Keep Your Sleeping Bag Dry With This Easy Aluminum Foil Hack

If you're a frequent camper, you've probably been in this situation. Imagine yourself on a beautiful night, camping under the stars. You've been hiking all day, and all you want is to relax and admire the nature you traveled to see. Suddenly, the sky opens up, and boom, you're stuck in a rainstorm. If you've driven to your campsite, you can grab your sleeping bag and sleep in the car, but what if you didn't? Many tent floors aren't waterproof for long, and once that seeps up through the ground and into your sleeping bag, you're in for a long night. Plus, now you have to find a way to dry out that sleeping bag, which could keep you from continuing your hike for a while. Mildew is the worst, and so is a wet bag of cloth to sleep in, especially in cooler weather. 

There is actually a wonderful hack from Reader's Digest Canada that can help keep your sleeping bag dry. It also involves an item that you not only probably have in your home kitchen, but you might have brought with you for another reason. That item is heavy-duty aluminum foil. 

You'll definitely need the heavy-duty version of this item, which is less likely to tear. For the hack, you simply take a sheet (or several, depending on what you have available) of your aluminum foil and lay it out under your sleeping bag. That will protect you from groundwater seepage. It's very easy to carry all folded up, and it hardly weighs anything at all. Not only that, but it's pretty inexpensive. 

As for the reason you probably have it anyway, it's all about the food. As The Kitchn tells us, the heavy-duty version of this product is exactly what you'd use to make campfire packets. If you're not familiar with them, you wrap up loose items you want to cook over the fire (like smaller pieces of meat and small veggies) into a packet so they cook all together. You can also put a couple of layers of foil over a forked stick, wrap the edges, and use that as a makeshift frying pan, per Reader's Digest.

The one caveat is that if you're a restless sleeper, the foil might rip. It's still going to keep you far drier than nothing at all, and you can solve this by using a few layers. If you're someone who flails, though, it might be worth putting the foil under a yoga mat and having all of that under you while you sleep. That just makes the whole thing even more cushy.