Poop

It's part of my reality, both human and dog poop. After my first week on the glacier my mom asked me 'so what do they do with the poop?' and I'm sure she wasn't the only one who was curious. So here are... an entire post dedicated to poop.

Every morning at 6am I'm out in a dog yard scooping poop. Dog pee is sterile (aka it's clean) and it doesn't have enough of an impact because it's immediately absorbed through the snow, so we leave the yellow snow. The little treasures get put into 5 gallon buckets and then they are dumped into one of 3 50 gallon barrels. Scooping up after 40 dogs is a bit of a job but I feel that if you get it done in about 45 minutes you're doing good. It's an art to pick up just the dog poop and not the snow. Some dogs enjoy spreading their poop everywhere so that their little section of the yard smells like them. They've claimed it. These dogs are my least favorite in the morning. Usually scooping 3 times a day is the easiest because in the morning you will fill up about 2 buckets of poop, and the afternoon 1- 1 1/2, and at night 2. It's super annoying when you have more than 2 buckets to carry to the barrels because then it means more than one trip.

Human poop is a little different. We have 2 porta-pottys which have been converted to hold a 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat on it. It's always someones job to empty and clean them twice a day. They go into a different set of barrels. We also add a chemical which breaks up the poop.

These barrels then get capped and a helicopter comes and gets them. A cable is attached to the bottom of a helicopter and the barrels are picked up and brought on down to town where they either go in a compost bin (dog poop) or the sewage treatment plant (human). Yes, dog poop gets helicoptered out.