How to Pack Your Bags for a Multi-Day River Rafting

Preparing for a multi-day river rafting trip can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to packing. Rather than offering tips about what to pack (your river guide should provide you with a list specific to your trip), these are tips on how to pack. If you are an experienced traveler, you probably think tips on how to pack are way beneath your level of expertise. Surely, the specifics of shoving a bunch of stuff into a bag are fairly standard whether you are heading on an airplane to Europe or rafting down a river.

Not exactly.

There are a few tricks to know to help you pack your river rafting gear efficiently and confidently.

First, let’s take a look at the bags:

Your rafting company will provide you with two dry bags, a large one and a small one. The large bag will need to hold all of your personal items, including toiletries, clothing, and shoes. It will also need to contain your sleeping bag, pillow and any other sleep items. So, while the bag seems quite large, it will be more than half filled with your sleeping bag. Everything else will need to fit on top or around and still leave room to fold the bag over to make a tight, waterproof seal.  You will also have a smaller waterproof bag that you will keep with you all day. This will hold any personal belongings like cameras, snacks, or anything you want to have in arms reach. This is the only bag that you will have with you all day. Your big dry bag will be strapped down and locked up tight until you reach camp for the night.

Think of it this way: the large bag is your checked luggage and the smaller bag is your carry-on bag.

Tips for Packing Your Large Dry Bag

The tricky part of packing the majority of your items is that they all need to go into one big sack, including your sleeping bag. Much like Murphy’s Law of packing, the sleeping bag is the first thing that must go into the bag, but it is one of the first things that needs to come out of the bag.  Having all your clothes and camp gear on top of the sleeping bag makes it hard to get to what you need without dumping the entire bag.

We solved this problem by packing our clothes in jumbo sized ziplock bags. This had the added benefit of giving everything an extra layer of waterproof protection, but it also made it so much easier to keep things organized and unpack. As we were setting up camp, we could quickly throw out the ziplock bags and grab our sleeping bags, then tuck the ziplock bags at the end of our tent for easy access to our clothes.  This poor-man’s packing cube technique is one that we use for packing often just to keep every organized, but has never been more welcome than on this trip. As I watched other guests dive into their dry bags and come out with handfuls of loose shirts and underwear, I was grateful that mine were neatly contained.

Another solution to this packing dilemma would be to pack your clothes in a duffle bag and put that into the dry bag. 

Tips for Packing your Small Dry Bag

Packing the smaller bag is easy, as long as you know what you need to have with you during the day. I packed sunscreen, bugspray, and a small bag of basic medicines, as well as a handful of snacks. There was plenty of room in the bag for any extra layers of clothes I might need to peel off or add during the day. The biggest thing I learned about packing my small bag was not about what I needed while I was on the river, but what I needed right after I got off the river. When we arrived at shore, we were, not surprisingly, wet and sometimes quite cold. However, there was plenty of work to be done setting up camp before we could really get into dry clothes. To make it a little more bearable, we made sure to pack a dry fleece and a pair of dry shoes in our small bag, so we could access those immediately. 

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