Does California’s tallest mountain have a poop problem?
Does California’s tallest mountain have a poop problem?
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On a granite expanse halfway up 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, Lily Henley was on a hunt, turning over stones and inspecting crevices.
She peered into a knee-high rockpile and spotted her quarry with mock excitement.
“Ooooh, it’s a gold mine!” Henley, a wilderness manager with Inyo National Forest, said wryly.
After removing a few football-size stones, she reached her rubber-gloved hand into the pile and lifted out a gray ziplock bag. It was filled with human feces — the first of four stashed there.
“When you find a spot with four of ’em like this it usually means there was a whole group (of hikers) who weren’t responsible, which is kind of a bummer,” Henley said.
It’s been 18 years since forest officials pulled the few solar toilets off the mountain and began to encourage — then later require — the tens of thousands of hikers and mountaineers who set foot on Whitney each year to pack out their poop.
The forest advertises this simple directive on its website as well as on flyers at the main Whitney trailhead, where free Waste Alleviating Gel bags, or WAG bags, are available for hikers to grab before starting their treks. Inside the bags are light waste kits: a larger inner bag contains special jelling powder, then an outer ziplock bag, plus toilet paper and a sanitary wipe.
And, yet, on a recent hike up Whitney’s main trail, abandoned bags plump with excrement weren’t hard to find. Some had been deposited, seemingly recently, on the side of the trail in full view; others were stuffed into bushes or under logs; many more were placed out of sight around Trail Camp, the mid-mountain staging area where hikers rest and regroup before heading for the summit.
A few were frayed and pocked with holes, having been chewed into by the local wildlife.
“People leaving their crap up there really is the biggest issue” on the mountain, said Taro Pusina, former Mount Whitney District Ranger with Inyo National Forest.
Occasionally discarded WAG bags are found on the less traveled, more technical mountaineer’s route, according to Kurt Wedburg, founder of Sierra Mountaineering International in Bishop, who has guided hundreds of trips on Whitney.
“You’re leaving it for someone else to carry? That’s baffling to me,” he said.
Burying one’s waste off-trail 6 to 8 inches into the dirt, where microbes can help accelerate its decomposition, is the commonly accepted method in most backcountry areas in the Western U.S. But heavily trafficked alpine environments, where soil is thinner and often shallower, just can’t sustain a constant influx of human waste, government land managers say. It’s especially problematic near water sources.
The pack-it-out policy is mandatory at certain popular recreation zones in Zion National Park in Utah, Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and elsewhere. Outdoor enthusiasts across the West are proactively pushing the practice as good outdoors etiquette — a natural extension of the “Leave No Trace” philosophy.
Guides and rangers reckon that people accustomed to flushing waste out of sight struggle with a psychological barrier of handling and carrying their feces with them for what might be hours or days during a hiking trip.
“The first time you ever do it, it’s going to seem daunting, like the grossest thing,” said Howie Schwartz, owner of Sierra Mountain Guides in Bishop, who wrote a lengthy essay about human waste on Whitney seven years ago. “But a lot of people make it to the point where they put it in the bag, tie it up and seal it — but then they don’t carry it out!”
Trekking up the main trail earlier this month, one Southern California hiker said she’d never used a WAG bag before and wasn’t excited about the prospect of hauling her poop in her pack for the two days she expected to be on the mountain. But she said she understood the importance of keeping the trail clean and wanted to follow the rule.
“If everyone was just going around the trail, I can see that being pretty gross,” she said.
Most hikers pack out their waste, said Brian Spitek, Inyo National Forest wilderness manager who has two decades of experience on the mountain. But rangers who face the unfortunate duty of routinely picking up after careless hikers make it clear the pack-it-out program remains a work in progress, he said. Rangers find “roughly a bag a day” during peak season between May and November, or about 200 per year, he said.
“I’m not sure we’ll ever get to 100% compliance, but we can do better,” Spitek said.
It can sometimes be difficult to tell, at a glance, whether a bag on the ground has been abandoned or is, as Spitek said, “in use” by a hiker who didn’t want to schlep extra weight up to the summit and intends to retrieve it on their way back down the trail. But even well-intentioned hikers have a way of forgetting, he said.
“There are definitely some that are left intentionally, but other hikers forget — or sometimes conveniently forget,” Spitek said.
Henley, in her forest green uniform and carrying a large plastic garbage bag, cheerfully picked through the boulders around Trail Camp. I asked whether, despite her upbeat demeanor, she harbored any resentment towards people who ditch their bags.
“Oh, yeah,” she replied. Approaching the task in lighthearted fashion “is just a coping mechanism. It gets worse if you don’t make jokes about it.
“I totally get it,” she continued. “Everyone has to poop, and no one really wants to carry it around with them. It is in human nature to be scared of our poop. … Sometimes it’s really annoying, though.”
This was one of those annoying days. Without having to look hard, Henley found 12 discarded WAG bags — a load she’d have to strap to her pack and carry down the mountain.How to Start Playing Pickleball