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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Outside Shower Enclosure
    Posted: 13 May 2017 at 3:50pm

Pahaque makes one of the stand up portable latrines like Cabela's. They have a use, where legal to use and if boondocking. We used to set one up in base camp when we mule deer hunted in AZ. I wouldn't use one in a campground nor use my outside spray wand as a shower in a campground. Really about common sense.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13 May 2017 at 8:08pm
I googled pathogens as that made real sense.   So if a pathogen is a living thing, where would a camper get it?  Except from the environment around the camper.  So washing off living things, from the area in which there were obtained, seems OK to me.  There are pathogens in water.  So if you bring your water from far away, then you do bring hitch hikers essentially.  However, don't most TT people fill up on water when they get close to the destination?   Which still yields the same result.  

Showering outside, uses 1 - 2 gallons.  In volume, on a bad day, 2 tbsp of soap?  Of which, 40% by volume is a natural oil for fragrance.   Leaving about a tbsp of a cleanser.   That doesn't seem too excessive.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13 May 2017 at 10:42pm
Great Smokey Mountains NP regulation:

Waste Water
Dish water and bath water must be drained at utility sinks or dump stations, not on the ground. Do not wash or bathe in streams or at water fountains. RV sewage should be drained only at a dump station. Showers and utility hookups are not available in the park. Showers may be available in nearby towns.

Capital Reef NP (Utah) regulation:

Bathing/Dishwashing:
Wash dishes, bathe, and use only completely contained solar showers at your site. Washing of any kind is not permitted at spigots, drinking fountains or the RV dump station. Do not wash dishes in the restroom or gray-water sinks. Water from dishwashing, bathing and solar showers must be collected and deposited in gray-water disposal sinks.

Those are just the first two examples I found.  My point is, despite what might seem to make sense or to be reasonable there are sometimes regulations that apply.  The NP Service probably has their own rationale, but I think the rules are based less on consideration of fellow campers than of the environment.  All kinds of animal behavior, not to mention health, can be affected scents and pathogens of human activity and waste, even if it seems trivial or is invisible to us.  Of course, in cluster campgrounds, the problems are easily compressed and concentrated to the point that they can be annoying or unhealthy to humans too.

And let me say this about boondocking, picking a nit perhaps.  We camp in the Smokies and Outer Banks National Seashore campgrounds more than anywhere else, and there are no hookups at all in those campgrounds, so if you stay there, you boondock.  These campgrounds aren't as tightly packed as a lot of places I've seen, but let's just say it's still not hard to have an annoying neighbor.  Plus, quite often in season, there is someone setting up in the site I just left before I leave the dump station.  If it's me moving in, I don't want to find a puddle of someone's bath or dishwater.

On the other hand, I've been to those dispersed campsites too that Furpod referred to.  There are still environmental concerns even if no one will camp in the same spot for another two years.  Leave no trace is generally the rule to go by.  Again, it really, really gripes me in those kinds of places to have to deal with, or even see, someone else's trash or waste that wasn't carried out our buried properly.  I figure the reason people go to those places is to enjoy nature in its pristine state.  Unless we go to the necessary effort to protect those places the stress of all the additional people who like to camp nowadays will make places worth going to harder and harder to find.

All that said, there are places remote enough that even I figure if a bear can do it in the woods, I can too.  But I bury my crap and don't use soap or shampoo if I find it necessary to bathe in a lake or stream.  I'm talking about places Pods don't (can't) go.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 9:08am
Derek - Pathogens are everywhere there is life.  They are the basic forms of life that have existed for millions of years.  They have very little motive power except as hitchhikers, but they are extraordinarily effective at tagging along, traveling unseen and unnoticed all over the world, for example, various forms of influenza.

Every time you go to a campground, or anywhere else for that matter, you carry along billions of microorganisms, many of which can cause disease in other people or animals.  So when you wash off, you not only leave behind organism that you may have picked up in the campground, but also others that you brought from your last trip to tropical Africa.  Thankfully, living creatures, be they animal or plant, have relatively effective defense systems that keep us from becoming ill every time we encounter a bug that can make us ill.

Most potable water people carry to a camp ground is treated so that there are very low levels of pathogens in it. But it isn't that water that causes the problem.  It's the stuff that comes from your body, your food, etc. that gets washed off with the water and thrown onto the ground that can spread disease.  


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 9:37am
That is totally fair.  The NIH in 2013 published work on how our skin has 2 billion or so bacterium, and if we have a dog, its even more.  An if I just came back from Africa, then 24 hours later zipped up to the smokies, there could be some bonus bacterium.  Their ability to survive would be questionable.  To me, and I am going to read this paper from Stanford to learn more, its like the 5 second rule.  Bill Nye and Myth Busters tested the 5 second rule.   Long story short, the likelihood of bacterium being on the floor exactly where the food item was dropped is so remote, there is no 5 second rule. http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/5-second-rule-with-food/

I haven't thought about food however until you just said that.  Throwing an apple core sounds simple enough, but if that apple is from Mexico, then its not so simple.  Boy Scouts didn't cover pathology in nature.  I was so robbed!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 11:27am
It's the cantaloupes from Colorado that I worry about.  http://www.denverpost.com/2013/09/26/colorado-cantaloupe-farmers-charged-by-federal-officials-in-fatal-listeria-outbreak/
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 12:43pm
I own two dogs. I clean up their poop ALWAYS and often clean up after others who don't. But my dogs and everyone else's urinate all over. Let's face it campsites are dirty places.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 12:49pm
Good points, David, and a good laugh!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 May 2017 at 2:30pm
OK, our 4 years ago we had a problem with our cantaloupes.   I bought a RPOD made in Oregon last year and I still have problems with it !

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31 May 2017 at 10:39pm
Ha Ha - we used the outdoor shower on our shakedown trip to wash the dog...after she rolled in something smelly. Figure it will be mostly for cleaning dog, sand off feet etc. but interested in what is suggested for true outdoor shower.  We filled our gray water tank pretty fast so might be a good idea to shower outside.
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