An estimated 1,650 hikers poop each year on Colorado’s tallest and busiest 14er.   

And because what those hikers do with their waste can have widespread environmental and human impacts, PACT Outdoors, a Crested Butte-based business, set out this summer to explore behavior and attitude around “packing it out” with researchers from Penn State University. 

The survey, which connected with over 4,200 hikers at Mount Elbert outside of Leadville, produced what researchers say are hopeful results.

“The results were very hopeful for us that we can really instill a new practice among the majority of people recreating outdoors,” said Shari Edelson, a Penn State researcher who led the survey. “It’s amazing; give someone a bag, and they will poop in it.”

Why does it matter what you do with human waste outside?

Jake Thomas co-founded PACT Outdoors a few years ago as a way to make backcountry bathroom practices easier and more sustainable for people.

“Every year since has been this continuous unfolding of learning more and more facets of the problem with mishandled human waste, both on the individual side and how people could use better tools, but also how it has these more macro-level effects on the environment and burden on land managers,” Thomas said. “It just keeps reinforcing that it’s a problem worth working on.”

From a high level, mishandling human waste in the outdoors can have downstream effects on water quality, human health, wildlife and the entire ecosystem. This is because bacteria and pathogens can live in human waste for up to a year or multiple years in some cases, Edelson said.

As for why human waste is different from the waste left behind by wild animals, the answer is pretty simple.

“It’s the things that we ingest,” Thomas said. “Our very complex diets, sugar, refined alcohol, our drastically increased exposure to pathogens, bacterial and viral being a part of a global kind of society, are all things that are not necessarily usually true in the case of animals.”

Part of the pandemic’s effects included more and more people going out to recreate — and therefore, poop — in the outdoors and on public lands. This has increased the burden on agencies and individuals managing these recreation areas and spaces.

“A huge portion of land management budgets go to managing waste,” Thomas said.

On Mount Elbert, where there is also a vault toilet at the trailhead, one of the rangers is tasked with taking up an alpaca to pack out poop left on the peak, Edelson said, adding that it’s been a real management challenge for the U.S. Forest Service.

“The more prepared and skilled hikers are when they go out — whether it’s on a 14er at a national park or wherever it may be — the more that eases the burden on land managers from an hours and wage perspective, but also from just facilities management perspective, cleaning up mishandled waste,” Thomas said.

Otherwise, the other impact may come in the form of increased regulations, including converting dispersed camping to fee-based sites or requiring permits to access public lands, Thomas said.

“Human waste is usually one of the top three reasons these things are done,” he added.

What should hikers do with their poop?

However, one of the most complex elements of waste management outdoors is that what you do with your poop depends on location.

During the Mount Elbert study, Edelson said this was one of the gaps in education she heard. While people generally acknowledged that they should not leave their waste on the ground, they were less sure what the right thing to do was.

“You almost need to give people a flowchart to explain it to them,” Edelson said.

For example, in an area below the treeline with deep topsoil, digging a hole — commonly known as a cat hole — can be the right practice. However, if it’s a heavily trafficked area, it can also be better to pack it out and bring it with you.

Above the treeline, where you can’t dig a deep cathole, it’s super dry and the risk of flash flooding can be higher, you should be packing it out. The same can be said for low-elevation, arid and desert environments.

Scientifically, the difference has to do with biological activity in the soil, and whether your waste will decompose, Edelson said.

Studying poop perceptions on Mount Elbert

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<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">On Mount Elbert, Colorado’s busiest and tallest 14er, hikers showed a willingness to pack it out when armed with the right tools and information. </figcaption><figcaption>PACT Outdoors/Courtesy Photo</figcaption>

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This summer’s research on Mount Elbert was part of a pilot program under the name “Clean Fourteen,” a collaboration between PACT, Penn State, The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative and Leave No Trace.

The study aimed to gauge the behavior and attitude of everyone from first-time hikers and out-of-state visitors to experienced hikers to help land managers and organizations design and implement better, more cost-effective systems for waste management in the backcountry.

Part of what Thomas has seen is that the individuals buying PACT products from a retailer are often “hardcore outdoor enthusiasts” who are more likely to be plugged into discussions around proper poop disposal.  

“The person who needs the most help is actually really hard to reach,” he said.

This was part of the reason Mount Elbert was selected as the testing site for the study. The peak has an estimated 15,000 hikers each year, making it the most popular of Colorado’s 14ers. This summer, 60% of the individuals surveyed were from out of state.

In setting out to understand how much hikers know, Edelson was stationed at the trailhead every day for a month administering surveys.  As hikers returned to the trailhead, the survey asked about attitudes about packing out waste, how people handle their waste, what concerns they have about these practices, and what might make it easier for them to use tools and be more prepared.

What they found was that 30% of hikers who went to the bathroom that day used the vault toilet — a rarity for Colorado’s 14ers — at the trailhead. The remaining 70% pooped somewhere on the mountain. This data was used to estimate that around 1,650 people poop on the peak each year.

“This shows that we may have plans but if we’re not planning and preparing broadly or imagining more broadly about what might happen to us out there, we might find ourselves underprepared,” Thomas said. “That was a huge lesson for us.”

They also discovered that there is a significant willingness to use things like pack-out kits. Only 8% said they would never use one. Thirty-eight percent reported having used them before.

In addition to looking at perception, the study aimed to see what people would do when armed with the correct tools.

So, they placed a kiosk with PACT’s pack-out kits for interested individuals. Edelson said 400 bags were taken from the kiosk during the study. Of those 30 to 40 bags were returned to the accompanying trash receptacle, with Edelson estimating more used the kits and disposed of it themselves elsewhere.

“Given our knowledge of the costs associated with maintaining vault toilets, we believe that we can lower the cost per user over time with this type of strategy compared to only relying on vault toilets,” Thomas said. “A big part of that is the fact that users are taking on some of the responsibility.”

What this tells PACT and the researchers is that with willingness, accessibility to tools and education will be key in addressing the challenge at hand. 

“People are willing to implement best practices, but they may be under-educated on what those best practices are, and then they may be underprepared materially to actually implement,” Thomas said. “We saw that when we gave people the tool, they used it.”

Bridging the gap between these things and seeing widespread implementation is the next step, he added.

“It was really illuminating to find out how willing people were to take an action that they were associating with the protection of a space that they were visiting and that they cared about,” Edelson said.