16 Camping Hacks You Will Want On Your Next Trip

Camping hacks are the difference between a weekend you talk about for years and a weekend you spend driving to the nearest store for something you forgot. Gear is expensive, campsites are not, and almost every problem a tent throws at you has already been solved by somebody with a coffee can and a roll of duct tape. There is a fire built to feed itself for hours, a hand washing station rigged out of a water jug and two bungee cords, a bucket nobody wants to talk about but everybody is glad of at two in the morning, and dessert baked in the coals. Some of these are five minute tricks and some need doing before you leave the house. Every one links back to the person who worked it out.

DIY Camping Ideas

1. Mason Jar Citronella Candles

Five panel graphic of blue tinted citronella jars, a hand fitting a gold lid and finished jars on a table

Mason jars filled with citronella torch fuel and lit through a wick fed up the middle of the lid, which is the cheapest way to keep a picnic table usable after dusk. One Little Project punched a starter hole in each lid with a hammer and a nail, drilled it out to about three quarters of the wick’s width, pinched the wick through for a snug fit, poured in the oil and screwed the lid down. Two nights of burning used about an inch of fuel, so a jar runs roughly ten hours. Leave a quarter inch of wick showing, not half, or the flame is enormous.

Get the full tutorial at One Little Project.

2. Make Your Own Fire Starters

Cardboard tube packed with blue gray dryer lint on paper, under a typeset Make Your Own Fire Starters title

A cardboard toilet roll tube packed tight with dryer lint, which is the fire starter everybody eventually discovers and then never buys again. Frugal Family Home keeps a container of empty tubes on the back of the dryer and stuffs the lint straight in while clearing the trap, then moves each full tube to an old shoe box by the fireplace that holds about sixteen of them. Both ingredients were already going in the bin. She burns them at home for the wood stove and says they are just as good taken camping.

Get the full tutorial at Frugal Family Home.

3. Self Feeding Fire

Metal frame holding two angled stacks of split logs leaning over a burning fire pit on gravel in a clearing

Two angled racks of logs leaning in over a fire pit so that each log rolls down into the flame as the one below it burns away, giving a fire that feeds itself for up to fourteen hours. The whole point is the geometry: the rails hold the stacks at an angle steep enough to keep the wood advancing and shallow enough that it does not all tumble in at once. It is the setup to build if you want a fire still going at breakfast, or if you simply want to sit still all evening instead of getting up every twenty minutes to throw another log on.

Get the full tutorial at Architecture & Design.

4. Keep Bugs Out Of Your Drink

Mason jar of lemonade topped with a blue patterned cupcake liner and a green striped straw, under a typeset title

A paper cupcake liner turned upside down over a glass with a straw pushed through the middle, and that is the entire trick. Mom 4 Real poked a hole in the liner, sat it on top of the glass and put the straw through, which keeps wasps and gnats out of a drink left on a picnic table. The lovely bit is the side effect: patterned liners look deliberate rather than makeshift, and if you have a few people to keep track of you can write names on the tops with a marker so nobody picks up the wrong glass.

Get the full tutorial at Mom 4 Real.

5. Camping Margaritas

Hand holding a salt rimmed plastic cup of frozen margarita in a wooded campsite, under a typeset title

Margaritas mixed at home, double bagged and frozen solid before you leave, so they come out of the cooler as slush two days into the trip. Around My Family Table uses one twelve ounce can of limeade, three cans of water, one can of tequila and half a can of triple sec, with limes and margarita salt packed separately, and the limeade can does all the measuring. Alcohol never freezes hard, which is why this works. The double bagging is not fussiness, it is the thing that stops a bag splitting and emptying itself into the ice chest.

Get the full tutorial at Around My Family Table.

6. Rub Hiking Boots With Paraffin

Pair of worn brown leather hiking boots on a table with unlaced cords, under a red typeset Camping Hack banner

Paraffin rubbed along hiking boot laces before you set off, so that burrs and seed heads slide off instead of knitting themselves into the weave. Happy Money Saver lists it among eight camping hacks and the reasoning is simple: laces are the part of a boot nothing else protects, and picking burrs out of them at the end of a walk takes longer than the walk deserves. A block of paraffin costs almost nothing and lives in the camp box forever. Do it at home before the boots go in the car.

Get the full tutorial at Happy Money Saver.

7. Terracotta Fire Pit

Foil lined terracotta pot full of glowing charcoal with a marshmallow stick, under a typeset S'mores title

A terracotta plant pot lined with foil and filled with charcoal, which gives you a table height fire just big enough for marshmallows and nothing else. Nest of Posies built it specifically to avoid lighting a proper fire pit in summer heat, and that is exactly when it earns its place: no camping required, no fireplace, no standing over a blaze in July. Clean up is the best part, since once the charcoal is cold you gather the whole lot up in the foil and bin it. Keep it on stone or paving, never on a wooden deck.

Get the full tutorial at Nest of Posies.

8. Hand Washing Station

Blue water jug on a white clothed table with a paper towel roll bungeed on top, a soap bottle and a catch bucket

A big water jug with a paper towel holder bungeed to the top and a soap dispenser alongside, set on a table with a bucket underneath to catch the runoff. Do It And How uses two bungee cords wrapped around the jug and the holder, and keeps the jug dedicated to hand washing only, which matters more than it sounds: a jug that has been used for drinking water ends up with soap in it exactly once. A bucket underneath is listed as optional and recommended, and it is what stops the ground turning to mud.

Get the full tutorial at Do It And How.

9. Proper Way to Clean Dishes While Camping

Three panel graphic of red and black dish basins on a camp table with a typeset How to Clean Dishes title

Three basins in a row, which is the scout method and still the right one. The first holds warm water and a little soap for washing, the second holds hotter water for rinsing, and the third takes a capful of vinegar or bleach to sanitize, then everything air dries on a rack. Scrape the plates clean with a rubber spatula before they go anywhere near the water, because friction does more of the work than heat does. Greasy pans get wiped with newspaper and sprayed with full strength vinegar for five to ten minutes first.

Get the full tutorial at Let's Camp S'more.

10. Tackle Box First Aid Kit

Open fishing tackle box on gravel with lift out trays filled with bandages, medicines and first aid supplies

A fishing tackle box fitted out as a first aid kit, which beats a zipped pouch for one reason: you can see everything at once. Food Storage Moms says this is one of her most popular posts and the logic holds up, since the trays lift out and every compartment is visible the moment the lid opens, which is what you want when somebody is bleeding and you are holding a torch in your teeth. Tackle boxes are cheap, they latch shut, and they survive being thrown in a car boot for a whole season.

Get the full tutorial at Food Storage Moms.

11. Repurposed TicTac Boxes for Travel Spices

Flat TicTac boxes filled with labeled ground spices in reds and browns, laid out on a weathered wood table

Empty TicTac boxes washed out and refilled with spices, which solves the one camp kitchen problem nobody thinks about until they are eating unseasoned food in a field. Seattle Sundries packs them because space in a camp box is always the constraint and a full spice jar is mostly air. The flip lid pours a pinch at a time, the boxes are flat so they stack, and a printed label on the front means you are not opening six of them to find the cumin. It works just as well for a rented cabin or a motorhome.

Get the full tutorial at Seattle Sundries.

12. Place Yoga Mat Under Sleeping Bag

Rolled green yoga mat on a table beside a typeset Camping Hack caption about using it under a sleeping bag

A yoga mat rolled out under the sleeping bag, which is the cheapest upgrade to a night in a tent that exists. Happy Money Saver’s reasoning is that a mat does the same job as a foam sleeping pad by isolating you from the cold ground, and rolls up small enough to throw in with the rest of the kit. Cold coming up from underneath is what actually keeps people awake, not the air temperature, and it is worth knowing that most people already own the fix and have it standing in a cupboard doing nothing.

Get the full tutorial at Happy Money Saver.

13. Portable Potty

Five gallon bucket wrapped in red and white duct tape stripes with a gray lid clipped on top, standing on concrete

A five gallon bucket with a toilet seat clipped to the top, dressed up in red and white duct tape stripes so it looks like a decision rather than an emergency. Little Vintage Trailer lines hers with either the gel bags sold for the purpose or a bin bag with cat litter in the bottom, and the honest case for it is the two in the morning one, when the campground bathroom is a long dark walk away. Duct tape now comes in every color, and taping a bucket that tapers is slower than it looks.

Get the full tutorial at Little Vintage Trailer.

14. Camp Fire Monkey Bread

Foil pan of golden cinnamon sugar coated biscuit pieces baked over a campfire, under a typeset title block

Tinned biscuit dough quartered, shaken in cinnamon sugar and baked in a foil lined dutch oven in the dying coals, which is the best camp dessert going for the amount of effort involved. Sweet Anne Designs needs one can of buttermilk biscuit dough, half a cup of cinnamon sugar, half a cup of brown sugar and a stick of salted butter, and only the dough needs to stay cold, so the rest can live in the food box. Measure everything at home and pack it ready, because measuring in the dark is nobody’s idea of a holiday.

Get the full tutorial at Sweet Anne Designs.

15. Change The Color Of Your Campfire

Campfire burning with bright blue and green flames over orange embers against a dark background at night

A campfire burning blue and green instead of orange, which is a genuinely startling thing to do to a group of people who were not expecting it. The color comes from metal salts: copper chloride burns blue, copper sulfate green, lithium chloride pink and potassium chloride purple. The neat part is the delivery. Melt down old candle wax, pour a quarter inch of your chosen chemical into a paper cup, cover it with wax, stir and leave it overnight, and you have a puck to throw on. The page is blunt about the one rule: never in a fire you are cooking over.

Get the full tutorial at Discover HubPages.

16. Dollar Store Magazine File For Paper Goods

White plastic magazine file inside a cupboard holding paper plates and orange trays, under a blue RV Hack badge

A plastic magazine file screwed into a cupboard to hold paper plates, cups and trays upright instead of sliding around loose. Organizing Made Fun came to this after borrowing an RV for a vacation, where every horizontal surface is contested and anything not held in place ends up on the floor at the first corner. A magazine file costs a dollar, holds a whole stack of plates vertically, and takes up the depth of a cupboard nobody was using. It works exactly as well in a car boot, a tent porch or a camp kitchen box.

Get the full tutorial at Organizing Made Fun.