The etiquette for pooping in the outdoors is changing, writes Writers on the Range columnist Molly Absolon. The solution, according to Exum Mountain Guide Trevor Deighton, is WAG bags. PHOTO BY FRAN/ADOBE STOCK
Poop talk makes everybody fidget and giggle uncomfortably. We like our poop to disappear. We want shiny white porcelain toilets and privacy.
But how do you cope when you’re in the woods behind a tree?
When I took my first course at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming, years ago, the preferred method of waste disposal was bringing a trowel to dig a six-inch cat hole, a practice still the norm for many backcountry travelers today. There was even a how-to guide by Kathleen Meyer, published in 1992, titled bluntly, “How to Sh*t in the Woods.”
We thought the soil would break down the nasty stuff pretty quickly. In fact, we were taught to stir dirt into our deposit to speed things along. But our faith in the speed of nature has been shattered.
Studies by a University of Montana research team have found that from as far back as the early ‘80s, high levels of pathogens remained in feces even after they’d been properly buried. Maybe a few piles of poop in millions of acres of wilderness weren’t so bad when it was just a few piles of poop. But if you visit the backcountry or beaches on public land these days, you know lots of people are visiting the outdoors and leaving their waste behind.
In 2020, 7.1 million more Americans participated in some form of outdoor recreation than in the previous year, for a total of roughly 200 million people, according to the Outdoor Foundation’s 2021 Outdoor Participation Trends Report.
Fifty-three percent of Americans age six and over recreated in the outdoors at least once in 2020, which is the highest participation rate on record. The Bridger-Teton National Forest, near where I live, recorded a 44 percent increase in the number of people camping between 2016 and 2020. Outdoor recreation is enjoying, if you can call it that, a boom.
Each human, on average, produces roughly a pound of poop each day. That adds up quickly. Anyone who has done a 21-day Grand Canyon river trip probably noticed the stacks of metal boxes that filled up over the course of a trip. By the time you got to the takeout, the cargo in one 18-foot raft was mostly poop.
Outside Magazine recently published a story about the changing etiquette of pooping in the outdoors, citing a startling study from 2007 that said 91 percent of the sand on 55 California beaches was contaminated with fecal indicator bacteria. Packing out poop thus became a necessity in that state if people wanted to avoid disease.
But this is true even in a forest where people dig their perfect cat holes 200 feet from trails and water. If thousands of people hike the same trails every day of the season, that’s a minefield of waste festering below the surface. Over time, pathogens in that poop will leach into the soil.
What, then, are we supposed to do? Though we may not like it, just like river guides and other outfitters, it’s past time for all of us to pack out our poop. But good news: There are a number of products available commercially to make this as lightweight and odor-free as possible.
Trevor Deighton, of Victor, Idaho, an Exum Mountain Guide in the Tetons, recommends WAG bags, WAG being short for Waste Alleviation and Gelling. Since more people started carrying them, he says “There’s so much less poop on the Grand. The [bags] don’t smell and never break. It’s worse thinking about it than it is in practice.”
He adds, “You see a lot of plastic bags with dog poop left along trails around here. People don’t want to put them in their pack because the bags are so flimsy, but then they forget about them.” The beauty of WAGs, he adds, is that your sturdy portable toilet never fails and is easy to use.
But there’s no getting around it, packing out poop is still an inconvenience, especially for those of us who look forward to a mostly light pack at the end of a hiking trip. But for our health and for the health of the forest or anywhere we recreate, it’s our responsibility to leave no waste behind. It’s the right thing to do.
Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She writes and travels often through the West.
We all are familiar with using a limited palette, but do you use one? Do you know how to use a
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We all are familiar with using a limited palette, but do you use one? Do you know how to use a limited palette to create different color combinations? Are you tired of carrying around 15-20 different tubes when you paint plein air? Have you ever wanted to create a certain “mood” in a painting but failed? Do you create a lot of mud? Do you struggle to achieve color harmony? All these problems are addressed in John’s workbook in clear and concise language!
Based on the bestselling “Limited Palatte, Unlimited Color” workbook written by John Pototschnik, the workshop is run by Maggie Shane and Annie McCoy, accomplished landscape (acrylic) and plein air (oil) artists,exhibitors at the Big Sky Artists’ Studio & Gallery and members of the Big Sky Artists Collective.
Each student will receive a copy of “Limited Palette, Unlimited Color” to keep and take home to continue your limited palette journey. We will show you how to use the color wheel and mix your own clean mixtures to successfully create a mood for your paintings.
Each day, we will create a different limited palette color chart and paint a version of a simple landscape using John’s directives. You will then be able to go home and paint more schemes using the book for guidance.
Workshop is open to painters (oil or acrylic) of any level although students must have some basic knowledge of the medium he or she uses. Students will be provided the book ($92 value), color wheel, value scale and canvas papers to complete the daily exercises.