Dealing with human poop in the woods

[Josh J]

Karen,  nope!

[AK Granola]

I can’t speak to your situation then, Josh. Keep on with the TP I guess! I’ve not camped at 20F without snow.

[Kevin Babione]

@Karen – Thanks for the info.  I may give it a try.

As for my buddies…It’s a mental thing for them (no drugs or supplements) and I’ve just gotten used to it.  My trips with them typically go from Friday morning to Sunday around lunch.  I think they go before they leave their house on Friday and then again soon after arriving home on Sunday.  It’s not that long, but they don’t go in the woods…

[jscott]

kevin, maybe your pals feel vulnerable crouched down with their pants around their ankles and no way to run if a rabid squirrel decided to attack…

I drink coffee in the morning and definitely need to poop in the woods like the Pope and a bear.

(cf. is a bear Catholic? does the Pope poop in the woods?).

[Kevin Babione]

@book – Your coffee reference cracked me up!  Drinking coffee definitely sets the “gotta go” switch with everyone in our house, but these two guys have a cup in the morning when we’re out and it’s like they had a sip of water.  I’ll have to start watching out for those rabid squirrels though…

 

[W I S N E R !]

Yesterday’s unused TP.

(I swear that’s clay soil on the stick on the right!)

Add a little washing if necessary…It’s really not that hard to be clean, LNT, and avoid carrying poop in your pack…

[Christopher R]

thanks for all the replies.  This information is not easy to find online.

[BlackHatGuy]

How do you “know” when you’re clean?  With paper I have a literal litmus test ;)

I might be a bit different than others here. When I go TP-less (which I don’t always do), I first use small sticks (about the diameter of my thumb, like the ones in Craig’s pic) instead of rocks to do the ‘cleaning’. Then I simply pour some water into my hand (I don’t do the bidet thing) and ‘wash’ my butt with my hand. Pour some more water in my hand, finish washing my butt with my hand. Then wash my hands with soap, letting the water all fall into the poop hole. Stir up the poop afterward, then fill in the hole. This seems to make some folks a bit squeamish, not sure why. It’s your own butt, for crying out loud.

If I’m in the woods with my pants around my ankles, how do I keep from soaking my underwear and pants (and socks and shoes) with either clean or runoff bidet water?

I’ve never had this issue with the above method, since I’m never ‘squirting in the dark’.

Be honest – do you take some TP with you “just in case”?

Generally, yes, even when I don’t use it.

[W I S N E R !]

It’s your own butt, for crying out loud.

Yes.  I find it quite odd that the thought of this practice bothers people when it’s done in the backcountry. Do people not wash in the shower?

Soap is soap, water is water, just do a good job.

I trust my TP-less backcountry hygiene far more than I trust people that use TP but don’t wash their hands well…and I see this happen in public bathrooms all the time. The toilet in the stall flushes and the person just walks right out…

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

A Japanese friend of mine sent me a pocket bidet. He says all Japanese carry these and they use them even in public toilets in the city. I find it a bit large to bring backpacking, but it works great. It has a little nozzle that you pull out and twist to select the type of spray you want. There’s a steady stream side and a shower stream side. You give it a good squeeze and hose yourself off. I will also use my hand and then wash my hands after. It’s not any worse than pooping at home and washing off in the shower after.

One of the benefits of using soap and water is you really do cut down on chafing because you wash away the salt and sweat, too. You feel a lot better when you are really clean. Let’s face it, you don’t get very clean with TP and you aren’t very clean on a backpacking trip going days without bathing.

If you are squeamish you might consider at least washing yourself at the end of the day to get the salt and sweat off. A side-effect will be cleaning up after sub-optimal TP action from the previous morning.

[BlackHatGuy]

“One of the benefits of using soap and water is you really do cut down on chafing because you wash away the salt and sweat, too.”

You also get rid of the tiny bits of TP stuck to your butt hairs, if you use TP. And those tiny bits are anything but clean.

[Bonzo]

Something that hasn’t been brought up yet is the benefit that a bidet can offer anyone that suffers from hemorrhoids.  I’ve had to deal with something like that just once and it was absolutely miserable; literally any sort of contact or pressure is incredibly painful, and the thought of hiking through that kind of discomfort is enough to make people stay at home.  That said: I’ve never actually used a pocket bidet… mostly because I knew they existed, but didn’t really connect them with being a useful trail tool until this thread popped up.  Heretofore I’ve used as little toilet paper as I could cleanly get away with using – pun intended – and made sure that it was well-soaked and well mixed in a hole of sufficient depth.  I’ve admittedly never done the pack-it-out thing with toilet paper because I couldn’t see how it would have any greater impact than what I was already leaving, but if only for the sake of sheer simplicity and improved cleanliness, the bidet sounds wonderful.  I’m glad that I’ve been keeping up with this thread; it just saved me some needless complexity!

[AK Granola]

Because poop threads on BPL have a life of their own…I thought I’d add one more comment. After trying a bidet solution while backpacking and hiking, when the TP hoarding hoax happened this spring (our community never actually ran out of TP!), I decided to install one at home in the regular bathroom. I love it! You can get simple ones that just use the regular cold water line, or ones that connect to a GFCI outlet and have all kinds of features, all the way up to music choices and light displays. I chose a middle range one, that has heated water, and air dry. Ours also has silly (to me) features like a night light, massage option, some other things that we just turned off. I spend at most 3 minutes in the bathroom, so while the heated water and air dry are nice, nothing else is “needed.” People who fear being clean can also just use it as a regular toilet.

I think a feature like this would be a wonderful help to people with mobility issues, someone caring for an aging adult that has trouble wiping, for when you’re ill and out of energy, when you can’t shower regularly due to surgery – in short, all kinds of people would benefit from something like this.

[Miner]

Back to the OP, like others mentioned, I double ziplock it.  One freezer bag 1QT ziplock holds all my clean TP, hand santizer, and my second sandwich ziplock.  The sandwich ziplock holds my dirty TP which I tend to wrap the 1st dirtier piece with a cleaner later piece. I store the whole thing in the mesh outside pocket on my pack, though wouldn’t fear putting it inside my main pack pocket if there was ever a need to do so (not that I can think of such a need). Never had an issue with rain or the ziplocks getting damage where I’d be concern about something getting exposed over multiple week trips. I do replace the dirty ziplock on a regular basis, though some have been forgotten about through multiple trips with no harm.

And while I do like to use water to clean up after the TP gets most of it, not every hike in the western US has water so readily available.  Carrying 3+ liters on a regular basis tends to make me conserve my water so I don’t have to carry even more.

Speaking on hiker bidets that mount to bottles, I was given 2 types recently. One really short one (Culo Clean) that is like an oversize lid and one that has a few inch long curved spout (Uyicoo). I have this fear with the smaller shorter one that dirty water will drip back on the threads of my water bottle so have never tried using it. Am I being overly concern or just doing it wrong.

[Jenny A]

Well, I have been doing some product testing at home with a couple of things I found to use backpacking next season.  The first is the CuloClean portable bidet cap, the “short one” mentioned by Miner in the previous post.  It is so light and easy to use that it will probably be my item of choice for backpacking.  And Miner, if you hold the bottle with cap behind your behind and spray horizontally, or at a slight downward angle, water cannot drip back onto the threads.   I had some concern that squeezing the bottle too hard could pop the lid off, but that hasn’t happened.

The second item is one that we briefly had in at the local REI, the Happy Bottom portable bidet.  (What a silly name, but that is really what it’s called.).  That item is a soft bottle with a telescoping angled spout that sprays water.  It works well, too, but weighs a bit more and is bulkier.  Hmm, wonder if that spout could be screwed onto a lighter weight bottle?

Both products seem to do the job just fine, and I am excited about the prospect of carrying and hauling out less TP, AND feeling cleaner.  Washing away sweat and salt is a benefit I had not considered but is a significant benefit nevertheless.  Such happy options!

[Author]

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