Conan, when were you able to schedule in time to hike?
nobody
Trail hygiene - Appalachian Trail
system
#22
Don’t matter how clean and shinny I get. I’m full of sweat 15 minutes out of town. So why bother trying to look like a townsman with a tie. I’m a Backpacker.
73 men sailed her.
Greg
system
#23
virginian reminded me that fresh snow makes great booty wipes, however cold it is. and it works good on the leave no trace. Just be sure to walk off quite a bit and bury it.
being aware of where people are pooping will become an instinct you develop. I don’t know if it is because your sense of smell or sight gets better, or your tracking skills pick up to a fine honed edge, but you will know where people have been before you. Several register entries said people had taken dumps in springs or right inside camping areas. so keep an eye out.
i also forgot that i was about as anal as i could be about water filtering. I kept my filter as clean as possible and watched how i handled water from the get go. may help prevent something worse than BO.
burn
system
#24
purell’s good for the occasional clean, like after you go poopie, but if you use it too much it will hinder your body’s natural ability to de-funk.
if you’ve ever kept a fish tank, you know that if you disrupt the natural filter in the substrate, you’ll kill off the nitrogen fixing bacteria and knock out the n cycle, allowing an abundance of ammonia, and killing all of your fish. the last thing you want to do on the trail is kill all of your fish.
your skin’s chemical balance is so delicate that an overuse of antibacterial substance can give you some serious health trouble. and really, it’s not even worth the risk. most gels are made up of two things: ethyl alcohol (disinfectant) and triclosan (antibacterial). alcohol’s just alcohol, and scientists are finding armies of bacteria to be newly immune to triclosan. also, there’s no such thing as an antibacterial gel that kills viruses. if they affected viral infections in any way, they’d be called anti-viral. so unless you’re fighting off e.coli, streptoccus, and salmonella from those shelter registers, purell’s not gonna help you. you’ll get sick anyway when you lick the gorp dust off your fingers.
more bad news. while that dab of gel kills off your body’s good bacteria in one swipe, it stops protecting you from the bad bacteria elsewhere the minute you touch something else. you’d have to gel yourself to death if you wanted to touch your sleeping bag, your stove, your spork, your pack straps, …your nalgene cap, the shelter floor, the tree you piss on, without worrying about all that deadly bacteria. you’d climb springer as a hopeful, slow-talking hippy and run off the trail somewhere north of there as an obsessive-compulsive trainwreck, screaming for more purell! just one more hit!
sorry to all the gel fans. didn’t mean to ruin your dreams of the perfect product, but i used to be an ecology major and just couldn’t help myself. :tongue
grace