what do most hikers do for washing/rinsing clothing while on trail?

[dje97001]

FYI, I just found this thread: http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php?t=692

[digger51]

In winter cleaning is for towns. In spring and summer, love the rain.

[Streamweaver]

A trash bag or even a plastic grocery bag makes a great little washing machine. You can even use the one you line your pack with if you dont want to carry an extra.

[Streamweaver]

I regularly washed my socks on the trail and sometimes a tee shirt and hankerchief. I tried to pick a sunny day and hung the wet things on my backpack using large "horse blanket" safety pins.

For soap I used the sliver of Ivory cut from a big cake in my bounce box, otherwise used for body parts and dishes. My "washing machine" was my three liter aluminum pot, otherwise used for cooking and sterilizing suspicious water.

For aesthetic reasons I washed and rinsed 50 feet or more away from water sources.

All ordinary soaps and detergents are biodegradeable these days -- and most always have been. There are a lot of myths floating around about the nature of pollution and the superiority of Dr. Bronners, a perfectly good soap and probably as biodegradeable as Ivory, and vice versa.

Weary

FYI-Ivory soap even makes a good catfish bait!

[icemanat95]

I agree that prohibitions against rinsing out stuff in streams is mostly aesthetic. But do so well down stream or draw water and wash away from the streams.

I have bathed myself in plenty of streams along the AT, no problem at all. Just get down from the water points. By the time the stuff that washes off of you gets down to the next waterpoint, it'll be so dilute as to be negligible. That's probably true even if the next water point is just 100 yards downstream.