Soapbox

Ben Hunter wrote (see)

I know a lot of people who for some reason think its fine to throw away a banana skin but will still carry the rest of their rubbish down. Its a real bugbear of mine, take your banana skins, apple cores, orange peels or prawn tails home with you people. It does not belong on the side of a hill! Sorry rant over.

Do footprints, eroded tracks, people with [pa***o, red socks, wooly tams, beards], red tents or groups in pac-a-macs belong on the side of a hill?

I agree with you btw

Don't apple cores rot down ok but banana skins don't rot down as quickly? Cows like apple cores and apples BTW. At least the ones at back of parents when their apple tree dumped a load of them just where they could reach. Someone told me that apples affect the milk from dairy cows. Not sure if I believed it.

I also think orange peel is also as bad as banana skins.

Anyway no matter how bad these peels, cores and skins are they are a lot better than plastic bags of poo or even nappys. I was in the hills and saw an unused nappy left behind on the hills. It had rained so the gel stuff in the nappies to absorb the pee had absorbed the rain and burst out of the nappy. It was a mess to clear up and leaked water for ages after i picked it up to bag it. Ended up ripping the bag and allowing it to leak out as I walked down off the hill. I have seen used nappies too left on the hill in the plastic bags they come with to hold them (the ones that have odour control I think.

Ignorant people abound.

It does seem that it is mostly the 'reacheable' hills that suffer the most.  I don't recall seeing anything on the Grey Corries Ridge.  That would indicate that hill walkers that are prepared to get away from the crowd are a bit more responsible.

One thing that really grates is when folk use the 'but it's for charitee' excuse for whatever crap, mess and inconvenience  they leave behind.

Some colleagues of mine decided having done a '3 peaks challenge' to do it again the following year - twice!  why!!

The plan was to do each mountain twice, by the same route before driving to the next one.  One of them was not impressed when I suggested that they should work out the height and do it on a step machine instead.  Much more environmentaly acceptable IMO.

Steve D

Last time I was on the Ben we got to the top and some pleasant chap was sat on the trig point and was doing a turd in the round hole on top of the trig point. Him and his mates thought it was the funniest moment in the history of mountain walking :

He was saying :" now anyone who stands on top of the UK will have to smell my turd"

I was incensed and confronted the group, who thought me getting annoyed was adding to the enjoyment of the grand occasion. Now I've always had a slightly short fuse and when something presses my button I find it very hard to hold back, had my children not been there watching on I would have dropped the arrogant little s**t off Tower Gap.

The problem is some people just have a basic lack of respect for anyone or anything. The lads I confronted didn't care one bit about what they had done. The fact that I was annoyed over it was simply adding to their enjoyment ...... What can you do 

guys, slightly off topic, in that it isn't stictly just leaving a poo for somebody to step on, what do you all think about people having poo poo when wild camping, when it's away from the crouds and such and such.

 i always read it should be 50m away from a path, river etc.  but to be honest, when i wild camp i only ever do the business when i am right out in a field somewhere miles away from anyone/thing, usually somewhere covered in animal poop to begin with.  i dig a hole at least five inches deep, make a deposit, and back fill the hole, and sometimes stick a rock over the top for good measure.  toilet paper gets cling filmed and stuffed in a small, secure (air tight) sugar carrier and carried out and binned.

 if i am wild camping anywhere other than somewhere really remote, i use the same method as for the toilet paper, except my goodies go into cling film and then plastic bag.

 i hope nobody has ever stumbled across any of my droppings, i would imagine the chances of it are pretty small.

 with respect to the guy who crapped in the trig, he obviously wasn't bothered or embarrassed, why not just drop his knickers and do it in a plastic bag.  if they find that sort of thing funny, surely it would be just as awesome to crap in a plastic bag and carry it about and they could have had just as much fun?

 perhaps he has a check list to plant one in all the five thousand or so trigs about? kind of munro bagging for the, shall we say, challanged.

If I have to then it's dig a hole and burn the paper unless unsafe to do so. Well away from water supplies.

In some sensitive areas I carry out everything, suitably sealed and protected!

Steve D

Ben Hunter wrote (see)

I'm thinking maybe tasers could be issued to all us responsible walkers and we can kindly remind people of the country code from time to time. There is not much in life that I don't think can't be fixed with a good taser in hand.

Define responsible walkers. I count myself as thoroughly unresponsible but I want a taser too. I doubt there are many on here who are responsible all the time and least of all with a trig point shitting lout and a taser in hand.

Personally I would like the central holes of all trig point pillars to be fitted with an automatice taser. As soon as the hole gets covered up it pops and zap! Whatever blocked it gets fried. People usually shove waste in there like crisp packets and evern bags of dog shit. I'd like to see the auto-taser zapping them as well as the lout Rodney saw. I just wonder how far the taser would need to rise before zapping. The lout would have quite a surprise if it was set too high!

Sorry but fantasising about pain and torture inflicted on lout like them gives me great pleasure. You really shouldn't have mentioned tasers as I hadn't thought of that possibility. You have now given me a whole mew level of punishment for miscreants.

BTW I was always told it was 6" down into the ground and 100yards from water sources. Unfortunately I do wonder whether that is truly possible in our waterlogged upland fells. I heard somewhere that the height of soil that contaminents need to pass through for the bugs in it to take out the nasties is in the order of a few metres. Anyway I have a plastic trowel with inches and cms marks on the inside of the blade. This I use to dig through the turf and soil to at least 6" then I go. However sometimes I need to dig a lot deeper as you are in fact filling it up. I usually don't need to use this technique as I tend to hit somewhere with toilets and can hold off til then. When I did have to I learnt that 6" and a bigger area hole than you need for accuracy is the way. Also burn your paper if safe to do or pack out if not. Cling film or zip plastic bags and a tuperware box (with clips perhaps) is more than enough. The firt time I went in the hills I went into a hole in the ground between boulders. I had no trowel or digging tool like poles or axe. It was out of sight and inaccessible to animals so it was the best I could do. It is the reason you dig down 6" I believe so animals don't dig it up (or at least that is what I got told once)

I know this is a dirty topic but it is good to educate people as to the right thing to do. Even urine is best released well away from water supplies but that is not always followed. Not least around Angle Tarn near Patterdale where I often see toilet paper around the streams.

Can I also say that there are two types? Those who don't give a damn anyway and those who don't know any better. We can change the second group but the first group have to change themselves. They usually do when they grow up. Every boy becomes a man eventually!!

I am glad I have had bacon and egg butty and no sausages for lunch and well before this thread was seen.

LiL

In my opinion The Responsible Walker(tm) would probably have dumped the miscreant off Tower Ridge.  But then again would THAT be considered littering?  I guess he would be mostly bio-degradeable.

At the end of the day if you have to go, you've just got to do the best you can in the circumstances and protect the environment as best you can. 

At the bothy at the Spean Bridge end of The Grey Corries there was tissue paper jammed into the walls outside, presumably when someone went for a pee.  I presume it was from the group I saw further along the path on the way in, on the other hand they had done a great job of cleaning the bothy up.  Judging by the comments in the log book it had been in a poor state when they arrived.

Steve D