Wilderness Laundry 101

Introduction

Wear as few clothes as you can and wait as long as possible to do laundry.

If you're out in the wilderness you don't tend to stink as much as you do in the city, so you can wear the same pants for a few weeks (army pants are best) and shirts for 3 to 4 days before they're a little too gross.

Once you do laundry for the first time in the wilderness you'll understand why you want to wait as long as possible; it's a lot of work and takes a good part of an afternoon.


Where to wash?

Ideally you want to wash in swiftly running water this usually means finding a small creek or stream. The reason finding running water is important is that it gets grime and soap out of the clothes for you. If you wash in standing water like a lake or a large riverbed no matter how hard you work, your clothes just won't be as clean.


What do I need in order to wash?

Technically all you need is the clothes. If you have soap (Trader Joe's laundry detergent is best for the environment), bring that along to get rid of stains. Also, if you have some kind of medium to large container bring that too (today I used our cooler).


Now what do I do?

1. Find a part of the bank that is hard and dry. If you do it on a wet part, your feet will get soaked and you want to avoid getting your feet/socks/shoes wet, especially if it's cold.
If you don't have a container skip to: 6

2. Dip your empty container in the water so that it fills about halfway. If you can't fill it that far its okay, you'll just have to do smaller loads. You only want the container halfway full because it decreases the amount of water that ends up on you while you're washing.
If you don't have soap skip to: 8

3. The amount of soap that you put in the water is a tricky thing. You want enough to get the dirt out of your clothes, but not too much because it will take a long time to rinse it out. You should put enough in so that if you swish the water around with your hand for about 15 seconds you get a few bubbles on the top of the water.

4. Now that you've swished the water stirring the soap into it pick up some clothes and put them into the container. Make sure that there is at least a half inch of water covering the clothes when they're submerged; if the clothes are really dirty leave more room.

5. Push the clothes into the bottom of the container and pull them back out. Repeat until the water turns brown.

6. Take one garment out of the container (or bag if you don't have a container). Check it for stains. If there are stains put a small amount of soap and water on the stain and scrub it. Clothes that usually need extra attention are: the crotches of underwear, the bottoms of pants, the armpits of shirts, the chests of women's shirts.

7. Squeeze as much water out of the garment as you can. It is best to do this because you end up with less soap to wash out.

8. Hold on tight to the garment so that you don't lose it in the water! Put it into the stream for a few seconds (hold shirts and pants from their bottoms, they don't stretch as bad this way). Pull it out and squeeze the water out. Do this until the soap is out of the garment or if you're not using soap until the garment looks clean enough.

9. Set the clothes out to dry. If you can, put a clothesline up between two trees near where you are washing or near your camp. If you can't do this, lay the clothes out on rocks. If your clothes have stretched out in washing, lay them out in the right shape so that they dry correctly. Don't put the clothes in a bag and wait to hang them, they'll get mildewy.

10. Drink a beer! You've just done a lot of work.


Cautions!

1. Don't use bleach, Tide or any detergent that is bad for the environment.

2. Don't dump dirty soapy water back into the water. This is bad for the stream, dump the water at least 20 feet away.

3. Don't wash clothes in oceans or seas: the salt will irritate your skin.