Wilderness Athlete Pack Out Bars & Bites Review

As a health and wellness coach and avid hunter, I am always looking for good quality, delicious snacks for the wilderness. I do not like 98% of bars that I try because they taste terrible. Several bars these days are also made with junk ingredients and several fillers that mess with my sensitive stomach, so I have always stuck to homemade snacks. I finally decided to try the Wilderness Athlete Pack Out Bars and Pack Out Bites.  All I can say is I will be adding these to my wilderness adventures! 

The ingredients are solid, the macros protein, carbs, and fats fit into my daily nutrition, and they taste great, satisfy the sweet tooth, and can help get you through some survival situations.

The True Test

During this cold Alaska winter, my husband and I went flying after work to pull our wolf snares from our trapline at season’s end. We were on a time crunch to make it back home by dark and relieve the babysitter.

It was supposed to be a quick trip so I hardly brought any snacks, but as I walked out the door I had the thought to grab some of these bars and throw them in the backpack. So I grabbed a few of the peanut butter chocolate chip Pack Out Bars and a handful of the chocolate brownie Pack Out Bites even though I had not tried the bites yet.

We set out on our adventure and landed the airplane on top of a snowy, ice pack bluff over the creek where our snares were. It was 12°F ambient temperature, but as we got out of the airplane, the wind was howling at a cold 35mph. We dropped into the creek out of the wind and grabbed our snares. It was still pretty chilly but we stayed warm on snowshoes staying moving. We moved around for a couple of hours and I was so hungry but realized I left the bars in the airplane.

I was so looking forward to getting back into the warm airplane, eating the bars, and flying home.

Oops

As we snowshoed back up to the airplane, we noticed that we forgot to put the engine blanket on the airplane. This meant the airplane would be too cold to start as it had sat in negative temps for too long. We tried to start the airplane and it would not start. 

We dug a hole in the snow under the engine to make a small fire in an engine heater that the chilling wind wouldn’t put out. We sat there in negative temperatures for an hour, waiting for the engine to warm up so it could start. If it didn’t, we would be spending the night out there in our emergency tent and sleeping bags.

My only hope was those Pack Out Bars because I was so hungry and worried we would be stuck out there, and I was NOT disappointed. We both waited out the engine heating process, freezing in the wind, eating Wilderness Athlete bars and bites, watching the engine warm-up slowly from 10°, to 13°, to 17°, and finally 30° an hour later, with the unknown of potentially having to stay the night out there. I had not tried the Pack Out Bites yet and I took one from Adam to try, and they were incredibly good. It tasted like a brownie, which is my favorite dessert. We finally got the airplane started, and barely made it home by dark.

I’ll forever remember that experience as the test of my first Pack Out Bites and the time we almost had to go into survival mode because that is all we had to live on if we got stuck! They are both very good, and I’ll be adding these to my future Alaska wilderness packs from now on.