Big Wall/Backcountry Bathrooms

Hi Steph,

I love reading your blog and I love the questions you get from other women. So, my question has to do with spending the night on the wall with other climbers specifically guys. I don’t have any female climbing partners and so no one else to really ask this question to… How on earth do you go to the bathroom on the wall? Is there any privacy at all? I am headed to climb down in the Cochamo with someone I barely know and we are planning on doing some multi day routes. I’m just curious if there is anyway to have privacy. Thanks for the beta!

Jess

Hi Jess,

For some reason 😉 this is always going to be the single most interesting issue about climbing, for climbers AND nonclimbers! I am thankful for my years of climbing, because it has made me lose all unnecessary shyness issues in relation to taking a leak whenever nature calls–I actually have to remind myself not to just hunker down right there and go behind a clump of grass if I’m around nonclimbers because they get all freaked out. However my advice to you for your upcoming trip (and your future life in all other places) is just relax about taking a leak! It’s the most discreet thing in the world for girls because you crouch down and no one can see anything, from the front–perhaps even more discreet than for guys, yet somehow most men are absolutely unconcerned about using the world as their bathroom and we should follow their lead on this one. Naturally the same does not go for REAL bathrooming, which is a whole nother issue as you know which we’ll get to in a minute. Anyway, the good news is you’re going to know your new climbing partner a LOT BETTER after this trip 😀 The other good news is: everyone goes to the bathroom, it’s not just you!

There are two ways you can deal with these issues as a climber/outdoors person. The first is to be all awkward and shy. The second is to grab the bull by the horns and quit worrying about it. I was on the Zodiac once about 15 years ago with two girlfriends, which should have made everything all fine in the bathroom department….except for the fact that there was a party of guys on the route right below us for 3 days. On the first morning, my friend Kim just hollered down at them, “I have bad news for you guys, or maybe it’s good news I don’t know, but we need to pee!” This is the single most memorable thing I’ve ever heard anyone say, and it still cracks me up 😀 Peeing off the portaledge with strangers 3 pitches down is way up on my list of most awkward moments EVER and fully cured me of “stage fright” in any possible situation afterward (I’m pretty sure it qualified as bad news for the party below)…however it’s all part of climbing and life in the real world.

At a certain point, when you’re climbing long routes with your buddy, peeing is going to happen, and it doesn’t need to be a big deal. If you’re in a hanging belay, thanks to the miracle of elastic, you can just pull the back of your pants down, your harness legloop elastics will get out of the way, and you can be done with it in about 25 seconds. A few things to remember:

1. holding your pee for a long time is not good for you.

2. hydration is key on long routes: pound water the day and night before, try to pound more the morning of and rehydrate afterward.

3. when you’re in your sleeping bag and you need to get up and go, waiting is not going to make it any better 🙁

4. a full bladder will make you feel colder.

5. no real climber in the world cares if someone pees within 2 feet of them–just ideally, not on them (important to note when on a wall above others or when it’s windy).

6. when you’re a girl, you will undoubtedly pee on your shoes at some point in life and that’s just how it goes sometimes.

On to the thornier topic of going to the bathroom for real, always an unpleasant reality. This is a lot harder to overcome in terms of shyness, and is most certainly the most awkward part of camping or climbing big walls with your opposite-sex buddies. In the olden days, we used paper lunch bags and tossed them off and did a pickup patrol at the base later on if it was El Cap. You can’t really do that anymore: too many people. I climbed El Cap once with a very committed environmentalist, and she insisted we use paper bags (that was not hard to convince me to do–I really don’t prefer pooping in plastic) and made a daily chore of tying the bags to hang off ledges with string in order to let them mummify in the sun whilst we were on the wall. Then she packed them into a Seal-line bag for hauling. They were significantly lighter to haul, and on the summit she made a fire and burned them. I agreed that this system was superior in every way possible: it kept us from pooping into plastic (mega-plus!), there was essentially no weight for hauling and carrying loads down, and definitely a lot more environmental than throwing plastic wagbags into a landfill, but personally I didn’t have the stomach for that much poop handling, so I was just thankful she was spearheading that project.

Although not wholeheartedly, I recommend using wagbags and making a simple, blunt announcement to your partner that this is going to happen when the happy moment arrives. At the end of the day (well, probably at the beginning of the day), we all have to poop, so both of you will just have to be brave and make it happen. Metolius makes this adorable little haulbag, intended solely for hauling wagbags around. (However, it’s so nice and so cute, I can never bring myself to use it for that so I always put the wagbags in an old Seal line bag and use the Waste Case as a mini haulbag instead.) Usually your partner will immediately get as far away from you as possible and start scanning the sky for approaching UFOs or birds or something. If you are sharing a portaledge or bivy ledge, unfortunately that’s not going to be very far away. This is one of the joys of big wall climbing and what makes being a climber so…special 🙂



When not on a wall, you don’t have to deal with any of the social awkwardness–you can just go off on a morning hike by yourself. There are people who advocate for using wagbags in the backcountry, not just on big walls. Perhaps I’m old school, but I am not a fan of combining plastic and poop–it seems like the opposite of environmentally sound to me. Wagbags are a necessary compromise for big walling in today’s modern age of crowds and frontcountry bigwalling, but really not the best way we can manage our waste in the big picture (this is my opinion, I’m not a huge fan of plastic in general). My car camping kit includes a full size shovel and the Leave No Trace website offers good guidelines for burying, although I do not agree with the part about burying toilet paper. Bury your organic stuff deep and thoroughly, with a real shovel or oversized trowel. If you don’t have either, find a good flat rock and commit at least 5-10 minutes to digging a deep and legit hole. Whatever you do, do not leave toilet paper or any other artificial items around anywhere! Wrap up your toilet paper, etc, in a wad of clean toilet paper, possibly with a final wrap of cloth tape from your climbing stash (yes you can now put it in your pocket, it’s not going to bite you) and take it out with you: dispose of it with your other trash or toss it in your campfire. Do not try to burn it on site even if that’s what you heard you’re supposed to do in the woods. It takes forever with a lighter, the slightest breeze makes it even more ineffective, it never burns all the way, and I personally have been called over to join in on more than one scary emergency fire-stomping team because someone was trying to burn tp in the desert and then everything BUT the tp burned.



It’s hard to get over shyness about this stuff with climbing partners, but you will get over it surprisingly quickly and this is one of the great ways in which climbing builds character and helps us get rid of our weird hangups and be a little more natural like all the other creatures out there. Cajun my dog goes off a little way and tries to be a bit discreet when it’s time to go the bathroom for real, but she’s not all awkward about it. And when she needs to take a leak she just hunkers down real quick wherever she happens to be and then keeps on running. It’s only we humans who make it all such a BFD 🙂