PHOTO BY KIMBY KAPLAN.

Watch out, it’s time for another edition of

“Helpful Travel Tips with Ryan Covington!”

If you show up to a remote log cabin, at least an hour’s drive from civilization and located deep in the snowy woods outside of Angel Fire, New Mexico, and you are the first person to arrive there for the winter season, you might find that all the pipes have frozen and burst. This means there will be no running water for the duration of your stay, and by extension, no functioning toilets.

All your bodily evacuations will have to happen outside, in the woods, and usually in a raging snow blizzard. Unless you want to freeze more off than just your ass, then this will involve getting fully dressed in alllllll your undergarments and outerwear, plus putting on your snow boots. Once you are all bundled up, you will trudge through knee deep snow to get to a desirable spot. Then, you will have to undo all that clothing and expose those most delicate and cold-intolerant parts of yourself, outside, in the snow, at below freezing temperatures.

And often in the pitch-black darkness.

But wait! There’s a nifty trick that’s going to blow your mind!

I don’t think of my mom as an especially rugged woman, but this is why you should always CALL YOUR MOTHER on a regular basis to check in, because you never know what unexpected advice or life experiences she might have to share with you! On this particular adventure, I wish I would have thought to phone my mom on Day 1 of our remote cabin experience, because she could have saved us all a lot of very unpleasant poo excursions out into the freezing snowy darkness.

Depending on where and how you grew up, get ready for either your mind to be blown, or alternately, to think we are all idiots for not figuring this out for ourselves; but if you have access to an electric powered cooking range and tons of snow, then you have everything you need to make a toilet function. Hell. If you have just fire and snow, then you can make the toilet function. And we just so happened to have all of these things!

Because what is snow but just lightly frozen water? All you have to do is collect the snow in a large pasta boiling pot, then bring it inside and put it on the electric stovetop. Melt the snow from a solid to a liquid and ta-da! You have water! Now just dump it in the back of the commode!

A caveat, the snow water we ended up collecting had all kinds of crazy shit floating in it (like dirt and bark and God only knows what else), and even though it had technically been boiled, I’d only risk drinking it if things turned... apocalyptic. But it was certainly good enough for dumping in the back of the toilet. What a great idea, thanks, Mom!

We were able to go from uncouth barbarians to slightly more civilized barbarians with a toilet -- barbarians that now spent about triple the amount of time outside, gathering up dirty snow into pasta pots.

This might sound terrible, and it was, but let me assure you that this was still a million times better than having to get partially undressed outside in the middle of the night during a snowstorm to poo in the snow.

Even if you think you will never ever need this information, lock this away in your brain. If the need ever arises, you’ll be glad you did. You can save the day and appear to be both ingenious and ruggedly handsome.

I have soooooooo many more helpful toilet and poo stories HERE.