From: marlatt@spot.Colorado.EDU (Stuart W. Marlatt)
Subject: Re: Long-term cave exploration - waste disposal?
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 05:48:12 GMT

In article <9211191907.AA03650@cs.utexas.edu> wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) writes:
>The other night, the local PBS station showed a National Geographic Special
>on cave exploration. One particular subject of the program was a long-term
>(like a week or longer) expedition into a cave near to Carlsbad. During
>the expedition, the purity and fagility of this cave environment was
>emphasized, and the explorers were shown using the water in the cave 
>right from the pools for cooking and drinking, and illustrated the special
>efforts they took to avoid harming the cave formations, such as switching
>from boots to a sort of wading slipper to avoid damaging certain rock
>(flowstone) formations when walking over them. 

In my opinion, while it was better than the average show on caving, it
was badly lacking in conservation messages. But they did mention it a
little.

>But one aspect was completely avoided, and I wonder what people on this
>group can tell me about it: waste disposal during this long-term
>exploration. It's not like wilderness -- you can't dig a hole somewhere
>for a latrine, or find a "safe" spot to urinate. I would at first
>assume they had some sort of chemical toilet facility, like astronaut
>waste bags or something, to use and then pack out all the waste, but
>the show DID address the difficulty of getting their backpacks through
>the winding maze of passageways on the way in, and it sure seemed to me
>that they just simply could not pack out all the waste water generated
>by this multi-person team over a week-plus period. (They didn't have to
>pack *in* water, since they could use the cave water, so they'd have a
>vast amount greater weight to pack *out* if they had to bring out all
>the waste water.) [I wouldn't think they'd even have containers to hold
>it all!]
>
>So how did they manage?

In fact, most of it is packed out. Even on multi-day trips, SOP has
been to use double or triple ziplock freezer bags for solid waste,
and bottles for urine. I belive some of the urine is allowed to be 
dumped in the cave, in selected areas. This is becoming fairly
routine in many large caves (e.g. Wind, Jewel, Lech, Carlsbad, etc.),
as a natural outgrowth of the increasing numbers of people caving
these days. (If you don't cave, don't start! It's really nothing to
get excited about.) In caves which flood regularly, such measures
are of course less necessary. I don't believe any studies have been
done examining the effect of urine/fecal matter on the cave environment,
but taking out everything one packs in, in so much as is possible,
is good practice even if the adverse effects were shown to be small.
Small multiplied by scores of people is often no longer small.

A similar discussion filtered through here some months ago, regarding
waste disposal on glaciers. It seems the general concensus was that
packing out all your crap would be impossible. Perhaps, if we are
talking multi-week trips. However, the experiences in Lech have shown
it to be quite possible for trips up to about a week. This is in a
cave, where not only do you have to carry the 'cave-burritos', but
you have to package it well enough that it will survive being beaten
about while climbing, crawling, squeezing, and even swimming. And
you don't have the option of large frame (internal or external) packs
or sleds. I still think the argument that it can't be done in a
mountaineering situation is based more on distaste than actual
insurmountable problems. I would suggest starting now and working
out a system - as the population increases, and the numbers of
mountaineers and backcountry gawkers also increases, this will
cease to be a topic for debate - it will become inevitable.

(If you _really_ trust you water filter, you don't need to pack
out your urine...)


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I have not made this show purposelessly                                   
And it is not by any concitation                                          
Of the backwards devils.                                                  
  --T.S. Eliot, Gerontion                                                 
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s.w. marlatt, <><  &  *(:-)               Prov. 25.2
University of Colorado:                   marlatt@spot.Colorado.edu  492-3939
National Center for Atmospheric Research: marlatt@neit.cgd.ucar.edu  497-1669
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