8 Best Dry Bags for Camping

The clearest difference between this and our top pick is on your shoulders. The 35-liter Earth Pak wears two adjustable backpack straps instead of one shoulder strap, adds a zippered front pocket for the things you want without unpacking, and ships with a 6.5-inch IPX8 phone case. The body is 14 by 9 by 19 inches of the same 500D PVC.

This is the one we carry when the walk in is the hard part. Thirty-five liters takes a weekend’s clothes and a sleeping bag with room to spare, the harness puts the weight across both shoulders on a mile of trail, and the front pocket means a headlamp or a snack doesn’t cost you a full unpack at dusk. If you hike your gear to a campsite instead of driving it, this is the better buy.

The harness is the compromise. The straps came out of the box wide and stiff and only softened after a few trips — comfortable enough with a full load on flat ground, less so on a long climb. Set against that, the five-year warranty is the longest backing in this group and goes a long way toward making sense of the premium.

A bag that floats changes how you handle it around water. This one works because of the round bottom: spread it open, trap a pocket of air, roll the top three to five times and buckle it, and the whole thing bobs instead of sinking. We like that on float trips and kayak decks, where the bag spends as much time in the water as on it, and it’s the reason this is our pick for wet days rather than dry ones.

It’s also the only 20-liter bag here that gives you a proper backpack harness. Two adjustable straps turn it into a small pack for the walk from the car to the put-in, where the Earth Pak 20L hands you a single shoulder strap at the same size. The shell is PVC with welded seams rather than stitched ones, so there are no needle holes along the join, and the heavy-duty buckle takes a firm shove to close — which is what you want.

The hardware is the part to watch. Buckles and seams are what give out when a bag is stuffed past its roll zone and then hauled by one strap, so keep the fill below the closure and this holds up fine. For the money, we take the harness and the buoyancy and accept slightly less confidence in the fittings than the top pick gives us.

Eighty liters isn’t a personal bag. It’s the bag the whole pitch gets packed into: sleeping bags, spare clothes, towels that never quite dried, the lot. At 25.5 by 13.7 by 20.4 inches it eats most of a trunk, and that’s the point — one bag instead of three, with everything inside staying dry while it rides in an open truck bed or an open kayak.

The carrying options are what make it usable. A top handle, two side handles, a shoulder strap and a pair of backpack straps mean one person can wrestle it out of the truck alone. An exterior zip pocket and a separate interior pocket keep the small stuff findable, and the three compartments let you keep damp towels away from clean clothes.

We like it for basecamp and boat trips, not for carrying far. Loaded, the backpack straps dig into your shoulders after a few hundred yards, so treat them as a way to get the bag from vehicle to tent rather than a hiking harness. That’s a fair trade for something that swallows an entire camp’s soft gear and wipes clean in a minute.

Three sacks in three sizes answer a question one big bag can’t: where is anything? The 20-liter takes a sleeping bag or a day of soft gear, the 10-liter holds clothes, and the 5-liter is the one that ends up with a phone, wallet, keys and a small first-aid kit. Splitting a pack this way beats digging through one sack for a dry pair of socks in the rain.

The fabric is what you’re buying. It’s 190D ripstop nylon with a waterproof coating rather than the 500D PVC of our top picks, and the difference shows up as weight: all three sacks together come to 0.2 kg. They roll down to nothing inside a pack, and the D-ring on each one clips to a strap or a pack loop so a full sack doesn’t migrate to the bottom.

That lightness is also the limit. These are rain and splash bags, not submersible ones. A coated nylon sack sitting in the bottom of a wet canoe is a different proposition from a PVC one, and we treat them accordingly — good for a downpour on the walk in, not for a bag you drag through a river.

For backpackers and anyone packing a rucksack for a camping trip, this is the set we recommend before they buy a fourth stuff sack. They organize a pack, keep a sleeping bag dry when the weather turns, and cost about what one mid-size PVC bag here does — as long as you’re not planning to dunk them.

IPX6 is a specific promise and it’s worth reading correctly: the 10-liter Lamicall is built to take heavy rain and spray, not a dunking. Within that, it packs in a lot — a 500D PVC shell, welded seams, a roll-top that closes in three folds, an adjustable cross-body strap, and a splash-proof front pocket sized for keys, sunscreen and an ID. The included IPX8 pouch takes phones up to 7 inches, which covers most of the big ones.

For day trips and wet hikes, this is the bag we reach for when we want the phone accessible rather than buried. The pouch is usable through the plastic, so you can shoot a photo without unpacking, and the front pocket saves opening the main compartment every time someone wants sunscreen. It’s a better thought-out day bag than most of the plain sacks here.

The caveats are small but real. The front pocket is only splash-resistant, so a phone left in there during a downpour gets wet — that’s what the IPX8 pouch is for. And at this size the only carry option is the cross-body strap. A two-year warranty backs it, which is more cover than most of this group offers.

The front of this 30-liter bag is a mesh pocket with cargo straps, which sounds like a small detail until you’re standing in the rain holding a soaked shell and have nowhere to put it. Mesh drains, the straps cinch the load down, and the reflective strip across the front catches a headlamp when you’re walking back from the washhouse in the dark.

The rest is a serious carry setup: padded, adjustable and removable shoulder straps, an over-molded top handle, and a vinyl shell that wipes clean after a muddy weekend. It holds 30 liters in one main compartment with an extra pocket, and the straps come off if you want to lash the bag to a boat or a roof rack instead of wearing it.

We rate it for camp because the straps are padded enough for a real walk and the mesh pocket solves the wet-shell problem no plain PVC sack handles well. The shell is stiff, so rolling the top down takes a couple of firm folds rather than one — a small tax on a bag that otherwise suits wet weekends.

Two liters is a phone, a wallet, keys, a headlamp and a small first-aid kit, and not much else. The Unigear at this size is a pouch rather than a pack — 7.48 inches square, 0.19 kg empty, small enough to disappear into a bigger bag until the moment you need it.

What it has going for it is the material. Ripstop 500D PVC with welded seams is the same family of construction as the full-size bags here, which is unusual this far down the price range, and the buckle and D-rings let you clip it to a pack strap or a canoe thwart so it isn’t loose in the boat.

Sealed with a few rolls and a pocket of air, it floats. That makes it the bag for a phone and a car key on a river float — the two things you genuinely can’t replace if they go over the side and under.

As an add-on rather than a main bag, we think it earns its place. It takes the two or three items you can’t risk, it clips out of the way, and if it does go missing you haven’t lost the bag your sleeping bag was in. Buy it as your second dry bag, not your only one.