Bathroom Considerations While Hiking

Video Transcript

"Also when you're going on your trek you need to think about using the bathroom. Sometimes in national parks they have, I wouldn't call it a bathroom, but they have like a little hole that they've kind of built up basically and then there's like a little fence around it. And they basically have it in this lock down thing where the bears can't get to the human waste or anything like that. So that's a safe way to get rid of human waste. So you should find out before you're going on your trek if there's going to be those on the way. If there is, then you don't have to worry about anything. You can use those. But most of the time there's not going to be anything like that. So what you're going to have to do is take a shovel. And there's a couple of rules that you need to remember if you're going to go out in the back country. If you're going to pee, pee on a rock, because the deer are attracted to the salt that is in urine and if you pee on plants they're going to come and they're going to eat up all the little plants. All these little, the alpine plants that have been spending years and years trying to get to grow. So pee on a rock. And do it far away from, you don't want to do it right next to the trails cause you don't want to attract animals to the trails and you don't want to do it next to a water source. Same thing if you've got to take a dump. You need to dig a hole and you need to be far away from a water source, far away from a trail. The hole needs to be at least eight inches deep, cover it back up so that the animals don't get to it."