Every Ounce Counts: Chris Barnes on Treating Nutrition Like Gear
Chris Barnes didn't come up through the mountains. He came up through football, playing offensive line through college and into arena ball, then found running almost by accident while traveling for work with no gym around. Running turned into marathons, marathons turned into ultras, and a car camping trip in Utah turned into a full-blown obsession with the outdoors. By the time he stood at the edge of a glacial lake in Patagonia watching two climbers rope up and head for the mountain above him, he was hooked. “My journey is over,” he remembers thinking. “This is the coolest thing I've ever done, and theirs is just getting started.”
Three years later, Chris has climbed Mount Whitney's mountaineer's route, spent weeks in the Alps, summited Ama Dablam and Manaslu in the Himalaya, and set his sights on the Everest Triple Crown, a rare attempt to climb Everest, Lhotse, and Nuptse in a single season. He is, by his own description, a gear nerd to the core, the kind of climber who will compare the fill weight of three different sleeping bags before committing to one. What took him longer to dial in was his nutrition, and that lesson came the hard way.
The Lesson on Manaslu
On Manaslu, an 8,000-meter peak in Nepal, Chris ran into trouble that had nothing to do with his gear. He'd spent months dialing in his layering system, his pack weight, and his acclimatization plan. Food was an afterthought. “I was still trying to eat protein bars,” he says. “I didn't recognize the importance of carbohydrates.” By the time he reached camp four for the summit push, he hadn't eaten properly for days. On the way up, it caught up with him. “I started bonking,” he says. “I'm not gonna turn around either.” He made the summit, but barely, and he came down with a clear takeaway: “My nutrition is just as important as anything else. Probably the most important thing, honestly.”
It's the kind of lesson that sticks with someone who treats every piece of gear like an equation to be optimized. “I'm spending this much time to shave this much weight off a jacket,” he says, “but then I come back from a climb with six extra protein bars in my backpack, or I'm bringing inefficient food. That's the exact same weight saving in food as any piece of gear.” For Chris, nutrition stopped being an afterthought and became part of “his kit”, dialed in with the same scrutiny as his sleep system or his boots.
A Crowded, Complicated Season on Everest
The season Chris chose to attempt the Triple Crown turned out to be one of the most chaotic in recent memory. A political dispute closed the Tibet side of the mountain to Western climbers entirely, pushing hundreds of additional climbers onto the Nepal side. A new rule requiring climbers to summit a 7,000-meter peak in Nepal before receiving an Everest permit added even more pressure to get up the mountain before the deadline. Then a massive, unstable ice tower stalled the icefall route for days, and an E. coli infection at base camp nearly took Chris out before he'd gained any real altitude.
He and his climbing partner ended up getting custom weather forecasting to time their summit push around the crowds, a decision that meant waiting through a delay while nearly everyone else on the mountain pushed for the same window. It was not a popular call with the team's Sherpa at the time. It also meant Chris avoided the worst of the traffic jams that make Everest's summit ridge so dangerous in a crowded season.
With so much to manage before dawn on summit day, breakfast wasn't something Chris wanted to think about. “I use RecPak in the morning,” he says. “It's perfect in the morning where you're already trying to get up and get out as soon as possible. Just having that one thing, pour water in, done. Don't worry about protein.” Every pocket of his summit suit was already packed with energy gels and gummy bears for the climb itself. Breakfast was the one thing he didn't have to think twice about. “If you don't finish it, it's made to slide in your dump pouch and take with you,” he adds. “It's kind of like a big energy gel with a lot of good stuff in there.”
That mattered more than it might sound. At altitude, every extra step slows you down, and chewing is an extra step. Energy gels turn into a sticky mess of empty wrappers to stash somewhere, and a solid food bar left in an outer pocket at 8,000 meters comes back out frozen solid. Liquid calories solved all of that at once. No stopping to chew, no fumbling with a frozen bar, no leftover trash to deal with mid-climb, just a drink he could sip on the move. It also did double duty on hydration, since he was taking in fluid at the same time he was taking in calories, one less thing to manage separately on a day when everything else already demanded his attention.
He credits that same attention to the basics for helping close the gaps he'd left open on Manaslu. “I think part of the reason I like RecPak so much was that I did have the macronutrient side of things dialed,” he says. “You're just filling on a bunch of junk, and you're leaving gaps. Over the course of a long expedition, that starts to wear down on you.”
Summit, and What's Next
Chris reached the summit of Everest with the mountain nearly to himself, a rare thing in a season defined by long lines and closed routes. Lhotse was a different story. Two of the four climbers on his team developed HAPE between camp two and camp four, and the oxygen that had been set aside for the Lhotse push went to support getting them down safely. Chris, while running the numbers at altitude, told himself it was time to turn back. It wasn't until he got down to camp two that he realized he'd actually had enough margin left to finish the last 250 meters to the top.
It's the kind of call he still thinks about, and the kind that comes with climbing at that level: sometimes the safest decision and the right one look identical in the moment and only sort themselves out on the way down. The Manaslu lesson had already landed by then, though. Nutrition, once the one piece of his kit he treated as an afterthought, is now dialed in with the same intensity he brings to everything else: pack weight, layering systems, weather windows, and the margins that matter most when the stakes are highest.
Next up, Chris is planning a solo, self-supported attempt on Ojos del Salado and Aconcagua. The following summer, he's looking at Gasherbrum I and II and Nanga Parbat, or possibly Broad Peak and K2 instead, depending on how the weather and logistics shake out. Whatever the lineup ends up being, the fuel plan won't be an afterthought again.