No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

[fgoodwin]

No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

 

 

 

September 5, 2007

By FELICITY BARRINGER

 

SUMMIT OF MOUNT WHITNEY, Calif., Aug. 29 The highest outhouse in the continental United States is no more.

 

High-altitude sanitation is too hazardous a business. Helicopters must make regular journeys up the steep-walled canyons in tricky winds while rangers in hazmat suits wait below to tie 250-pound bags or barrels of waste onto a long line dangling below the aircraft.

 

So from the granite immensity of Mount Whitney in California to Mount Rainier in Washington to Zion National Park in Utah, a new wilderness ethic is beginning to take hold: You can take it with you. In fact, you must.

 

The privy, which sat about 14,494 feet above sea level, and two other outhouses here in the Inyo National Forest the last on the trail have been removed within the last year. The 19,000 or so hikers who pick up Forest Service permits each year to hike the Whitney Trail are given double-sealed sanitation kits and told how to use them just as they are told how to keep their food from the bears along the way, and how to find shelter when lightning storms rake the ridges.

 

The kits the most popular model is known as a Wagbag are becoming a fixture of camping gear. On high western trails, Wagbag is now as familiar a term as gorp (a high-energy mix of nuts, seeds, dry fruit and chocolate) or switchback (a hairpin turn in the trail).

 

Its one thing to take a risk to fly up there to pick up a sick or injured person, said Brian Spitek, a forest ranger who works in the Inyo National Forest. To do it to fly out a bag of poop is another.

 

Other options, like burying waste, are ineffective where there is too little soil, too many people or both.

 

The pack-it-out ethic has long been practiced by Grand Canyon river rafters, who used old ammunition cans.

 

The Wagbags (WAG stands for Waste Alleviation and Gelling) are manufactured by Phillips Environmental Products in Montana and have been adopted by agencies including the Pentagon and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the companys president, Bill Phillips.

 

Their appearance in places like the John Muir Wilderness or the Grand Canyon is one more indication that park stewards want visitors to take responsibility for themselves. For several years, the National Park Service has required visitors who need helicopter rescues to help pay for the cost of sending in the copter.

 

Hikers on the Mount Whitney trail, in most cases, willingly shoulder the burden of the new sanitation regimen.

 

If Ive got to do it, Ive got to do it, said Scott Whitten of Danville, Calif., about halfway up the trail. Im not a big fan of it.

 

So far this year, more than 4,500 pounds of waste in Wagbags has been deposited in receptacles at the Whitney Portal trail head, all of it headed for landfills, where the bags are designed to biodegrade over six to nine months.

 

I dont mind it, said Marilyn Nelson, 64, who had just finished her first hike to Trail Camp, at 12,000 feet the highest camp below the summit of Mount Whitney on the eastern approach. There are so many indignities on the trail anyway. And people do that all the time with their dogs in the city.

 

But while her son, Brendan Nelson, 43, who works in television promotion in Los Angeles, accepted the need for the change, he was still nostalgic for the Trail Camp outhouse that was dismantled this year.

 

I do miss it, Mr. Nelson said. It was a great place to get out of the wind. It was really a luxury to have it up here.

 

For years hikers have boasted about their moment on the seat at the Whitney summit. Behind the single rock wall that hid it from hikers, the seat was open on three sides to the swirling clouds and the immense granite ridges that rise from delicate alpine valleys.

 

It was a photo point for a lot of people, said Rob Pilewski, a Sequoia National Park ranger whose district includes the western approaches to the mountain and the summit itself.

 

Backpackers have accepted the new pack-it-out policy, said rangers who have distributed Wagbags in Sequoia National Park to the west and the Inyo National Forest to the east. (The Wagbag is actually two separate plastic bags. The inner one is a funnel-like bag with powder at the bottom. Water causes the powder to gel, encapsulating anything in the bag.)

 

In the past, keeping the privies on the eastern side of the Inyo National Forest clean between helicopter flights was a huge headache.

 

If you didnt clean the outhouse regularly, it was a cascading nightmare, said Garry Oye, the Inyo National Forest district ranger who put the new Whitney regimen into place.

 

But with 300 or more people on the trail each day, it was hard to do. Can you keep your bathroom clean if 400 of your closest friends go through there each day? Mr. Oye asked.

 

Joanne Rife, who went to the Whitney summit to celebrate her 75th birthday with her daughter, Susan Rife, 51, and granddaughter Alexis Rife, 21, said the new policy worked. Most people are using it, Alexis Rife said. The few who dont are ruining it for everyone else.

 

So among the visual images of the 103-year-old Whitney trail myriad tiny holes that hikers poles make in the trailside or the winking headlamps of predawn hikers heading up 99 rocky switchbacks add one more: olive drab bags netted outside hikers backpacks.

 

Nobody likes it, said Erika Jostad, a Sequoia Park ranger. But people understand.

 

Erik Olsen contributed reporting.

[le Voyageur]

 

 

bout time to get that nasty hooter out of there....as for WAG bags, nothing new. Been a requirment to pack out one's own waste on many rivers and mountains out west for more then a decade.

 

 

[scoutldr]

Now if we could just convince all the animals to use WAG bags, everything would be just perfect!

[GernBlansten]

Only animals on top of Mt. Whitney are the two legged variety and they are very dirty creatures.

[packsaddle]

Working in water-related fields, this is one of my favorite topics for discussion. I just LOVE to watch the students squirm...MUHhahahahahahaha!

My favorite exercise is entitled "All About Poop" and incorporates such gems as, "you are what you eat" and poop, of course. My most recent discovery is a wonderful passage in the recent book, "The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson. It is the detailed account of the 1854 London cholera epidemic and the discovery of the cause. Here, I quote starting on page 114:

 

"With few exceptions, the problems that the early Victorians wrestled with are still relevant more than a century later. ... It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class consciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this **** ?"

 

See, he was right! We're still grappling with this problem. And for some reason we seem not to want to think about it.

A few years ago, I was just pulling up to shore during some work on one of the big reservoirs. There was a TV crew on the bank and they rushed over to ask what I was doing and what I thought about the fact that, at that time, large boats could legally dump raw sewage into that lake. I was quite aware of the issue and wanted to give as candid an opinion as I could so I smiled and looked directly into the lens that had the red light on and said, "I think it's pretty s---ty." The light went off and the interview was over. Was it something I said? Hey, it wasn't even close to 15 minutes!

 

And when you think about it, the indirect impact we have from food production (feed lots, mega swine farms, chicken ranches, etc.) is again magnified by our carnivorous diet. On many of our waterways, a swimmer literally swims in dilute poop. In many places we treat our water with filtration to remove the large pieces of poop and then disinfect the remainder to kill the remaining microscopic pieces of poop that we drink anyway. In our cities, the doggie doo, etc. dries and gets incorporated into the air. We literally breathe poop. Studies of particles transported by hurricanes going through the Caribbean have found particles of camel dung from North Africa. Breathtaking!

 

This is so much fun I sometimes feel guilty for getting paid. But I take the money anyway.

BON APPTIT!

 

Edited part: Oooooh, I just noticed that the web site took my original word in the book quote and subsituted asterisks for the letters. It was a four letter word that started with an 's' and ended with a 't'. I guess quotes don't get any more slack than we do.

Of course, now that I have noticed this...it takes on the aura of a challenge....(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[kenk]

My curiosity is screaming!!

 

Does the bag hold both feces and urine? I assume the "gel" mentioned is to hold the urine.

 

How big is the bag? How big is the opening of the bag?

 

No offence intended, but do people squat over the opened bag and hope they have good aim? or do they "go" on something else, like a peice of waxed paper, and then wrap it up and then put it into the bag?

 

How does the bag close/seal?

 

I've read about mountaineers using "poop-tubes" - lengths of PVC sealed on one end and with a screw-in plug on the other end.

 

Years ago I read the book "How to Sh-- in the Woods" and, being someone who has had the good fortune of having latrines whereever I've been - even in the Boundary Waters, I find the issue of sanitation without latrines very interesting.

 

Ken K.

[Beavah]

Yah, for some truly great fireside tales on river trips, there's a book out there that's a compilation of groover tales. Can't think of the title, but I'm pretty sure it's got "groover" in it.

 

A groover is an ammo can latrine for river runnin' (so named because of the grooves it leaves when you squat on it, though these days there's all kinds of seat-type contraptions). Transportin ammo cans and pod bags of poo on a river corridor naturally has the potential for an occasional catastrophic tale.

 

Bet we see a similar book about WAG-bag disasters some day. Anybody who's ever been above treeline on a highly trafficked mountain like Whitney can appreciate da need to pack it out though. The mountain gets really gross in short order otherwise. Not much natural decomposition in alpine areas.

 

Beavah

 

[packsaddle]

"Transportin ammo cans and pod bags of poo on a river corridor naturally has the potential for an occasional catastrophic tale."

 

Ooohhhh Yeaaaahhhh! Which is why, whenever someone falls into a lake or stream, as Pee Wee says, I scream real loud, "DON'T SWALLOW!"

[GernBlansten]

Go to REI. They have a section on camping sanitation. They have WAG bags. Buy one. Take it home. Open it up. Take a test drive on one. See how it works. Get real acquainted with it. Keep it around for a few days.

 

Learn it.

Live It.

Love it.

 

No REI close? http://www.rei.com/product/662978

[insanescouter]

One year my dad got me as he claimed a "gag" gift ... it was a book titled "How to **** in the woods" ... it is actually a pretty good book that explains a lot of the whys and hows...

 

Scott Robertson

http://insanescouter.org

[le Voyageur]

A better source then REI for WAG bags is NRS

 

http://www.nrsweb.com/default.asp

 

These bags should be considered as part of one's E kit....

 

 

[anarchist]

Wag bags, are a portion of the PETT environmentally friendly portable toilet and are OK...about the size of a small kitchen trash bag with powder (chemical) designed to be placed within the ''toilet'' bag suspension system and held in place by the toilet seat. Comes with a set of rubber gloves and a large (gallon size?) Zip-lock bag for disposal when finished directly in a landfill (EPA approved). Can be used without the toilet for backpacking. Check them out! We have been using the set up for river trips for a few years now...the fold-up toilet is sturdy and when packed is about the size of a large hard sided briefcase. It only weighs a couple of pounds ( is plastic) and if you pick a nice hill-side "perch" the morning "constitutional" can be down right... inspiring...now where is that darn newspaper......

Anarchist