I found the toilet when the light was perfect. This is an unusual statement to make, I think. The early morning sun had just risen above the surrounding mountains, and its rays of light unfiltered in the pure mountain air had pierced the one opening in the forest canopy and illuminated the Skagit Queen toilet precisely. Stonehenge and the solstices were not more perfectly aligned. (For more on the non-plumbing aspects of the trip and the Skagit Queen mine, visit https://georgeschools.wordpress.com/2022/08/12/north-cascades-2022/).
I have a small collection of wilderness toilet photos. Backpacking alone in the mountains frees your mind up to think about a lot of things you are normally too preoccupied to consider. Sometimes, because I encounter extraordinary ones, I think about toilets.
When I’m not needing to actually use a toilet, I tend to just walk. “Get in the zone,” as the through-hikers say, so that you can cover some distance. It takes a couple of days to get used to walking that much, to carrying that backpack up and down and back up mountainsides, so for a while what you think about is how much work it all is. I like exercise, and this trip was pretty much like Groundhog Day for workouts, except in this version you woke up every morning and said “Leg Day!” I pictured my quadriceps doing the work, getting stronger, and then I was ok.
I found another nice toilet in North Cascades. The toilet itself was nothing special:
Nothing to visit twice, right? It’s like sitting inside a forgotten flowerpot overgrown with weeds. But look at the view:
How many times in life do you get out your camera while sitting on the toilet? Ok, well, don’t answer that. I probably don’t want to know. But you get the point.
Best In Show I’ve shown you before, but it is worth seeing again. I do not know what the toilets are like inside the Sistine Chapel, but this one in Glacier National Park’s Boulder Pass is one to see before you die.
Get outside and see some extraordinary stuff.
My Name is SCHOOLS 