How to Stay Clean While Camping

Give Your Shoes a Home

After a long day hiking (or sleeping in the hammock), it’s easy to want to just kick off your shoes in the corner of your tent before collapsing (gently) on your air mattress. But bringing your shoes inside is probably one of the worst ideas when it comes to camping hygiene. Who knows what those shoes have walked through? To help discourage you (and the kids) from doing this, make a designated area outside your tent for shoes. 

Wash Up Before You Go Inside

The last thing you want when you crawl in bed for the night is to feel the grit of dirt or sand inside your sleeping bag. One of the easiest ways to prevent tracking unwanted debris you’re your sleeping bag is to keep it out of your tent. By washing your hands and feet before you go inside, you can keep dirt, sand, gravel, crumbs, and other microscopic annoyances out. 

Bring Some Biodegradable Soap

While we’re on the subject of hand-washing, let’s talk soap. It’s easy to grab the most convenient thing we have in the house before running out the door, like that bar soap that never gets used or the dish soap. But most soaps are bad for the environment. It doesn’t matter so much when it’s swirling down the drain, but if you’re camping without a sink, you’ll most likely end up washing your hands directly over the ground. 

That’s where biodegradable soap comes in. These cleaning liquids are designed to break down naturally. They usually do not contain things like preservatives, foaming agents, and other harmful chemicals. 

Wet Wipes Are Your Friend

Wet wipes are super convenient, whether you need to clean off your hands after that bedtime snack, or just want to wipe your face first thing in the morning so you can make your coffee with crust-free eyes. They’re also great for getting stubborn mud off the bottom of your boots, or cleaning burnt marshmallow from skewers. Wet wipes are also our favorite tip for how to stay clean while camping with kids.

Master the Sponge Bath

Many state parks and campgrounds have a restroom house that usually has a shower stall or two. But not everywhere you end up camping is going to have the luxury of pressurized running water. For short weekend trips, this might not be a big deal. But for anything longer than a day or two, BO becomes a pretty immediate concern. Luckily, it’s not hard to learn how to stay clean while camping with no showers: consider the humble sponge bath. 

While it might seem like something best reserved for your youngest when he’s laid up for a month with a broken leg, the sponge bath is actually a great way for the whole family to get a cursory cleaning. All you need is a sponge (or washcloth, or wet wipes), your favorite (biodegradable) soap, and some water (which you can get from the pump at your campsite or the water bottles you brought from home).

Invest in a Portable Shower

Sponge baths are a great way to get mostly clean and are perfect for three- or four-day excursions. But what about even longer trips? You can only sponge bath so much before the sponge itself gets overwhelmed. 

That’s where those camping innovations we mentioned come in, in the form of the portable shower. A portable shower (also known as a camping shower) is a system that uses gravity, a pump, or electricity to channel water and create a mini-shower. 

The simplest camp shower will be essentially a bag to hold the water, something you can use to hang the bag up high, and a hose that comes down from the bottom of the bag. Gravity will pull water from the bag down through the hose, and you use the spout to wash yourself.  

More complicated camping showers will use foot pumps, batteries, or even solar power to get water moving. 

Don’t Forget the Underwear

Depending on how intensive your camping trip is, one of the first things hikers like to cut from their pack is extra clothes. Objectively, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to wear the same pants for a few days, right? 

Wrong! Wearing stiff, stinky, grimy clothes is a sure-fire way to make you feel stiff, stinky, and grimy yourself. No amount of sponge baths or trips to the (portable) shower will help if, after you’re all clean, you have to put on dirty clothes. 

At the very least, try to bring clean underwear for every single day of your trip. Socks are important, too – there’s nothing more uncomfortable than having to slide your clean, sleep-warm feet into yesterday’s socks before your morning hike.

Respect Your Pajamas

It’s easy to change out of your sweat-soaked hiking clothes and into your comfy PJs once you get back to the campsite for the night – but you must resist! Always get clean before you get into your pajamas. This helps you feel clean when you go to bed, which makes for a more restful night. Whether it’s wet wipes, a sponge bath, a portable shower, or the bathhouse at the campground, wash off the day’s grime before you put on your PJs.

It’s also important to reserve your pajamas for sleeping only. This means don’t put them on until you’re about to get in bed. We’re all guilty of wanting to put on our comfy PJs to lounge around the campfire for an hour or two while we wind down. But this gets your clothes all smokey, and you’d be surprised how quickly that smoke smell goes from a fun reminder that you’re camping to an annoying reminder that you’re camping.