The United Kingdom doesn’t provide much time each year to get out and enjoy the great outdoors, which is a shame when you consider the wonderful natural sights on offer. If you’re going to make the most of the summer by heading out on a camping trip, make sure you take a cotton bag. They might not sound important, but cotton bags come with a number of advantages for a hiker.
- Use for Cleanliness
When you go camping, especially for a few days at a time, it gets tough to keep everything clean. Some items, such as your clothes and your cookware, are always going to become dirty by the end of your trip, so bring along a cotton bag to help keep them separated from the rest of your belongings.
- Use for a Pillow
When it comes to multi-day hiking, there’s a definite trend towards going lightweight. You can follow this philosophy while getting a great night’s sleep by repurposing a cotton bag as a pillow; all you need to do is fill it with some of your clothes. This saves packing room, and cotton is much softer than the materials used for most synthetic camping pillows.
- Use as Deadweight
Things tend to go wrong when you go camping, especially when you head out in high winds. One of the worst things that can happen is not being able to find a camp site with enough soft ground to hammer in the stakes for your tent. Luckily, you can just fill your cotton bag with rocks and then use it as an anchor for your stakes in rougher weather.
- Use for Unexpected Extras
It’s amazing how the size of your pack seems to decrease once you start hiking. The problem is that it isn’t as easy to pack everything down snuggly once you’re away from home, and you might even need to pick up more than the expected amount of food if you’re stopping off somewhere between two legs of your journey. Cotton bags are great because they can be easily folded away and then whipped out to take more cargo. You can then fix yours to the bottom of your backpack for easy carrying.
There are many ways cotton bags can be used, which is why they have become so popular over the last two or three years and we think hiking provides some fantastic opportunities to use them through your journey.
