Backpacking Gear Costs: What We Spent to Start Multi-Day Hiking in the Pyrenees

How much does it cost to start backpacking in Europe? For two people heading into the Pyrenees for seven days, our total spend came to €1,342.87 – split across two of us, mostly from Decathlon and some bits from Amazon, with a stove and head torches we’ve owned for over a decade. The short answer is €400 to €700 per person in new gear, depending on what you already own.

tl;dr

• A functional two-person kit for a multi-day mountain route costs €400 to €900 in new gear, depending on what you already own
• Your sleeping system matters more than anything else – a bag in the wrong temperature rating or a wrong sleeping mat means a genuinely miserable night at altitude; prioritise this above all else
• Before any multi-day trip, test your full kit overnight – sleep in it, cook with it, pack and repack it, so you know what’s missing or doesn’t fit before you’re two days from the nearest road
• A water filter is non-negotiable for mountain routes – streams look clean but aren’t always safe; we use a Sawyer Squeeze, and it’s one of the best-value pieces of kit we own
• Decathlon covers most of what you need at a fraction of branded alternatives, and the highest single costs are the tent (€190), the backpacks (€150 to €185 each), and the sleeping bags (€70 each)

What does a complete backpacking kit need?

Five categories you cannot skip: shelter, sleep system, pack, water, and cooking. Everything else – poles, liners, a shovel, a solar charger, sunscreen – is situational, or something you’ll already own after a few years of hiking.

First-time backpackers tend to underspend on the sleeping bag and overspend on the pack. The bag matters more. A pack in the wrong size is annoying. A sleeping bag in the wrong temperature rating is a genuinely miserable night at altitude. Buy for your actual worst-case sleeping temperature, not the optimistic average.

For a 7-day route in the Pyrenees in late spring, the minimums are: a bag rated to at least 5°C, a tent that handles wind and rain, and a pack between 50 and 65 litres per person. If you’ve already read my hiking backpack sizing guide, you know how I got to those numbers. If you haven’t, the short version is that 50 litres sounds like a lot until you’re also carrying food, water for two dogs, layers, and a first aid kit.

Full backpacking gear list with real costs

A note on how we shopped: we bought for longevity where we could, and kept costs down where we weren’t sure how much use something would get. That meant accepting a few compromises we didn’t entirely want to make. The black sleeping bags are one of them. We also made a deliberate call on food: we live in a van, we have two large dogs whose food we’re already carrying, and prepping and dehydrating meals at home before a trip is not an option for us. 

Everything below is what we bought or are bringing to the Pyrenees in June 2026. Links go to the exact products.

Strip out the food (€97.86), the sunscreen (€16.99) and the pure gear spend is around €1220. The sunscreen is included because I bought it for the trip, even though I would have bought it anyway, as I ran out of my travel-size one. 

One thing worth knowing before you commit to buying a full kit: hut-to-hut trekking is a completely valid alternative on many European mountain routes, including parts of the Pyrenees. You walk between mountain refugios or refuges, sleep there, eat there, and carry almost nothing overnight. No tent, no sleeping bag, no stove. The cost shifts to hut fees, typically €20 to €50 per person per night with dinner and breakfast included, but the gear investment drops to near zero.

For us, it wasn’t an option. We’re hiking with two dogs, and mountain huts don’t take dogs.

The backpacks: why we bought two different ones

I wrote about how to choose the right pack size in the hiking backpack sizing guide, if you want the full version. For the Pyrenees, we wanted enough volume for a 9-day route, a frame that transfers weight onto your hips rather than your shoulders, and as light as possible without sacrificing structure.

I went with the Simond Forclaz MT900 in 50+10L at €149.99. It weighs 1.43kg empty, rated for loads up to 12kg, with a height-adjustable back panel and seven pockets. I tested it loaded at around 9kg on a one-night overnighter before the trip, and the weight sat on my hips the way it should.

Tom’s North Face Terra 65 at €185.00 has a removable, torso-adjustable frame and a full-length U-zip for main-compartment access. It costs €35 more than the Simond, and the main reason Tom chose it over a Decathlon equivalent was fit: the hip belt sat correctly at the right torso length. But if the cheaper pack fits your body, buy the cheaper pack.

Sleeping bags: what we bought and what they cost

I spent more time researching sleeping bags than any other item on this list. I wanted a down quilt, and we didn’t get one, because down quilts at a comparable temperature rating start around €170 per bag, which would have added €200 to the total for two of us.

We went with the Simond MT 500 instead: synthetic, mummy-shaped, rated to 5°C comfort, 1,050g in the L size, €69.99. It ticked every box except one – it only came in black, and I had a completely irrational objection to owning a black sleeping bag. Several weeks of searching later, nothing beat it on warmth, weight, and price. We bought the black sleeping bags. I have made my peace with this.

We also picked up sleeping bag liners at €9.99 each, for a few extra degrees of warmth and longer between washes.

I go much deeper on fill type, temperature ratings (comfort vs lower limit vs extreme), and why the sleeping mat matters as much as the bag in How to Choose a Backpacking Sleep System on a Budget – worth reading before you buy if you haven’t picked a bag yet.

The titanium mug

The camping cookware section at Decathlon usually has prices on the shelf. That day, that section didn’t. I picked up several mugs one by one, comparing weight, chose the lightest one, and discovered at the till that it was €19.99. Titanium, as it turns out, costs more than aluminium. I did not know this. I do now.

As I later learned, titanium is roughly 45% lighter than aluminium at the same volume. The Simond 0.4L cup weighs 78g. An equivalent aluminium cup weighs around 130g. That’s 52g per cup, or 104g saved for two. Titanium doesn’t corrode, doesn’t dent the way aluminium does after a few trips, and doesn’t affect the taste of food. 

On environmental footprint: titanium production is energy-intensive, so the manufacturing impact is higher than that of aluminium. The argument for buying it is longevity. These mugs genuinely last decades, which means one purchase, no replacements. Whether that trade-off works for you depends on how often you’ll use them.

At €19.99 each, I have made my peace with this. I am fine.

Water filtration for backpacking

We carry a LifeStraw Peak Series filter bottle (€44.49) and Aquatabs purification tablets (€13.95 for 50), €58.44 total. We use both because each one has a blind spot on its own – the filter misses viruses, the tablets miss Cryptosporidium – and at that price, it’s not a weight or cost argument worth having.

The full breakdown of what a filter does and doesn’t catch, when tablets are genuinely non-negotiable, and how to read refugio taps and stone troughs on the trail is in Backpacking Water Filters in Europe.

Cooking kit for backpacking: what you need

The Coleman stove system is a canister-top burner with an integrated pot that we’ve owned since before we moved into the van. It works at altitude, boils water fast, and I genuinely cannot tell you what it costs because it was bought in a different era of my life. Equivalent systems from Decathlon run €40 to €70 now. MSR and Jetboil equivalents run €80 to €120. Any of them will do the job.

Gas canisters are a consumable. Two people on a 7-day trip, cooking only hot drinks and rehydrated meals, go through roughly one 230g canister. Budget €5 to €8 and buy it near the trailhead.

Trail food: what freeze-dried meals cost

We bought 14 Trek’n Eat freeze-dried dinners at €6.99 each, which comes to €97.86 for the trip. That covers dinner for two people every night for seven days.

Since we’re also carrying around 6kg of dog food. Adding bulk supermarket meals on top of that wasn’t something we wanted to do. Freeze-dried dinners weigh almost nothing, take five minutes to prepare and mean one less thing to think about after a long day of hiking. 

Everything else – snacks, trail mix, coffee, anything fresh for day one – I’ll update after the Pyrenees with the full picture: what we cooked, what we bought, what we carried, and whether the freeze-dried dinners were actually worth €6.99 each.

Power: solar charging and what it’s actually for

The BigBlue 28W solar panel at €69.99 clips to the outside of a pack and charges while you walk. On a route with long exposed ridge days – which the Pyrenees have plenty of – it earns its place. On heavily forested or overcast routes, it’s far less effective. We’re also carrying three power banks we already own, which cover two phones for a week at normal navigation use without any sun at all. We are currently still waiting for this to arrive, so no picture yet 🙂

If you’re building from scratch, one 20,000mAh power bank (€25 to €50) is enough for a single trip. The solar panel is worth adding if your route has consistent sun exposure, but it’s not essential for a first go.

The shovel: why a backpacking kit needs one

On a multi-day mountain route, there are no toilets. The method is a cat hole: dig 15-20cm deep, do your business, bury it, and pack out your toilet paper rather than burying it. For the digging, I bought the ultralight aluminium backpacking shovel for €14.57. It weighs 27g.

Sunscreen at altitude

UV exposure increases roughly 10 to 12% per 1,000 metres of elevation, so crossing 2,000m+ passes in the Pyrenees means significantly more UV than at sea level, even on overcast days. I use the ISDIN Invisible Stick SPF 50 at €16.99 – stick format doesn’t leak in a pack and reapplies cleanly on the move – plus long sleeves and a hat, since sunscreen builds up on skin without a proper shower for days.

Decathlon vs branded gear

Almost everything on this list is Decathlon, but it’s not one house brand doing everything. Decathlon runs separate in-house brands for each category: Simond for mountaineering, Forclaz for trekking and backpacking, and Quechua for camping basics. Each one is developed and tested for its own category rather than a single generic badge stretched across the whole range, which is a big part of why the quality is great.

Simond is the clearest example. It was founded in Chamonix in 1860, has been part of Decathlon since 2008, and still designs and tests gear at the foot of Mont Blanc. Edmund Hillary used a Simond ice axe on the first Everest summit in 1953. The accessible prices exist because Decathlon sells directly and skips the markup that goes on brand marketing and retail margin – you’re not paying for a label, which is different from saying the gear is a compromise.

What you pay for with brands like Arc’teryx, Black Diamond, or Osprey is partly genuine performance at the extreme end, and partly the name. For summer mountain routes in the Pyrenees, Alps, or Cantabrians, Decathlon’s in-house brands are more than enough.

Test your kit before you commit to it

We did a one-night shakedown hike before the Pyrenees, and it’s the reason our sleeping mats and pillows changed before the real trip: the foam mats destroyed our shoulders, and going without a pillow was worse than either of us expected. We came home and ordered inflatable versions of both the same day.

If you’re building a kit from scratch, don’t skip this step. The full story – the 12.5km test hike, forgetting the water filter entirely, and everything else it changed about our packing list – is in Shakedown Hike Guide: Test Before You Backpack.

Backpacking gear cost summary

If this was useful, or you want to see how the trip went, find me on Instagram at @helloaelita. I’ll be sharing the full Pyrenees trip there once we’re back, too.

More on this trip

• How to Choose a Backpacking Sleep System on a Budget – fill type, temperature ratings explained properly, and why the mat matters as much as the bag
• Backpacking Water Filters in Europe: What Works (and What Doesn’t) – filters vs tablets, refugio taps, and what to do about stone troughs
• Shakedown Hike Guide: Test Before You Backpack – our one-night test run, what went wrong, and how to run your own

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