Celebrating “the World’s Nastiest Outhouse”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.12.06 | 11:40 AM ET
Okay, perhaps “celebrating” isn’t quite the right word. In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, John Flinn recalls his visit to the spartan outhouse used and abused by climbers working their way up icy Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains near Chechnya. In 1993, Outside magazine named the outhouse the nastiest in the world. “I haven’t heard of any upstarts staking a new claim to the title,” Flinn writes. “I checked. Really.” In fact, in addition to visiting the remote outhouse himself, Flinn did a surprising amount of research. In his column, he invokes both the World Toilet Organization and a group called Hikers Against Doo-Doo.
Explains Flinn:
For all its vileness, the outhouse on Mount Elbrus got a lot of use. Climbers hunkered down in the hut to prepare for their summit bid, and there are two things they commonly do to cope with the oxygen-thin air. The first is to drink water—lots and lots of water. Liter upon liter of water. Bladder-bursting quantities of water. Dehydration, it’s widely believed, is one of the triggers of altitude sickness. The other thing they do is take a prescription drug called Diamox. It’s very effective in warding off altitude sickness, but it has a number of side effects, one of which being that it’s a very efficient diuretic.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
TambourineMan 04.12.06 | 8:55 PM ET
I haven’t used it in years, but the outhouse at Bad Water in Death Valley is a world class gag-inducer.
Kelsey Timmerman 04.12.06 | 10:07 PM ET
I’d like to nominate any of the outhouses at the Boy Scout camp I attended in Ohio so many years ago. I heard that one time a Brown Recluse bit this kid “down there” while he was taking a #2. His “down there” swelled up to the size of watermelon and he died before he made it to the hospital.
Source: My friend who huffed chlorine tablets was told by his friend, the best fart lighter you’ve ever seen, who was told by some kid that didn’t have a belly button, but had 11 toes, who was told by…
Frank Bures 04.13.06 | 7:04 AM ET
They must be selling Diamox at gift shop in the Sofia, Bulgaria airport, because, man, that bathroom is naaaaasty. At least it was when I was there in the 1990s. I’ve had nightmares.