The Best Electrolytes I’ve found for Backpacking

With Sugar

Contrary to what you may think, you actually WANT SUGAR with your electrolytes. According to my doctor (who was the first person to tell me this), and a variety of websites like this one, or this one, the sugar helps your body absorb the electrolytes. So you are actually not helping yourself by taking sugar free electrolytes. You are exercising, you can afford the calories of the added sugar. That is one of the reasons why Liquid IV is such a good electrolyte powder. Another good option being DripDrop, which you can get with or without sugar.

With Caffeine

Nuun + caffeine. Personally I was not a huge fan of Nuun electrolyte tablets because even as I worked my way through them, I still had a semi-large hard plastic container I had to deal with. Not to mention there was some time I had to wait while the tablet dissolved into the water (yes, I know its moments, but sometimes on the trail I get cranky and my patience gets thin). However, I found a cannister of the Nuun + Caffeine electrolyte tablets while in the White Mountains and DANG did they give me the necessary perk I needed.

Without Sugar

If you decide you do not want the sugar, your body will still absorb electrolytes, just maybe not as efficiently, but that is alright,. If that’s what you want, then I can highly recommend the Gatorade Zero Packets, they are the lightest electrolyte packet I brought with me on trail and outside of their lack of sugar, they have all the good electrolytes for your body.

Another great option, that I think has been highly underrated, are the Spartan Hydrate Tablets. Unlike everything else on this list, these come as tablets that you swallow like pills. I liked this because of 2 reasons:

• I wear a mouth guard at night and I shouldn’t be drinking sugary colored drinks when I have it in.
• If I drink a lot of water at night, then I am guaranteed to have to wake up in the middle of the night, crawl out of my toasty warm sleeping bag, and go out into the cold night air to pee. No one wants to do that.

Taking the Spartan tablets like pills solves the two above problems.