[Ymers] Fwd: FW: No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

[Jennifer Eaton]

An interesting read....Jen

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barbara Dyer <barbaradyer at hotmail.com>
Date: Sep 5, 2007 9:32 AM
Subject: FW: No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along
To: execworc at amcworcester.org, lynne.sarty at pol.state.ma.us


 No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

By FELICITY BARRINGER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/felicity_barringer/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Published: September 5, 2007

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

Skip to next paragraph<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/05whitney.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin#secondParagraphsecondParagraph>

*Multimedia*

Video Feature
<http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=10f9d22235ac52000cd4ef3a2501e589a393c4f1>

After Nature Calls, Pack It
Out<http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=10f9d22235ac52000cd4ef3a2501e589a393c4f1>



Outhouses Removed

Enlarge This Image



Heidi Schumann for the New York Times

Hikers like Joanne Rife, left, and her daughter, Susan Rife, are now
required to carry out their waste in gear like a Wagbag.

High-altitude sanitation is too hazardous a business. Helicopters no longer
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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/forest_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org>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).

"It's 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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_emergency_management_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
said the company's 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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_park_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org>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 I've got to do it, I've got to do it," said Scott Whitten of Danville,
Calif., about halfway up the trail. "I'm 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 don't 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 didn't 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 don't 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."
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