Keeping Dry in the Backcountry with Kids

It is totally miserable to have wet feet, but we can’t always stay inside on rainy days. For one thing, you might never go outside during some seasons, depending on where you live. For another, you could be on an extended trip and get hit with bad weather. Sometimes we have to go with it.

If you are staying out for days or weeks, your moisture management strategy is different than if you are out just for a day. In this post, I am going to focus more on moisture on extended trips rather than shorter excursions. For those shorter trips, check out our posts on Gear for Hiking in the Rain, Best Rain Gear for Kids, Jan and Jul Rain Gear Review, and Best Reima Rain Gear.

This post is based on what we learned while hiking the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail in summer 2023, one of the wettest summers on record in New England; it was the wettest since 1917 for Maine. Here is what we learned about keeping dry in the backcountry.

Family of four wearing ponchos and standing in a cloud on top of Katahdin (at the sign). — Even on the last day of our trip, we summited Katahdin in a fog bank. Our ponchos kept us warm (enough) and dry (enough).

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Keeping Feet Dry, or at Least Comfortable, in the Backcountry

Shoes: Waterproof or Not?

Given my obsession with keeping feet in good working on condition on backpacking trips, I suppose it’s not surprising that shoes are the first topic I want to cover. When I was doing research before our Maine trip, I was surprised to see that most thru-hikers opt for trail running shoes rather than light hikers. I knew that most people don’t wear boots (they are too heavy when you add up the weight over time), but was surprised that people don’t want waterproof shoes.

So, I went with my gut instinct, based on years of working and playing in the White Mountains, and got everyone Merrell Moab 3 gore-tex low-top light hiking boots. My husband went for the mid-height version. These boots are great! We could get them slightly wet in muddy areas and they were comfortable. The Gore-tex worked really well at protecting our feet from puddles. Both my husband and I hardly broke mine in before the hike and never had a blister.

The trouble started when my kids (then 9&11) overtopped their boots falling off bog bridges. Now the inside of the gore-tex lining was wet and the water had nowhere to drain. Their shoes did not dry until the next time we were in town.

The first time we had an all-day soaking rainstorm, about three hours into it, I could literally feel water running down my legs, into my gaiters, and into my wonderful, waterproof shoes. One problem, I discovered, was that the padding that made the Moab so comfortable, also took ages to dry. I had damp shoes for several days even after other things had dried out.

My conclusion is that Gore-tex boots have a very important place on a shoe rack, but long-distance hiking in humid locations is not one of them. I pull my well-loved Moabs out for day trips and muddy winter conditions here in NE Ohio. I would even wear them for a weekend trip where the weather forecast was going to be pretty good. But if I’m faced with the high likelihood of my entire shoe getting soaked, I’d rather have well-draining trail runners any day.

We are planning to hike a section of the Arctic Trail (in northern Scandinavia) this summer, and I plan to invest in trail running shoes for the kids and me. We bought Merrell Long Sky 2 sneakers for adults and Merrell Agility Peak sneakers for the kids.

For more information on boots, check out TMM posts Best Toddler Hiking Boots, Shoes, and Sandals, Best Hiking Shoes for Kids, and Best Hiking Shoes for Women.

Child in green poncho holding a rope and wearing wet shoes. — Mostly we changed our shoes for river crossings, but on this particular day, we were already soaked, so there was no reason. There are no bridges across bigger rivers on the Maine AT, so we had a lot of wet crossings.

Socks for Managing Moisture in the Backcountry with Kids

Aside from shoes, socks are the most important piece of equipment for keeping your feet comfortable, even if they are wet. Most people use some kind of a two-sock system. Back in the day, I wore really thick ragwool socks with very thin liner socks under them (basically like nylons). These days many people go for thinner socks. As a bonus, thinner socks dry faster.

Our family has been using WrightSock branded socks. My sister introduced these to me for running. They are a single pair of socks that has a liner and outer sock altogether in a single sock. This is fantastic because you can’t have one sock get sucked into your shoe overtime, which is both annoying and uncomfortable.

There are only two downsides that I have seen with the WrightSocks. The first is that because they are double thickness they can take a little longer to dry. The second is that we got small bits of gravel between the two sock layers. It wasn’t something I noticed until after our trip, and I could get them out, but it was definitely a negative. That being said, they are fantastically comfortable, come in kid and adult sizes, come in a variety of thicknesses, and really do reduce blisters.

The other really common option is to wear a “toe sock” that is entirely synthetic with a second sock on top of it. Injinji socks are supposed to be fantastic for this. The advantage of this system is meant to be that you don’t have your toes rubbing against each other, so you get fewer blisters. I haven’t tried it, but saw many, many thru-hikers with this system. We did have toe-rubbing issues (I’ll talk about this in the first aid section below), so I am considering trying it out. A friend tells me that this system keeps her husband’s feet from smelling so bad, so that could be an additional bonus.

In terms of an outer sock, I have seen people with running socks, thin hiking socks, cycling socks, and thick hiking socks. The choice of synthetic vs wool and the sock thickness is all about personal preference. Remember, though, that thicker socks have more padding but will take longer to dry. It’s a balancing act.

Pair of sneakers worn by a child with legs and feet visible. The sneakers have grocery bags inside them. — You can’t see it, but my daughter is wearing WrightSocks inside the plastic bags. She is trying to manage wet feet on this particular day.

Gaiters for Backcountry Moisture Management

I wore OR Ferrosi Thru Gaiters to keep stones out of my shoes. I think it helped since my feet and socks were generally cleaner than the kids. However, I would recommend Dirty Girl gaiters over the OR ones I had because mine were kind of baggy and were cutting through my shoelaces by the end of the hike. Most people I saw who wore gaiters, had Dirty Girl gaiters. Plus, they are super cute!

Chafing Prevention as Part of Managing Moisture

Chafing was a really huge problem for us. My best guess about the source of the chafing is dirt that came in through our socks and to our feet. Regardless of how fastidious you are about keeping your feet out of mud, dirt will get in the tops of your shoes or through the shoe itself. This gets into socks and chafes feet. When you are out for extended periods of time, you don’t change your socks daily, so your feet start to suffer.

Early on we tried wearing plastic bags around our feet to keep the dirt out of our shoes (see the photo of my daughter’s feet above). Our shoes “ate” the plastic bags and they just got crumpled under our feet or ripped. Didn’t work. It also didn’t keep our feet dry when we had wet shoes because our feet just sweated more.

We were nearly done with our month-long hike when Long Shot, one of the employees at Shaw’s Hostel in Monson, ME, told us that the solution was to rinse our socks each day and then put them in our pockets to dry them out. Once we learned that, we started to rinse socks daily (no soap because we didn’t want to contaminate rivers; if you do use soap, get far back from water) and then to carry them in our pockets to dry. It simply wasn’t sunny and warm enough to dry our socks on our backpacks. I also rinsed our underwear and dried them in our pockets.

The worst chafing I dealt with came from a blister powder that was highly recommended on a website I found that specializes in helping people prevent blisters. The powder is supposed to be hydrophobic and therefore stays dry while also lubricating your feet. The kids and I all used it one day and it was great. The next day, the kids changed their socks but I didn’t. My feet were rubbed raw by the end of the day.

In addition to daily sock rinsing (requiring only two pairs of socks for each person), we started to use Body Glide on our feet. I had wondered why all first aid kit recommendations included Body Glide, and this is it. The Body Glide gave our feet a fighting chance at avoiding chafing.

Two pairs of chafed feet in a tent. — My daughter and I got very badly chafed feet. We addressed this in part with Body Glide and in part with daily sock rinsing.

Keeping Your Body Dry, or at Least Comfortable in the Backcountry

Raincoats for Backcountry Moisture Management

My experience with rain gear in the summer in warm to hot locations is that the rain coat makes me sweat more than it keeps me dry from the rain. Because of this, we decided to go with ponchos instead of rain coats. We had Frogg Toggs Ultra Lite2 ponchos that barely survived the trip (see other photos in this post for them in action). They are light, cheap, and not that durable. But for the price, they are great. I will be buying four new ones for our backpacking trip this summer. This brand is a favorite with thru-hikers and we saw people with their Ultra Lite2 jackets and full Ultra Lite2 Suits as well.

Because we didn’t have traditional rain coats, we all carried lightweight windbreakers as well. Unfortunately, I cannot make specific recommendations as the ones we have are discontinued.

Two children's backpacking packs with crocs on the outside. — Our Crocs served two important purposes: we wore them for unbridged river crossings (nearly all major crossings on the AT in Maine do not have bridges) and around camp. In camp they gave our feet a chance to dry out.

Managing Wet Clothes in the Backcountry

Even with a poncho on, your clothes will get wet in a drenching rain. If you are wearing full rain gear in the middle of the summer, you’ll get soaking wet from sweat. So, either way you are wet.

We always changed as soon as we got to the shelter for the evening, whether we were soaking or not. If we were soaking wet, this was partly comfort and partly a true safety issue because I didn’t want people to be cold, wet, and sitting around. Generally, when we moved we stayed warm enough, but not when we stopped.

Nothing is going to dry in a single night in damp conditions. I had a policy with the kids that they had to put back on their wet clothes unless we were hiking in to town that day. This was because if you got a second set of clothes wet, you would no longer have a dry set of spare clothes, but would instead have two gross and wet sets of clothes.

Instead, we had a policy of “wearing dry” our clothes. We just gritted our teeth and put back on the gross, wet clothes from the day before. Because we had lightweight synthetic clothing, it was usually dry (enough) within an hour or so.

Keeping Gear from Getting Too Wet in the Backcountry

Pack Covers for Moisture Management in the Backcountry

Ponchos are great because they cover you and your pack, so theoretically you don’t need to also carry a pack cover. However, we also carried pack covers because they can be used when you aren’t using your poncho and do protect packs. We also used them at night to wrap packs up if the weather was iffy for the night. This was important because with three of us in a three-person tent, our packs were not in the tent with us. They were in the vestibules or hanging in trees.

We also lined our packs with strong garbage bags. I used trash compacter bags in the kids’ packs and an outdoor trash can bag (like a contractor bag) for my own pack. The compacter bags held up better, but the kids also had less full packs. I replaced my garbage bag about every two weeks. I just had new bags included in our food resupply boxes.

Girl climbing a rebar ladder in rock with a frame pack covered with a green pack cover. — We used pack covers anytime the weather threatened a little. My daughter carried all the down sleeping bags, so it was really important to keep her pack dry. She has a compactor bag inside it as well.

Managing Wet Tents in the Backcountry

Dealing with wet tents is really unpleasant, so whenever possible, if the weather forecast was for rain to start overnight and continue through the entire next day, we stayed in shelters on both nights of the storm. This is obviously not always going to be possible, but it worked well for us.

If you do have to set up a tent in the rain, it’s helpful to plan ahead a little to minimize the tent itself getting wet. For example, most free-standing or semi-freestanding tents can be set up using the strategy in this video. I tried it recently on a Scout campout and it worked very well with our Mountain Smith Bear Creek tent. I normally subscribe to the tent-stuffing philosophy but would definitely make an exception for the chance to keep the inside of a tent dry during set up in a rainstorm.

You can also try to pack everything up in a single package if it’s still raining while you are breaking camp. Again, practice this at home before you are out on the trail.

After the storm has passed, you can dry your tent out fairly quickly during the day if you take it out and unpack it to air out during longer stops (like at lunch).

Shaking a tent out can remove an amazing amount of water. So definitely shake out the fly in the morning after a wet night (as long as it’s stopped raining). We also try to hang the fly in the sun to dry while we are packing up other gear.

Tent and groundsheet drying in the front of a shelter. — After a morning where it had rained overnight and our tent didn’t fully dry, we hung it up at the shelter while we got ready for the evening. This basically dried the tent completely in a fairly short period of time, even though there wasn’t any sun.

Waterproofing Gear for Your Backcountry Adventure

If you are concerned that your gear is no longer waterproof, you can treat it with durable water repellent to try to get some of the waterproofness back. This can be especially helpful with gear like windbreakers that aren’t expected to hold up to downpours but can do well in sprinkles or some fog situations.

We highly recommend Nikwax for your waterproofing needs, including Nikwax TX Direct for clothes. We also recommend seam-sealing your tent (if it didn’t come that way) using Seam Grip. As a bonus, Seam Grip is great for repairing technical gear. I used some last week to repair my son’s down jacket after a close encounter with embers from a campfire.

First Aid Supplies – Gear to Prevent and Treat Blisters and Chafing

If you are going to be out in potentially icky weather, a good first aid kit to prevent and treat blisters and chafing is a good idea. Here are some of the things I carried for just this purpose:

Silicon toe protectors (they can be cut for sleeves, no need to carry both). These keep toes from rubbing on each other.
Body glide. This is for feet and anywhere else that is rubbing. I used it on my back the first few days of our big trip last summer.
Blister prevention patches. These were new to me last summer but are GREAT for treating persistent problem spots in shoes on the shoe rather than on the foot. They can smooth out rough surfaces and add glide to the inside of shoes.
Tincture of Benzoin. This is like liquid sticky stuff that can help moleskin and tape stick to sweaty feet better. I repackaged it into a smaller bottle and carried a q-tip to put it on with.
Moleskin and mole foam. These are the standards for treating blisters and hotspots.
Blister bandaids (aka hydrocolloid bandages). Maybe these are gimmicky, but maybe not. My kids swear by them.

A foot with a silicon toe cap on the 2nd toe. — We used toe caps to keep toes from rubbing against each other. They are light and worked miracles.

Keeping Up Spirits in Bad Weather

Bad weather can be really demoralizing, but it doesn’t have to ruin your trip. We had only two really bad all-day soaking rainstorms on our month-long trip last summer, but we had many kind of drippy and gross days.

When the weather is less than ideal, it’s important for you to take the lead in keeping spirits high. This meant that I played more games, read more jokes from the library book on my phone, and sang more songs on bad weather days. I tried to keep banter friendly and light.

When kids get whiny, sometimes we play the “if I were going to whine, I would…” game. This makes a joke out of things that are unpleasant.

Sometimes the weather is just so miserable that a child will refuse to go on. I had this happen with the kids on both of the really bad soaking rain days. In both cases, I let the kids listen to audiobooks for more than their usual 1-mile of audiobook per day quota. They were allowed to listen to their books from lunch until we arrived at our destination. Yes, it’s not a true “nature” experience, but sometimes you need to give the kids a little comfort to keep them happier. I carried wired headphones and we each had a phone (no sim cards for the kids) that we used for audiobooks and ebooks from the library. This is much lighter than carrying a book or kindle (and more durable than the kindle).

Try to eat lunch in a shelter if possible. On one of the soaking days and one of the drippy-gross days, we were able to have lunch at a shelter along the trail. In both cases this required a small trip off trail, but it was worth every extra step we took. On one of the two torrential downpour days, when we had already told the kids that we couldn’t stop for the day at that shelter, we did stop for an extended lunch break. We made a hot meal and everyone had hot drinks. Because we do bulk food packing (more or less), we had enough extra supplies to have the hot lunch. It was worth every single ounce of fuel and food that was used for it. We all dried out a little (or at least rung out our shirts) and were able to keep going while a bit warmer and better fueled than if we had tried to gobble trail food on the go.

Sole of a wet foot. — It was pretty common that our feet looked like this when we arrived at camp. With drying them out every night and rinsing our socks daily, we could keep this wet foot situation from becoming a medical issue.

Staying Dry

Sometimes the goal isn’t staying dry, but it’s instead about managing moisture and comfort. In this post I gave a number of suggestions for managing comfort and safety in warm, humid environments. Remember that in different climates, your safety may require different choices.