Columnist Susan Snyder: Approach is a waste of our time

Tuesday, July 10, 2001 | 8:29 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Many of us who learned to swim in the perceived safety of three feet of chlorinated water learned first what not to do.

Don't pee in the pool. We all share the water.

Fast-forward to a daylong float trip down the Colorado River.

Two weeks ago we bobbed blissfully in the brisk waters John Wesley Powell himself once navigated. Our river guide kept the raft on course while a dozen of us floated along feet-first in life jackets.

We were on a popular, 13-mile stretch roughly northeast of Moab, Utah. That would be upstream from Lake Mead and the Las Vegas Valley.

What goes into the river up there, eventually comes down here.

Remember that part.

About halfway through our foray into this watery nirvana, the guide dragged us all back into the raft and said we were beaching for lunch. There were about 15 rafts like ours in the group, and the meal was to be a communal picnic served ashore.

The guides managed to get the rafts, the food and the whole soggy, sunburned lot of us on shore. Then one of them hopped atop a boulder and made this announcement:

"If you have to go to the bathroom -- and I can't stress this enough -- go IN THE RIVER. Girls upstream. Boys downstream."

Whut? Pee in the pool?

Yep, she said. That section of river sees too much use and has too few spots big enough for group picnics to allow folks to go burying it on shore. A single four-month season brings thousands of visitors to these places. The beaches would be fouled beyond use in a matter of weeks, the guide said.

I wanted to hop up on another boulder and advise anyone planning to include Las Vegas in the next leg of their trip to remember the bottled water, as we'uns live downstream from the Utah potty party.

Joking aside, whatever happened to packing it out? In sections of the Colorado and other rivers that run through National Park Service lands, all human waste has to be contained in portable potty buckets and packed out.

We took a daylong float trip below Hoover Dam last year with a Boulder City outfit. Directions for using the wee-wee bucket were as detailed as those for using life jackets.

Do they ever tell people it's OK to winky in the water?

"Oh, God no," one of the workers said when asked over the weekend. "If we ever told people that, we'd lose our license."

A worker from one of Moab's river guide companies said its commercial BLM permits require rafts to have portable potties for solid waste. But piddling in the river is OK because there's so much water and enough sediment to act as a natural filter, she said.

She's likely right. After all, only a fraction of the people who work and play on the river ever suffer the fever, abdominal cramps and other unpleasantness that surfaced a week after our return. Probably was nothing.

Still, our guides offered no portable privies in a section of river that sees enough visitors to foul its beaches in one season. Probably an oversight. Maybe they just lost track of the rules on a chaotic, crowded day. Or maybe they'd do better with one rule.

Don't pee in the pool. We all share the water.