What do you use for a "sink" when you're in the woods?

I have one of those PVC military style folding bowls, but it has a melted pin hole half way up the side, so doesn’t get much use. On real trips I use either my large Balti bowl that doubles as eating bowl and sometimes fry pan, or my Snowpeak 900, which doubles as pot, mug and bowl.

When I was on a desert trip with a group, we used sand to scrub food off plates etc, then had a tiny bit of water heavily treated with Dettol to swill in. They had a wash bowl big enough for plates. The Dettol water was quickly brown with the sand residue, but you knew no pathogens were gonna survive.
 
Pathogens are a risk whenever you move into a new environment. It is part of the risk that you accept when you go out to enjoy something new. If you come into contact with something, it is probably more likely from swimming, bathing, crossing a stream or lake then from eating. Your hands will always be the most likely source. Most of the time the consequences are mild. Your body is use to dealing with the stuff.

Don’t sweat it.

I prefer metal plates that I can rinse in a water source and sterilize over a camp fire, or paper plates that I can just burn.

n2s
 
So I just wanted to follow up - my recent camping trip showed pretty good success in the washing dishes catagory.
I have 2 flexible, reinforced LL Bean buckets that are probably each a 3 gallon capacity from when I was a youngster.
They worked pretty well and I was able to wash and rinse dishes, but my one complaint is that they aren't rigid, so if you left either of them alone for any length of time, they had a tendency of toppling over and dumping some of that water I worked hard to get and boil.

I do believe I will go for the more robust collapsible bowls in the future.
I will say I feel better about having clean dishes, and that's a definite improvement.
If we were hiking long distances I would probably be selecting pouch meals and granola- nothing that required dishes in the first place, though I'm sure I'd take a small mess kit anyway.
 
GAGL said:
Seat to Summit kitchen sink, available in 5,10 and 20 liters
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That first picture! 🤣

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

🧙‍♀️
 
Guy McVer said:
That first picture! 🤣

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

🧙‍♀️
Click to expand...
Adobe_20220503_204924.png
 
If you're near a clean river, make an elevated bed of smooth, flat stones. It should allow water to drain quickly. It should also be stable enough to hold a big pot full of water steady. When washing plates and pans, food particles will go into the spaces between the stones, deterring ants and flies.
 
Danke42 said:
A jerry can on a rigid packframe is a good way to haul liquids.
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How about this? A 20 liter tin can and some cloth straps. I actually saw little Hmong refugee girls hauling water like this, uphill. In the early morning in the winter it gets chilly, maybe 45 degrees where this photo was taken (I worked there for a time - Ban Vinai, Thailand). The water slops around and drenches the carrier.

a-hmong-refugee-girl-carries-water-at-ban-vinai-refugee-camp-officially-the-ban-vinai-holding.jpg
 
Guy McVer said:
This really baffles me. When I was researching the steripen, you would see people scoop water into their container, sterilize the water, and then put their mouth right on the rim or threads of the container to drink it. :eek:

Of course, I'm freaking out every time I see this. That was just in the water! You didn't sterilize that part! Plenty of viewer comments were about this exact same thing. The common response? It's not enough to worry about. If it bothers you, you can JUST WIPE IT OFF before you drink. o_O

My head is still exploding.
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Remember you can swim in the water, so your lips are automatically touching the unfiltered water.
Humans have been drinking "dirty" water since our beginning, many still do. We're not as feeble as water filter companies want you to believe.
We used to do a week-long canoe/portaging trip in Algonquin Canada and drank 100% unfiltered lake water. I don't recall a single person getting sick. There were probably 15 people on each trip and I went 4 times. That's 420 days of a single person drinking unfiltered water.

Onto to washing dishes:

We try to limit our dishes (1 cook pot, 1 eating vessel per person). We usually put a bit of water in the cook pot (after scraping it out as best as possible) and warm it up with a splash of soap if it was a really messy meal, otherwise we just rinse everything with cold water. If you use soap, you have to rinse which is really water intensive. I have found a plastic scraper is really useful, better than a sponge that gets nasty:


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The bladders out of wine boxes make excellent water carriers and are surprisingly durable. I used one on kayak trips for all one season. No leaks.
Put it in a plastic shopping bag with one corner cut out for the spout and you can hang it.
 
kvaughn said:
The bladders out of wine boxes make excellent water carriers and are surprisingly durable. I used one on kayak trips for all one season. No leaks.
Put it in a plastic shopping bag with one corner cut out for the spout and you can hang it.
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For one of the organizations I worked for, I made bags out of shade mesh and retired tube webbing to carry the bags. I did IKEA bag style handles, looped underneath but with long and short loops so that you could carry the bag alone, or with someone else. We used 5 and 10L water box bladders (they are the same, and super common here in Australia) We would get a couple seasons out of a bag, 5-7 trips. The main killer of them was being overfilled and then getting pinholes from being set down hard on sharp rocks or even some of the low scrub. Or they would just delaminate. But still a good lifespan for an item being handled by middle school students.
 
Guy McVer said:
Just brainstorming a bit here...

If you had a water bladder with a hose attached to the bottom, you could hang it from a tree and let gravity give you your water pressure for rinsing off dishes. I'm sure there must be several companies that manufacture something exactly like that. Then you could take any old large open-top container, fill that with water, squirt in some dish soap, and use that for your sink. So now you have a sink for washing dishes, and something to rinse them with.

The trouble is that you gotta carry all this stuff a quarter of a mile while it's full of water. It's not exactly ideal. So let's say that you leave your sink behind and just fill the bladder, using that to fill up the sink. Well, now you gotta make more than one trip. Two trips adds up to a whole mile of walking, half of which while you are carrying multiple gallons of water.

Not exactly my idea of fun.

edit: oh, I'm dumb. You could just carry the sink to the water, do the dishes there, rinse and dry everything off, and then bring it back.

Still a pain in the backside, but with 50% less walking. But you still need water for cooking and drinking. So I guess yeah... it sounds like a two person job. One person has to carry the water back to camp while the other has to carry the cleaned dishes.

Walking in pairs is better for safety anyway.
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Portable shower is your bladder tap by the way.
 
Drop bear said:
Portable shower is your bladder tap by the way.
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Yeah I discovered that there are several different outdoor showers that are basically just hanging water bladders with a hose and a valve. If you want warm water then you leave the bladder out in the sunlight. Obviously that won't work well in winter...
 
I just take the biggest pot, then use that to wash everything else.
Honestly, I don't need my pots to be perfectly clean out in the backcountry. Just a rinse with water and a little campsuds, and I'm good to go.
 
Humans tried to settle near water sources for a reason. I follow the same principle. If I have to spend the night somewhere where water is not readily available and I have to carry everything on me, then it is dried-freeze meals time. You boil water and eat out of the pouch. No clean up neccesary. And for tea, coffe, etc.. a quick swirl with some water (that you can drink afterwards is all you need).

Granted I usually spend nights out when the activity calls for it (long traverse, multiday climb, etc...) I don't usually camp "for fun", so I take the bare esentials. No real cooking takes place in my stoves.

Mikel
 
For me its very simple.
Water and sand.

I use uncoated pots.
First, rinse with water and clean up as much as you can.
Then, fill a bit of water in the pot and add sand. Yeah, make some mess inside the pot. Then just rubb off all the dirt with your hands or a patch of moss.
Last step is simpy rinse the pot again to remove all sand.

No need for soap in the outdoors, the pot can be washed with it at home. On the trip, you will boil new food anyways so no worries if there is something invisible left in the port.
 
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