[pct-l] one more lesson learned: another reason to be a section hiker

[Will Hiltz]

I'm going to disagree on this one... I think it is easily possible to carry
too much TP.


If you have a lot of TP, you won't be so shy about using a healthy amount.


Once you have a lot of poopy TP, what are you going to do with it? Sure, the
right answer is to carry it out but folks tend to be a lot more concientious
about this in theory than in practice.


Lotsa poopy TP leads to burying which I think we can all agree is not a good
thing.  I also can't tell you how many times I've found partially burned (or
sometimes totally unburned) poopy TP in fire rings along the trail.  As
someone who ran out of white gas for a week or so in Oregon and was cooking
over fires at night, this was unpleasant to say the least.


Bring a LITTLE TP for a huge emergency and then do what I do... use natures
TP.


Leaves are OK.  Sticks work.  Pinecones work (don't laugh!).  My personal
favorite though has to be the smooth stones on riverbanks and dry
riverbeds.  Try it once and you'll never go back to paper...


YITOOD,

Easy

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:16 PM, David Hough on pct-l <
pcnst2001 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> One lesson reinforced this otherwise successful weekend:   you can never
> carry too much toilet paper and imodium.    I did not have any outside
> food since Friday night, I only passed one other hiker briefly, I pumped
> all my water and added a small dose of iodine to the pumped water...
> but for the second time I suffered an intestinal upset verging on
> incontinence (previous time was July 2007 in the Marble Mountains).
>
> As before imodium did not help right away, but stopping hiking did.
>  That's
> seldom an option for me, so I am glad these occasions happened on days
> I planned to hike out anyway.
>
> So I am wondering if some combination of physical stress/dehydration/
> strange water/strange food can lead to some kind of mechanical irritation.
> That's my problem to figure out, but the more general lesson is...
> sometimes
> it's a good idea to carry more than the minimum that you know you'll need.
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