I’ve been sharing all about our recent Pioneer Trek reenactment with you lately. Today I’m going to share all about our Pioneer Trek five gallon buckets. I think it’s fairly common on Trek reenactments for each person to bring a five gallon bucket. This is not only your suitcase for the trip, but also your seat out in the wilderness. It’s amazing how comfortable those buckets are after a long day of hiking!

I also recommend bringing some sort of cushion for the top of your bucket. Someone in our Church ward made little pillows for the top of everyone’s buckets that would be attending Trek. They really made a big difference in the comfort level and there are tons of great tutorials of varying degrees on Pinterest.

I forgot to get a picture of our Pioneer Trek five gallon buckets until after we got home. By that point they were completely trashed from the dusty trail. That’s okay though, you can see how roughed up they get over the course of just a couple of days.

I’m sure that many groups organize their Pioneer Treks differently. Our Church Stake asked each person to bring a five gallon bucket. As I mentioned earlier, this is both your suitcase and your seat. We used them during our nightly meetings, eating our meals, and our personal time. In addition to individual buckets, each Ma and Pa couple had to supply an extra bucket to keep two days’ worth of food in for our lunches.

decorating our Pioneer Trek five gallon buckets

I wanted all of our Pioneer Trek five gallon buckets to stand out from the crowd and I wanted to know from a distance they were ours. I used turquoise spray paint and chalkboard paint on our buckets to set them apart. We kind of used turquoise as our family color, as that’s also the duct tape color we used to mark all of our equipment. On our food bucket we wrote a scripture from Acts on it with a chalk marker. Our other buckets were left blank. I brought along chalk so we could play simple games like hangman or tic-tac-toe on them but we never really had the time.

Going on a Pioneer Trek reenactment? Be sure to check out my other posts about it!

Have you needed to make a Pioneer Trek five gallon bucket before? Have you ever decorated a five gallon bucket for another purpose?