California State Parks Turning Off Showers

After a long grueling day of hiking, setting up your tent, and building a fire, there's nothing quite like heading over to the bathroom and washing the dust away with a hot shower. But with the ongoing historic drought ravaging California, many state parks and state beaches are turning off the spigot.

According to series of reports, a wide range of state beaches are turning off their showers in order to do their small part to conserve water. This is in response to Governor Jerry Brown's mandate for the parks department to reduce water consumption by 25 percent.

How big of an impact does this have? Each visitor uses an estimated 25 gallons of water per overnight (to be fair, that's still less than the 100 gallons that people use at home per day). With that in mind, the state will save an estimated 8 million gallons of water by turning off the showers.

So if you're heading to camp or to the beach this summer, be prepared to forgo the luxury of taking a shower to wash off that dust or sand. But you know what? That's fine! That's the beauty of the outdoors. If you need to wash off, just jump in the river, lake, or ocean!