced trip report all say the same thing: bring a tent even if you plan to hut.

For food, that matters. Hut nights mean you can cook in a small enclosed space, share boiled water with other hikers to save fuel, and eat in relative comfort. Tent nights mean cooking outside in wind that may extinguish your gas burner, eating cold food if conditions are bad, and burning more fuel per meal because of cold and exposure.

The defence is a hybrid fuelling plan that works in either scenario. Hot dinners for hut nights, cold-soaked or no-cook backup meals for tent nights when conditions make stove use unpleasant, and bar-and-snack lunches every day regardless. Bars, nuts, cheese and chocolate give you the same calories in a gale as in a hut, so the more of your day comes from no-cook food, the less a bad night costs you. The ultra high carb solid foods guide covers the wider logic of why solid carb-dense foods outperform liquid or freeze-dried options when conditions are uncertain.

Constraint five: weather pin-downs and the +1 day rule

Greenland weather can change in an hour. The official ACT site recommends carrying an emergency flare and remote-rescue insurance because the trail is far enough from rescue services that self-evacuation is the assumption rather than the exception. The practical fuelling implication is the +1 day rule: carry one extra day of food beyond your planned trek length to cover a single weather pin-down or pace mistake.

For a planned 8-day trek, carry 9 days of food. For a 10-day trek, carry 11. The buffer is non-negotiable because there is no shop to recover from, and walking the last boggy days into Sisimiut cold and underfed is when tired hikers make mistakes.

How much food do you need for the Arctic Circle Trail?

About 0.8kg a day if your food averages 4.5 calories per gram or more. Here is a worked food bag for a typical 10-day east-to-west traverse: about 7.9kg of food for roughly 3,700 calories a day, plus about 0.5kg for a spare day, before water and fuel. The figures are approximate, from typical UK label values, and the bar line uses five of each of my six flavours.

I make Phoenix Bars, so those are the bars in my version of this bag: up to 557 calories in a compact, 120g bar, about 4.5 calories per gram. Five of each flavour (Apple & Cinnamon, Cherry Bakewell, Chocolate, Vanilla, Salted Caramel and Ginger) stops ten days of the same lunch getting old, and they won't freeze or melt; Shaun Weston found them "Easy to eat, even at -45c" on a South Pole expedition. You can also mix one with water as a high calorie porridge, and the method is in how to use Phoenix Bars. A Complete Bundle of 36 covers ten days at three a day with six to spare, and two Starter Bundles of 12 cover a 7 or 8-day plan.

Breakfast is 60g of porridge oats, 25g of whole milk powder and 15g of seeds per bag. Use the hot-water-soak method in the high calorie breakfast guide in a hut, or cold-soak it in the tent. Dinners are dehydrated meals of about 150g and 700 calories each, with an olive oil sachet stirred in. The cheese, salami, nuts, dark chocolate and dried fruit add about 8,000 calories over the trek; our high calorie snacks guide compares them on calories per gram.

The 10-day bag averages about 4.6 calories per gram and 3,700 calories a day, the lower end of what most ACT hikers burn. That is normal, and most people finish a little lighter than they started. If you know you are a big eater, add nuts and olive oil, the densest foods in the bag, rather than more of everything.

Should you cook hot meals on the Arctic Circle Trail?

Yes for breakfast and dinner when you can, and cold food the rest of the day. On the ACT you will make the hot-versus-cold call every day. Most experienced thru-hikers settle on roughly the following pattern.

Mornings: hot porridge in a hut, cold pre-soaked oats in a tent. Both work. Hot porridge is easier to face on a cold morning; the cold-soak approach saves stove fuel and is faster for cold-weather pack-up.

Lunches: cold every day regardless of weather. A bar, cheese, salami, dried fruit, chocolate. Lunch is on the trail and stopping to fire up a stove in cold wind is rarely worth it.

Afternoon snacks: cold bars and nuts at any natural break point.

Dinners: hot in huts (dehydrated meal plus oil), hot in tents if conditions allow (dehydrated meal with sheltered burner), cold-soaked or bar-heavy if a storm makes stove use miserable.

This pattern lets you plan stove fuel for two hot meals a day across 10 days, which is approximately one 230g gas canister for solo use or 1.5 canisters for a duo. Most ACT hikers buy gas at the supermarket in Kangerlussuaq, across the road from the airport, as soon as they land, because gas canisters can't go on a passenger flight.

Water and stove fuel: the things the ACT actually does well

For all the carry-density pressure, the ACT is generous on water. The trail passes hundreds of lakes, streams and tarns. Most ACT hikers do not treat their water and report no issues, although the Hiking Life and a few other experienced sources still carry purification tablets as a backup. You should never need to carry more than 1.5 litres at a time, which keeps water weight low compared to a hot-weather Mediterranean trail.

That helps with the carry. Every kilogram of water you do not carry is a kilogram available for food. Combined with the gas canister being purchasable immediately on arrival in Kangerlussuaq, the only weight you actually fly into Greenland with is your gear and your food.

What does a day of eating look like on the Arctic Circle Trail?

This day matches the food bag above, item for item.

0600 to 0700, wake at hut or tent. Hot oats with milk powder and seeds, plus a hot drink. Roughly 450 calories.

0800, walk out. Average daily distance is 16 to 22 kilometres. The terrain is rolling tundra, low ridges, lakes, river crossings and some bog sections.

1000, mid-morning bar at the first natural rest point. Up to 557 calories. Half a litre of water from a stream.

1300, lunch on a rock by a lake or stream. One bar, 30g of hard cheese, a handful of nuts and a few squares of chocolate. Roughly 1,100 calories.

1530, afternoon bar at another natural break. Up to 557 calories. By mid-afternoon the cold and the distance have added up, so don't skip it.

1700 to 1900, arrive at hut or pitch tent. Eat a handful of dried fruit and a few slices of salami while you set up and dinner cooks, about 200 calories.

2000, hot dinner. Dehydrated meal with an olive oil sachet stirred in. Roughly 800 calories, more if you finish the day's nuts or chocolate.

Total daily intake on this template is about 3,700 calories. If you are still hungry at night, eat the next day's snack ration early and top up from the spare-day bag only once the end is in sight.

The structure is similar to the daily template I built for the GR20 and the HRP, but the ACT version is more bar-and-cold-snack heavy because there is no village lunch option ever, and dinner is the only reliably hot meal of the day rather than the centrepiece of a hut social.

What to do if you are delayed

The +1 day buffer covers a single 24-hour weather pin-down. If you are delayed beyond that, the standard advice from Cicerone and the official ACT site is to ration carefully, stay in the next hut you reach, and use your emergency flare or satellite communicator if conditions are deteriorating.

Practical rationing if you are stretching food into an unexpected 11th or 12th day: drop daily intake to 3,000 to 3,500 calories, prioritise the bars and high-density snacks over the heavier dehydrated meals, and skip the morning porridge in favour of cold bars to save stove fuel. Bars and nuts make the simplest reserve because they need no stove, no water and no shelter to eat.

For the broader emergency-food principles that underlie this kind of planning, see our guide to emergency food preparedness.

Frequently asked questions

How many calories do you burn per day on the Arctic Circle Trail? Most ACT hikers burn 3,500 to 5,000 calories per day, with cold weather pushing the upper end higher because of thermoregulation costs. Daily output is moderate compared to alpine trails but cumulative across 10 days it is significant.

Can you buy food anywhere on the Arctic Circle Trail? No. There are no shops, no resupply points, and no road access between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut. Cicerone's guidebook and the official ACT site both confirm that hikers must carry the entire trek's food plus one extra day for weather buffer.

How heavy should my pack be on the Arctic Circle Trail? Realistic starting pack weights are 12 to 18 kilograms including food, water, fuel and 3-season camping kit. Lower is better if your gear allows. With no resupply, calories per gram of food largely decide how heavy your pack is at the start.

Is the Arctic Circle Trail suitable for vegan or gluten-free hikers? Yes, more so than most European thru-hikes because you carry everything yourself and never depend on village food. Plan and pack to your own dietary requirements: dehydrated meals, bars, nuts, dark chocolate and gluten-free oats all come in vegan and gluten-free versions, so check labels as you pack.

When is the best time to walk the Arctic Circle Trail? Late June to early September is the safe window. July has the longest daylight but the worst mosquitoes and midges. Late August offers cooler temperatures, fewer bugs, and the chance to see the Aurora Borealis as the nights lengthen. Early September is the latest realistic window before snow makes the trail more dangerous.

Do you need a tent if huts are available? Yes. The Arctic Circle Trail official site, Cicerone and every experienced trip report all say to bring a tent. The huts are small, first-come first-served and can't be booked, so you cannot guarantee a bunk at the end of any given day.

How much water should you carry on the Arctic Circle Trail? 1 to 1.5 litres at a time is sufficient. The trail passes hundreds of lakes and streams and water is generally drinkable without treatment, although a few experienced sources still carry purification tablets as backup.

What is the fastest time anyone has walked the Arctic Circle Trail? The fastest known time is under two days. Most thru-hikers complete the trail in 7 to 10 days. Fastpackers and trail runners attempting to compress the route below five days should read our fastpacking nutrition guide for the carb-tolerance protocol that makes high daily mileages sustainable.

How many bars a day should you eat on the Arctic Circle Trail? Three is the usual baseline: one mid-morning, one at lunch and one mid-afternoon. With 120g bars that is 360g a day and up to 1,671 calories, close to half of a 3,700-calorie day, with no cooking.

How should you pack food for the Arctic Circle Trail? Bag each day's food separately, in the order you will eat it, and put the spare day in a different-coloured bag so you only open it if you need it. Strip off outer packaging before you fly to save weight, but keep the labels for anything you need to check for allergens.

What food should you take on the Arctic Circle Trail? Dense food that needs little or no cooking: bars, nuts, dark chocolate, hard cheese, salami, oats with milk powder, and dehydrated dinners with olive oil stirred in. Aim for an average of 4.5 calories per gram or more, and leave tins, bread and fresh fruit at home.

Can you fly to Greenland with stove gas? No. Gas canisters aren't allowed on passenger flights, so buy them in Kangerlussuaq when you land. Check the supermarket's opening hours against your arrival time before you fly.

Related guides

The Arctic Circle Trail sits within a broader category of self-supported, low-altitude wilderness thru-hikes where the carry density problem dominates everything else. Plan alongside it with these guides: the Cape Wrath Trail nutrition guide for the closest British equivalent in self-supported demand and remote terrain; the HRP nutrition guide for the European long-distance carry-density logic at a much larger scale; the GR20 nutrition guide for the Mediterranean opposite end of the spectrum (short, intense, partially supported); the wild camping nutrition guide for the broader principles of self-cooked thru-hike eating; the backpacking nutrition guide for the foundational pack-density logic that applies to every multi-day route; and the polar expedition nutrition guide for the cold-weather fuelling principles that scale down to Arctic summer trekking.

For hikers planning the ACT as part of a wider Greenland or Arctic objective, our notes on weight maintenance in the how to gain weight guide cover the multi-week calorie deficit that affects most thru-hikers by week two of any sustained Arctic expedition.

All of these sit under my ultra-endurance and expedition nutrition guide.

Sources: Arctic Circle Trail official website; Cicerone, Trekking in Greenland: The Arctic Circle Trail; trip reports from The Hiking Life, The Detour Effect and Stars and Wildflowers; typical UK pack label values for the food bag table.