Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board How Everest Base Camp Handles Waste

Open Letter to Inyo County:

Sometimes when government agencies try to help the wilderness they end up messing it up worse.

We're having a huge fire at Tahoe quite possibly due to the TRPA (Tahoe Regional Planning Agency) not allowing clear cutting of huge timber around houses. Pine needles and pine cones not allowed to be cleared. This is to keep silt/dirt from running into the lake and ruining clarity.

Well, now that the pine needles and cones are gone, silt and ash will be running into the lake at a record amount at the next big rain. Bye, bye clarity.

It's just sickening reading some of the posts that hikers are reporting toilet paper, human waste and terrible smells that will prompt us to run through Trail Camp instead of lingering and relishing its beauty now that the solar toilets are gone.

I know they weren't perfect, but they kept a serious problem in some semblance of check. The following is excerpted from an excellent and funny book "Mt. Everest: Confessions of an Amateur Peak Bagger" by Kevin Flynn available at Amazon.com.

"Our bathroom at Base Camp was a little stone hut with a plastic tarp roof erected by the Sherpas. There was a hole in the ground. Underneath the hole was a plastic barrel that held 25 or 30 gallons and could be sealed up pretty well. The barrel was double-bagged with plastic bags.

Ahough Base Camp was a rocky area, underneath the moraine was snow and ice-water flowed beneath us during warm afternoons. Dealing with solid human waste is an issue on Everest. Various expeditions pay for a poop porter. Joke to follow: Yes, it's the crappiest job around. When the poop bucket was full the poop porters would bag it up.They wore masks. It was a nasty job. They were paid $1 per kilogram to carry the waste down and off the glacier to around Gorak Shep, where they dug a hole and buried it. It was like a landfill. To Nepal's credit they have been trying to keep Everest as clean as possible and overall sanitation has improved in recent years at Base camp."

So you mean to tell me that this backward 3rd world country can build a working crapper in sub-zero temperatures on ground that is MOVING several feet a day, but the best engineering minds in the U.S. cannot build a workable toilet on Whitney?

Like TRPA, to protect Whitney from the imposition on prestine conditions by outhouse structures, the mountain will now become a giant, stinking hill of ****! I believe a big hole could be dynamited where the old solar toilet was and we could hire people, you know,hate to say it, but the ones who do the jobs Americans won't do, to cart it down the mountain.

Come on all you engineering students. There MUST be a way to erect working toilets on this mountain since the WAG bag way is being ignored. You may even get these little monuments named after yourself.

Unfortunately, Inyo County does not have jurisdiction at Trail Camp. The Feds do and they have a law against hiring the 3rd world employees who will work for wages that can't support a standard of living with indoor plumbing and medical care. But it works on Everest.

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

Hey Bobcat,
Good essay & I like your thinking. As much as we want to think of our mountains as pristine wilderness areas - a few of them are not and will not be areas for solitude. Whitney and Half Dome are two examples of iconic peaks that are going to continue to draw thousands of visits. Ignoring the poop problem is going to destroy the environment at Trail Camp & the piles will spread. Hauling it out by hand probably won't work (no Sherpas here), it is a matter of money, budget, and coming to grips with the Wilderness regulations for the trail corridor. Burying ones head in the sand about the problem sure isn't going to work - their aint gonna be any clean sand...

an extra couple of bucks per person would pay for a helicopter a couple of times a season. Cheaper than going #2 in Paris, that can be a euro or two per incident.

-lance

I followed a pointer from Kurt Wedberg to a description of the process at Mt McKinley. They require all refuse to be packed out and rangers weigh the bags at the bottom on your way out.

Copying from their process, we could weigh food plus wag bags for each person on the way in and the way out and charge for excessive differences. Fees collected for shortages could be used to reward 'do gooders' (...yes?) who help with the cleanup by returning with more than the required minimum.

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

On Aconcagua long time ago 1998 my partner and I were given a burlap bag each and instructed to bring the back full of trash, otherwise a penalty, I think it was $80 US per bag.

I'm afraid the power of the $ is underestimated.

You could charge $10 per toilet visit and I bet it would generate more than enough revenue, and I doubt many would choose to go elsewhere. I'd probably pay $100 especially if I was told it was more environmentally sound than other options, and I'd choose it over wagbags.

Similarly, for enough money someone will do the work of maintaining it & getting the waste it down. It's not that complicated or difficult. Those of us in the waste business or medical field have seen much worse.

I like the everest method, or a perhaps a variation of it.

There has to be a will to make any system work. It does not seem to me the Inyo National Forest wants to make any system work. In a response to my lettter on this subject there was laundry list of reasons why the current system could not work including getting people handle the hazard waste. Heck, we can get people to handle nuclear waste in this country all you have to do is pay them enough money.

My mistake on who to employ to carry out the poop! Inyo County Sheriff no doubt has a jail full of able bodies sitting on their backsides eating county tax dollars. I say employ THEM to walk the 6 steep miles to Trail Crest and haul the bags out. No horses, mules or helicopters, just grunt labor. Dress them in pink jumpsuits and after a few oxygen rare trips carrying a smelly parcel, they won't be doing any more crime in Inyo County!

Sgt. Nixon are you listening?

Im sure that if anyone has read my post trash and waste is a big complaint of mine.
Gone are the days where the human race cared of something so beautiful as Whitney or any Mountian.
Too many people too much crap. Last couple of years it seems whan my friends and I go hiking from the Portal camp sites to the Portal store just picking up a couple pieces of trash isnt enough. Last year we brought along a 30gl. plastic bag. almost quarter full by the time we made it to the store.
Pick it up. How hard is it?

I wouldn't condemn the entire human race, but certainly far too many individuals were never taught manners and respect by their parents (a far too common problem these days!).

Reminds me of an incident I had a few years ago driving to the grocery store. I'm waiting behind some guy in the left hand turn lane waiting for the signal to turn and he chucks a half eaten apple out the window onto the center median. I just shook my head in disbelief and told my children that people shouldn't litter. The signal turns and we both pull into the parking lot (I go down one row, he another). As my children and I were approaching the store this guy pops out and confronts me, 'Were you in the car behind me shaking your head?'. I said, 'Yeah, you shouldn't be littering.'. He says, 'It's not littering, its biodegradable!' I think he would have hit me if my children were not present. Can't argue with a moron and did't want to push it with my children present, so we continued past a trash can and into the store.

Kind regards,

Mark A. Patton

I just came down from the summit of whitney last wednesday and I did not recall seeing one piece of litter nor did I smell anything foul. The main trail is in great shape, one of the most amazing trails I have ever been on. If there is a piece of litter that was accidently dropped then so what, just pick it up, I do It all the time. This is not the garden of eden. People are on the trail so things sometime happen but I have never seen 11 miles of trail so perfectly maintained..........

Where people defecate is not going to be near the trail through Trail Camp thus much of this will not be visible to those passing through. However, those taking those campsites not in sight of the trail may have another story entirely.

web shots

here is a link to pictures of the trail camp toilet going up in flames.
enjoy the video
why ask why

Interesting to see the video.

The only thing that has bothered me about this process, is that it cost something like $300k/toilet to buy these. It seems like there should have been some way to move them, either to a place where they would work (Tuttle Creek?), or to sell them.

Ah, too late now....

Prior to my wife's and my departure from Trailcamp last Thursday, I pulled on a pair of Nitrolon gloves out of my 1st aid kit, grabbed a trash bag, and went around and collected at least half a dozen "abandoned" wag bags that had been tucked under/behind rocks in just the immediate vicinity of our campsite.

One hadn't even been tied off or placed in the outer ziplock!

Three guys who had been camped near us and departed the previous night left ALL of their wag bags as well as trash stuffed inbetween some rocks.

Since I was already quite heavily loaded (carrying the bulk of the heavy gear for the two of us), and carrying our own set of wag bags from several days on the mountain, I tied the trash bag with it's nasty contents to the top wire of the fence that the rangers put around the former solar toilet location. High enough that marmots hopefully couldn't reach it.

When we ran into some rangers on the descent, I let them know what it was and why it was there. We had run into one of the two rangers several times during our time on the mountain, and I had told him about the WB's stashed all over the campsite, and he had asked me to point them out to him if we got the chance. That didn't happen, so I figured this was next best.

SUGGESTION: A unique serial# pre-printed on every bag by the govt vendor. Serial#'s from bags issued to permit holders get printed on the permit during issue process. Bags left on mountain get serial#s looked up; Permit group leader is fined $250 per bag.

Conversely: At least the idiots are USING the wag bags, so they're not that heinous to pick up. If such a system was implemented, they might just go on the ground!

SUGGESTION: A unique serial# pre-printed on every bag by tgovt vendor. Serial#'s from bags issued to permit holders get printed on the permit during issue process. Bags left on mountain get serial#s looked up; Permit group leader is fined $250 per bag.


From my earlier post: "On Aconcagua long time ago 1998 my partner and I were given a burlap bag each and instructed to bring the back full of trash, otherwise a penalty, I think it was $80 US per bag."

I should have said that each bag had a number on it in big letters. When we exited the "guard station" at the end of the valley, we had our number compared to the list. Again, there was a fine if we did not return that trash bag full. I don't remember if we paid in advance and then got refunded, but that would make sense.

For the Inyo Park Service, implementation of something like this would be another staffing and logistical problem

The rules of the wilderness are like the rules of the IRS; that is, voluntary compliance. The forest service and park service, to a lesser degree, can not police every square inch of the MMWT. Therefore, it up you to do your part. In other words, do the WAG Bag thing, camp away from water and trail, etc., etc, etc.

You are not going to get forest service to count WAG Bag serial numbers or weight food/waste on return 24/7 between May 1 and November 1.

I took a group of Scouts up Whitney last weekend, and they thought it was pretty cool to poop in a bag.

On another note, though, the wagbag design should be easier to tie to the outside of a pack. There is no loop or easy, convenient way to tie them up. They are kind of cumbersome, and the whole way down the trail, we'd check our lashings to make sure we hadn't lost a wagbag while hiking down the trail.

Luckily, they were lashed appropriately so we had no problems, but I could easily imagine someone who wasn't as versed in tying things off losing their wagbag on the trail and not even noticing it until they were miles down the trail.