The official Human Sump Method: After eating your meal in your bowl/cup, you scrape the sides with your spoon to get as most food off as possible. You then add a tiny bit of water to help scrape more food off. This is then drunk (it is only water and food, no soap). More water is used until all large food particles have been cleaned from the container. This virtually eliminates yum yum (the extra food particles left over from dishwashing). To take it a step further, the 2 pot method can be used just to make sure everything is nice and clean.
2 pot method: Most crews who cook their meals, put all the food in one of the big 6 or 8 qt pots to cook/serve from. When all the food has been eaten, some of the cooler crews will human sump this pot. Or at least scrape and lick the food out. This is then given water (cool or warm, it doesn’t matter) with about 2 drops of camp suds. The second 8 qt pot (the rinse pot) is used for rinsing off the campsuds. The personal dishes are washed in the dirty pot and rinsed in the rinse pot. Once the personal dishes are clean, the scrubbie is then applied to the cooking pot (which by this point should be mostly clean). After the food particles have been loosened, this water is dumped into the sump through the sump frisbee.
The sump is a pipe in the ground that takes your waste water (from dishes) and puts it about 3 feet down into the ground and is then dispersed along about a 10 ft long section of PVC pipe with holes in it. Now part of the rinse water is dumped in the cooking pot to get more food particles out by swishing it around. Andif there are any more remaining, more water is dumped out into the cooking pot. By the time you get to your last rinse of the cooking pot, it should just be water, no food. Save this last bit for the magic of the sump. The sump frisbie is removed and the glorious wire mesh sump screen is revealed. The wookie knife (aka rubber sraper or sump scraper) is then tapped on the screen while the crew chants “Ohhhhh sump clump. Ohhhh sump clump” Magically, the food parts that slipped through the frisbee will all come to gether and form a clump in the center of the screen where the scrapper removes them to the yum yum bag. The remaining clean dish water is then dumped over the screen to remove the remaining smells (or many of them anyway). If a small pine or fir cone are handy, this can then be LIGHTLY scrubbed on the screen to remove more food particles and give the screen a nice piney fresh scent. The cone is then tossed into the woods.
Before the next meal, dishes are then sterilized.
And that is dish washing 101, the PHILMONT way
Jason (former ranger)
