Mountain relief – the art of alpine lavatories
Everyone can get caught short – but what do you do at 3,500 metres when there isn’t a pub to nip into? One solution is to use a mountain loo, which, as Swiss journalist Marco Volken discovered, can come in all shapes and sizes.
For his series of photographs “Silent Places”, on display at the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern, Volken photographed various outhouses on Swiss mountains. These are made of wood, metal or plastic and offer a degree of privacy to climbers who need to “re-apply their sunscreen”. More seriously, the conspicuous nature of such huts raises questions about human needs in the mountains. (Pictures: Marco Volken)
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