Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Whitney Toilet discussion

What happened to the Whitney toilet discussion? I looked forward to reading the latest.

Edit: It is here:  more poop on the poop pack-out

I think it got flushed. It had run its course.

Bee

Yup, around the hole and down the bowl...

That is odd. Guess it was considered irrelevant (?)

One of the few long-winded threads that I've bothered to keep up with over the past couple of years. Someone must have been bothered by it though.

It was interesting reading seeing GD's comments from the Grunt's side (No offense intended, but he is a ground pounder. And a very good one!) and the Engineer who thinks he can solve it all.

It did seem to me that the FS jumped to a quick decision with this one. And why they burned the structures down in such a hurry is beyond me.

None taken. Grunt not only describes my field outlook, but is exactly what I sound like on the trail nowadays -- like a newly packed mule just starting up some switchbacks though, I like to think, with less gas.

g.

Ah rats! I too was enjoying the zesty banter. Seems like this is one of the very few places you can read a very spirited argument without folks losing their cool and popping off at one another.

I never feel like I have anything to add to this conversation though because I have a drawer full of unused wags at home. Seems the very thought of baring my behind out in the open causes my system to shut down til I reach the Portal. Have to wait another year I suppose. Hard to imagine it will top this one though.

I was reading george durkees reply on page 4 at 10:15pm last nite and turned to page 5 and zap it was gone just like that..I thought to myself what did i do....

It seems like there was a lot of thoughtful discussion in the thread, which takes some time and effort getting the thought in print; seems a little unfair to those who put in the effort to just dump the whole thing. At least I saved the Environmental assesment PDF before the links were deleted.

Just remembered I get e-mail updates of almost all of the posts to this board. If there's something specific that you want, let me know. (It might take until next week though because it's the weekend starting tomorrow afternoon and I probably won't be home, unless the weather looks bad.)

You can still find cached pages from the thread on Google. Just enter the right set of keywords (you can also search for the user names of people, such as George Durkee).

I sent Steve the posts that I had e-mails of from 04/20/09 forward. Maybe he'll reconstruct the thread?

I didn't know Kent Ashcraft, but many on this forum are grieving his death right now. It makes all this debate seem trivial at this moment.

My last post before the thread was "flushed" discussed the environmental review process the Forest Service should have completed. That legalistic post may have raised some lawsuit concerns and may have triggered the "flush" of this thread. People should understand the Environmental Assessment (EA) that was kindly distributed on this forum does not complete the required environmental review process. Because they probably didn't complete an EIS, and because Inyo flushed their Environmental documentation from their website (EA is apparently gone), it could make people wonder what might be going on. Here's how its suppose to work:

The EA needs to be followed up with a Decision Document, either an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) or a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), all this pursuant to NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act). An EIS is a big deal and many of you would have seen it. I assume they completed a FONSI. They should have provided a 30-day public review period and notified all 700 parties who received the EA of their change in direction. They certainly wouldn't want this to look like a bait-and-switch from toilets to wag bags without proper notification and public review.

The FONSI must explain the basis for changing their decision stated in the EA from the Proposed Alternative 1 (Replace the Toilets) to Alternative 5 (Pack Out Human Waste). The follow up decision document needs to explain why, address the impacts described in EA for that Alternative 5, and explain how they will monitor things.

Since they do list potentially significant impacts in the EA, filing a "Finding of No Significant Impact" might raise some legal issues. They need to convince everyone the impacts are minor, fully addressed, and properly monitored.

Does anyone have a copy of the decision document? It could be brief and titled something like, "Findings of No Significant Impact - Human Waste on Mt. Whitnety?" I'm not interested in legal action, but I'd like to see what the monitoring plan is in that document for hiker compliance tracking and MOST IMPORTANTLY the water quality monitoring to watch for the pollution they are predicting in the EA. Water quality impacts seem like only a matter of time if there are over 1,000 "failures to comply" (defecation) per season in this sensitive ecosystem. Hard to imagine that impact being sustainable at and above treeline. If that's really the case, then how many seasons can this go on?

There is no perfect solution to this problem, but in my professional engineering opinion, and as a hiker, I strongly believe the best solution is the best available modern composting toilets IN COMBINATION WITH a voluntary wag bag program for everyone who wants to help reduce the load on those toilets. Yes they will have to remove a lot of liquid each season like everyone else with remote toilets in a heavy use area, but these toilets can function good enough with the right solar-heated and insulation enclosure. It solves the problem sustainably.

We must be paying around $200,000 per year in permit fees. I know they use that permit money several ways, but for comparison purposes, thats about the cost of a turn-key system installed and ready to use at one camp. That would include a set of 2 composting toilets in an Alpine version solar heated structure installed and ready to go at one of the two camps including helicopter costs from Fresno. I have a written quote on that from a federal government GSA-certified company. There might be other vendors with good solutions but the costs should be similar.

Here's something even better -- each of the 5 pages of the original thread as of very late in the evening of April 22 (around the time it was deleted, I suspect), from Google's caches. I deleted my previous post, incomplete as it was, in favor of this post with these links. Hope this helps. As far as I can tell, everything is here.

Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5

CaT

It's curious how much attention the issue of Whitney wag bags generates.

I wonder if other peaks which require bagging, among them Shasta, Hood and Rainier (and there are probably others) generate similar discussion?

Whitney's wag bags are the best I've seen, so I always carry them when climbing the peaks above. As I recall, Rainier provided a blue bag and a twist tie. The potential for leakage is obvious.

Curious as to whether Rainier requires pack-out now. When I climbed it a few years ago, there were strategically placed ammo cans for dropping off you bag(s).

This site reminds me of a store in So Call called Trader Joes(TM): Every time you start getting to like something, they stop carrying it.

There are only two moderators far as I know. The owner, Doug, and one other.

Of course, no one would question the moderator's right to delete posts or threads as they see fit. However, out of respect for the large community that has "adopted" this resource, I would think an explanation would only be reasonable and fair. This is how other well-moderated sites operate. On one that I frequent, the moderators will often give a warning, e.g. "Everyone take a breath and calm down or I will delete the thread", or post a note as to why they did whatever they did, e.g. "Moved to xxxxxxx forum". Often in the board FAQ there will be a written policy regarding when threads will be modified, locked, or deleted.

The ideal is for moderation to be consistent, fair, and objective (i.e. performed according to some standard that users can follow, not whim).

Personally, when I think of what a resource the contents of a message board like this can become over time, I think it is really tragic when a thread is deleted for no apparent reason whatsoever other than it possibly "annoyed someone". Think of student researching environmental or wilderness issues who could have come across the now deleted thread. In that conversation were all sides of an debate over a very important issue, conducted in a respectful, even cordial fashion, yet with various parties still agreeing to disagree, and debating the merits of each other's respective positions therein. How informative and useful would that have been to the hypothetical student? Or anyone else interested in the subject for that matter?

To simply blindly blast such content is simply tragic, and a terrible loss of a precious resource.

Yes, we users benefit greatly from this board. The owners of the board also benefit from the appreciative promotion of their businesses by the users of this board.

It goes both ways. IMHO the moderators should speak up and let the users know what's going on. If out of respect and appreciation for what they bring to the board, if nothing else. Otherwise, why should anyone have any incentive to waste their time posting here if at any second, unannounced, without any guidelines or policies to follow, one's post will simply be deleted?

Maybe because the topic had a goofy title "More Poop on the Poop Pack-out", and because the thread had pegged itself into the pole position so long; Moderators were afraid that newcomers were going to view the board as "Scat Chat"...!!

(inside joke -- sense of humor folks. You can "cancel" me Steve C -- I deserve it )

Bee

Saw some of this scat at Whitney Portal on the 21st...

I don't think crap is quite in my photography tastes :P