"I can't, I just can't," groaned one guy as he walked away from one of the less-than-ubiquitous gray structures set up here in the Nevada desert. He wasn't alone. Nearly everyone among the young, hip and otherwise restless at this year's bacchanalia spent some irritating portion of each day wandering the 5-square-mile playa in search of a usable loo -- one that was less frequented, less filthy or, at the very least, without a 10-person queue.

Outdoor facilities have been a problem since humans first invented picnics, baseball games and beer -- and then tried to have them all on the same day. But the dilemma has reached critical proportions at Burning Man. Last year, with some 23,000 revelers attending, there were so few latrines that the official Web site made a point of promising that "there will be enough porta-potties on the playa."

"I wouldn't have called it a crisis," said Jim Graham, a spokesman at this year's Burning Man festival, "but last year people did say we needed more, so we rented more." In fact, this time Burning Man doubled the number of outhouses it rented from Johnny on the Spot in Reno, Nev. ("We're #1 in the #2 business!" its logo boasts.) The festival cleaned out the company's entire inventory -- 408 portable restrooms in total -- and it still wasn't enough.

Part of the problem is the size and scope of Burning Man itself. "It's not like we can call up the people who do Woodstock or Lollapalooza and ask how they do it," said Marian Goodell, mistress of communications for the Burning Man operation. "This is a weeklong camping event -- no one else does anything like it."

In other words, they had the equivalent of a Rolling Stones concert crowd sprawling throughout a huge tent city in the middle of a remote desert for eight days. Because the conditions are so harsh -- and it was presumed that people would be consuming a fair amount of intoxicants -- Burning Man officials mandated that attendees drink between 1 and 2 gallons of water a day. "Piss Clear" was the motto posted throughout Black Rock City.

"Piss Where?" would have been more accurate. Yet the number of facilities Burning Man provided exceeded the Portable Sanitation Association of America's guidelines by more than a third. For a crowd of 30,000, the PSAA's complex ratio-determining matrix recommended a mere 250 toilets. So what was the problem?

Robert Thomas, 21, one of the guys charged with cleaning the latrines during Burning Man, eloquently described the delicate science of portable-potty usage.

"You know, it's not about how many toilets you've got," Thomas said from beside his truck, parked on the central playa. He was about to empty one of the free-standing toilets that, at 20 minutes away from the main encampment, boasted a low odor and a short line.

"You could have more toilets, but it still wouldn't matter," Thomas continued. "People just fill them up. It's weird, man. You'd think that if there were more toilets, people wouldn't fill them up as fast, but they do. And it's not 'cause they're using them more. Man, you should see what people put down there. I pull up all kinds of stuff: shoes, bottles, garbage."

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