We've always taken a five-gallon bucket with a screw-top lid as our groover on our rafting trips, but we never actually used it; we were blessed with lovely outhouses on all of our previous trips. This changed when we went on the Owhyee in Eastern Oregon, a beautiful and remote float with no outhouses. With no previous experience, we made our 'deposits' directly into the bucket, all the while giving little thought as to how we were going to deal with our mess this at trip's end. We now know that experienced rafters line the bucket with doubled trash bags that are securely knotted before launching each morning and stowed in the bucket until set up time in the afternoon.
At the end of our trip I was the proud owner of four gallons of poop, its odoriferous qualities enhanced by several ninety-plus degree days!
Many take-outs have a scat machine that you strap your bucket into and automation takes care of the rest. There are no such luxuries in the wilds of Eastern Oregon. Every one of the RV dump sites on the way back to Western Oregon required fittings our primitive setup lacked to flush out the considerable detritus from our eleven-person, four-day float. Luckily it was a long trip back home, and I had plenty of time to think about possible solutions.
I quickly rejected the idea of dumping the load down a toilet, as it was too big of an olfactory offense to my nose. Abandoning the whole amount of waste in a dumpster similarly offended my sense of ecological responsibility. Nothing much came to mind, so I occupied my mind through the high desert flatlands with other musings.
One of the travel problems that keeps me busy is looking for ways to maximize ice retention on long floats. This trip had been hot so I turned my imagination away from poop toward ways of improving ice retention, and this resulted in a nearly immediate epiphany!
When I got home, I popped the screw top lid on our groover, held my nose for the few seconds it took to insert a piece of firewood to make a handle, and sealed the whole thing with a standard lid. Overnight in an otherwise empty freezer and voila, a giant poopcicle! Next day I made a midnight run to a nearby construction site and deposited the goods in their johnny-on-the-spot. Problem solved!
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The concept behind the groover's name is that this portable shitter will leaves grooves on your butt or thighs after taking a poop. You can view a groover here, along with some accessories and a bit of the groover history.
