Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board more poop on the poop pack-out

Steve:

Eeeek. You have exceeded my knowledge base, but I'll wing it. If you can bury the TP deep enough, then it's probably ok. So I'd say a minimum of 10". The problem is that there's a bunch of people who don't do that. In some cases, marmots dig it up and in many others, it's just the big rock with the TP sticking out everywhere. Yuck.

TP does break down, though I think a little more slowly than feces. Assuming summer rains, then we're talking 3 to 4 months. With the feces, it's maybe 6 weeks (totally anecdotal. Probably someone actually knows...). I don't know about more biodegradable TPs. Undoubtedly there's something out there, but Keeping It Simple is my main goal.

Also, of course, there's a difference with elevation. People do a better job of burying where there's soil. They don't seem to look very hard at alpine levels. I used to actually carry kerosene at Guitar Lake to burn it in place. (Your tax dollars at work!).

My guess is that the folks here do a good job. Peer group pressure, example and pep talks to the people you hike with have a huge influence.

So for the reasonably experienced, I say burying is ok. But I think for pep talks to your less experienced hikers, encouraging a trend to pack it out -- or at least to the next allowed fire ring-- is the way to go.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,

g.

This was originally written on another board by Ron Moak, an all-around nice guy, and owner of Six Moons Designs, an ultralight outfitter.

It answers some questions, and fills in some blanks.
==========================

From: "Ron Moak" <ronmoak at sixmoondesigns.com>

Subject: [pct-l] Ode to TP - The Three P's of pooping in the woods.
To: <pct-l at backcountry.net>

A lot has been said over the years of the evils of TP in the backcountry.

I'll even admit that it can be an eye sore at times. I didn't find it to be particularly problematic on my 2000 PCT hike despite the chorus of TP critic's decrying the desecration of the wilderness with clumps of TP scattered about the landscape.

Over the years I've developed my own methodologies of waste disposal based upon some unique knowledge. Acquired by actually having a degree in Forestry and having once worked for several years at one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities on the East Coast. This somewhat uncommon collection of skills allowed me to look beyond the simple bury, burn or pack out philosophies pushed by various camps.

Before postulating on my Three P's a few comments are needed to fill in the picture of TP.

While it's true chemicals are used in the production of TP to both breakdown and soften the natural wood fibers and bleach the color, very little of it remains in the TP post production. Remember that 99.999999% of your TP travels through large wastewater facilities. The discharge from these facilities is sent back into major rivers. So one town's discharge becomes
another town's drinking water. Any significant chemicals in TP would leach out and become a become a nightmare in our major rivers. The result is that TP is little different in cellular composition than that leaf litter upon which it may ultimately reside.

Second TP is designed to breakdown and decompose quickly. If it didn't you'd get to know your plumber better than your spouse and your local treatment plants would quickly become overwhelmed. The trick is understanding the nature of TP to allow it breakdown quickly and effectively in the dry environment normally found along the PCT.

The Poop, Pee and Puree method of Waste Disposal

Over the years I started considering both the nature of TP and the natural environment to find a suitable method of disposing waste so that it will decay naturally, quickly and eliminate the potential of an unsightly mess.

The result of too much thought, was the formation of the Poop, Pee and Puree method of waste disposal.

It's a very simple method that not only eliminates any sign of the TP is also uses the TP to speed up the breakdown of the waste.

In practice once you've pooped and wiped off with TP, you pee on the TP. Or if you're unable to pee a half cup of water poured on will work fine. Then with a stick, stir the poop, pee and TP into a slurry and cover with several inches of top soil.

The stirring performs several tasks. First it helps break apart the fibers of the TP and mix it with the waste. It helps to spread the moisture throughout the poop and the TP. Properly mixed, the TP will be thoroughly incorporated and no longer a possible eye sore.

The TP also plays and important function in the breakdown of the waste. The incorporated TP will hold additional water like a sponge. Without the additional moisture, your poop may dry out before colonies of bacteria that break down the poop have a chance to grow. The result is petrified lump of poop. The water held with the stands of TP will enhance the opportunity of these natural decomposition processes to occur.

Now the 3P method may not be your cup of tea, but if you're not in to packing out TP and want to help nature recover faster, it may your ticket to a quilt free backcountry purge.

The sad truth is most people don't care, are too lazy, or afraid, (or all the above) to have any to do with disposing their own messes other than flushing the toilet. Think about it: how many times have you heard from the non-outdoors types the question "Do you really do your business outdoors?" or "You have to do it in a BAG!!! Oh my Gawd!". I hear it alot when the topic pops up when I'm discussing my latest adventures with friends and coworkers. To really expect a voluntary (or "semi-voluntary") wag-bag program to succeed is Polly Annish at best. My personal attitude is this: make wag-bags absolutely mandatory, period. Fines, tickets, whatever is necessary but that's the small price you must pay (no money - just effort) to enjoy this beautiful area. Don't want to comply? Sorry, go to Disneyland or Yosemite or somewhere else where facilities of your liking are available. The rest of us will pay that small price in effort and continue to enjoy all that this area has to offer (with maybe a few smaller crowds to deal with ;\) ) . Just my personal rant.

From a female perspective who is accustomed to packing out TP all the time-(in some areas of wilderness travel men do have an advantage)-just do it. It requires very little effort to place it in a bag and throw it out when you leave. It is not a big deal and it saves the purity of the mountain.

I'll write on the assumption that the earlier-stated 20% non-compliance rate refers to people who use Wag Bags but don't carry them out.

If, in a season at Mt. Whitney, there are 30,000 hikers, and if 2/3 of them need to poop at some point during their trip, and if 20% of the poopers leave their Wag Bags behind, that's 4,000 orphaned Wag Bags.

Some of these Wag Bags get adopted by courteous hikers (such as many on this board), but no doubt many are left undiscovered near but off the trail. That could be 3,000 or more a year. I suppose the current system assumes that the rangers will find these Wag Bags and carry them out, though, given their duties, it seems unlikely that the rangers would have time to search the area and accumulate many of the left-behinds.

What to do in such a situation? How about contracting out the clean-up duties (so the rangers can concentrate on the higher-level things they've been trained for)?

As it stands, going up the trail is a bargain, only $15 for the permit. The permit is a tiny part of what most people pay to hike Mt. Whitney. Most pay hundreds of dollars in travel and lodging expenses, not to mention food and gear. Adding $10 to the permit fee would prevent almost no one from making the hike but could generate up to $300,000 annually.

That money could be used to hire private firms to scour the area for left-behind Wag Bags. To encourage industriousness by the private employees, compensation could be a combination of a flat hourly rate plus a per-piece rate for each Wag Bag brought down. If the per-piece rate were set at, say, $20 per Wag Bag, and if 3,000 abandoned Wag Bags were brought out each year, that would account for $60,000 of the $300,000 raised. The rest would be used as wages and overheads.

(The existence of this carry-out service would not be advertised, of course. The rangers would continue to issue Wag Bags and to instruct people to carry out their own waste.)

wag bags will never work i still get a laugh that some think that its only 20% that dont have a plastic wag bag

its more like 2% use them

bring back the toliets, with all the day hikers around all season long it just makes sence

or perhaps if there is some sort of deposit say 5-20 bucks... you get it back when you bring your wag bag back, used or not (if unused you get your deposit and of course keep the wag bag... or not... either way). if you don't bring the bag back they keep the money and put it towards 'sanitation' costs for cleaning up the mess on the mountain.

People pick up their dog poop every day and don't freak out about having to carry it home or to a trash bin. Why folks get the heebie jeebies from their own poop befudles me. There are too many folks on the Main Trail to handle it any other way. I like the idea of extra $$ for a permit because no matter what, some people don't follow the rules. They are, no doubt, the same slackers who cut switchbacks, have campfires, and leave too many reminders that they've been there. Just get over it and pack it out. It really isn't a big deal. We LNT girlies have been doing it for a long time.

Just as a reminder: there is no charge for a permit. There is a charge for a permit RESERVATION. I'm guessing it is illegal to charge for a permit.

By the way, few know that this fee is generated through the same program that generates the Adventure Pass in SoCal.

They do??? I think on the trails I hike I'm the only one. Even my dog gets tired of stepping over other dogs' poop.

The wag bag problem is not those on this board, or experienced hikers. It's the person who is on Whitney only because it's Whitney, has never hiked before and never will again. It's just another adventure besides Disneyland. Most of them don't understand the rules, probably won't know the rules until they arrive, and will ignore them as they are grossed out.

So, that leaves us with these options:

1. Keep trying wag bags and hope they work. (See what I just said.)
2. Further restrict access. (Whitney is already too restricted IMO, given it's unique status as top of the 48 states.)
3. Find a permanent solution the tourons can accept.

We have HD TV, robots vacuuming our floors, tiny cell phones that send pictures around the world, and spaceships to other planets, but we can't design a toilet that will work at altitude??? Incinerators, deep pits, a tunnel to the valley to for processing, transport beams a la Star Trek, cold fusion, there must be something that will work. It costs $70 to get into Disneyland, that would generate over a half million dollars a year to fix this problem. (NOT that I like fees, but this is a unique problem.)

I guess I'll get flamed for this, but we Americans have weird ideas about managing public spaces and the "wilderness" concept is one of the more preposterous ideas we've come up with...Europeans and others (Switzerland being a good example) have a less impetuous and more mature approach than we do and recognize the value of having infrastructure so people can enjoy the outdoors without trashing it. Any country rich enough to be able to slaughter goatherds by remote control on the other side of the world can surely afford the provision of waste removal from a place like Trail Camp. Of course solar composting doesn't work up there..it's too cold and people (women) will pee in them and make it too wet to dry out. The toilets stank mostly because of the misbegotten idea of using composting which ventilated them too much and dispersed rather than contained the stink...
Many, many people, especially foreigners, are apt to view the "wag bag" idea with incredulity and amusement. They will not comply...
Animals crap where they please and the stuff is dispersed widely where it serves to nourish the life cycle. A major concern for people of course is the disemination of human pathogens into the water supply used by campers. Greater dispersal of campers is one way to help with this, but outhouses just seem to be the way to handle the problem and spending public monies to deal with the waste seems fully appropriate....

I haven't been to Trail Camp since the toilets were removed, but imagine there are many golden nuggets hidden away behind rocks up there now that the toilets are gone, and many gross little hermetically sealed packages furtively discarded in various places.

Adrian

Others on this board have advocated removing the Whitney Trail from the wilderness area, which is what it would take to get proper equipment established at Trail Camp. And that would take an act of Congress. (Good luck.)

But then you have all the "slippery slope" people who say, "If you do that here, then it will happen all over the place!" So nothing gets done.

This debate could go on for decades.

Was it actually removed from Wilderness or never included in the first place? The latter is done all the time. I've never heard of a case of the former, though maybe that's the case there. Ostrander Ski Hut to 100' feet out was never included. None of the High Sierra Camps in Yosemite are included & etc. In fact, as another side note, at Ostrander we looked into extending our "non-wilderness" out another 100 or so feet to accommodate a septic system, but were told it would be pretty close to impossible, even when the guy who drew the boundary admitted he made a mistake in the first place.

I don't know that "mature" is the word but a very different evolution and resulting attitudes. We are not the Swiss and our history is very different and unique. The Wilderness concept started in the US when we had huge areas without any development and was fueled by the uniquely American experience of frontier and open space as critical to our psyche. Of course, the resultant National Park and Wilderness idea caught on throughout the world, but was adapted to their conditions and psychology towards open space. In Europe, they didn't have much open space left and trails had to be cobbled together through villages & etc. I also suspect that terrain in the mountains they did have favored huts as a better way to fit a bunch of people in the little camping space available.

The Europeans I run into are amazed and delighted about how long they can go here without a village or even crossing a road. "Infrastructure" is an inherent intrusion on the wilderness concept. So rather than preposterous, it was a darned good idea and remains so 100 years later. I'll even go one more step and say that the modern form of democracy and the National Parks/ Wilderness philosophy are two of the best ideas the US has come up with.

George

Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob... (R that is)

I wish you didn't delete your posts!

Whether tongue-in-cheek, or serious, they always add something to the conversation. Losing the benefit of your insights and wit is truly unfortunate!

[Explanation to others: For a few short mintues there was a new and very amusing post on this subject from Bob R then, sadly, it "vanished"]

I don't know the toilet location would have to be removed from the wilderness (although I do not consider the Whitney Zone wilderness anymore). I believe such facilities could be accomodated and still retain wilderness classification. For example, there are cabins some rangers (that we know and love) live in. There are bear boxes, wag bag dispensers, snow survey telemetry equipment, a former Starbucks building on top of Mt. Whitney, signs, cables on the switchbacks, rock retaining walls with rebar, etc. In this one location some accommodation could be made.

George mentioned that international visitors are awed by our vast wilderness. They also come to climb Whitney. I'm not sure "Welcome to America, poop in this bag" sets a very friendly tone.

Thank you and yours, George, for all you do. I wanted to be a forest ranger in the 1970s. I don't think I'd feel the same way today if I was just starting out, with all you have to go through just to get 'er done.

John:

For this summer's trip, I plan on using one of those big Folgers plastic canisters and just using a bungee to strap it to the outside of the pack (and to strap the lid down). The inside will still smell a bit like coffee, and I think it seals pretty well, at least well enough to get the crap off the mountain.

-L

Especially for ClamberAbout, with apologies to my friends down south:

AsABat, this is a great idea! Instead of that 3' x 3000' hole in the ground I proposed, this would be a real toilet but with continuous flushing. Divert a fraction of stream water over to this new Trail Camp toilet, then it goes down this long pipe to the valley below. Bury the pipe, so it wouldn't be a visible blight on the wilderness.

Los Angeles won't agree to giving up this water, you say? I have the solution for that: Put the end of the pipe in the LA Aquaduct, and voila! LA gets the water after all and, as a side benefit, the need for processing goes away!

Laura,

Hope a bear doesn't decide to have morning coffee with you...

My suggestion: Go to a store that sells kayaking equipment and buy a "dry bag". If it will seal out water, it will (pretty much) seal in scent. Just clip it on the outside of your pack.

In the real world, no, still smells a little bit. Worst is when you take the contents out to dispose of them, and are stuck with a stinky, expensive dry bag. Wash outside with a hose, leave hanging in the sun, let the U.V. rays and wind work on it for a couple days, and no more smell. A day or two of sunlight won't break the bag down.

ClamberAbout: Yup, I brain fahted on that one! Good idea on the dry bag. I've seen them occasionally on sale around here and online, so I'll keep my eyes peeled. The clip on the top of that would allow for easy attachment, as well. Thanks!

-L