Though America’s national parks system might be its best idea—according to Ken Burns,
who obviously never ate a deep fried Oreo—its glacial peaks and simmering springs mask a
stinky secret.
Millions of visitors travel to these national parks which are managed by—you’ll never
guess—the National Park Service, and having that many people in a park requires the infrastructure
of a small city.
Many of these fragile, vast landscapes can’t support centralized plumbing or sewage systems—which
makes dealing with that much fecal matter a huge, complex, dare I say crappy, problem
for the Park Service.
Most national parks have centralized plumbing at their fancy visitor centers.
But at trailheads, overlooks, and viewpoints, the NPS relies mostly on pit toilets—which
are basically what you get when you combine the classic charm of a pit with the modern
expectations of a toilet.
Simply maintaining bathroom facilities for visitors is a burden for parks, with Yellowstone
National Park spending $12,000 on toilet paper alone in summer 2018.
But even though they’re the ecologically best solution, pit toilets put a huge burden
on fragile landscapes, because it turns out, when you’re continually filling a hole with
poop, eventually those holes fill up.
Millions of visitors mean that these toilet holes get filled every one to two years, which
requires rangers to dig new ones nearly every season.
And even though parks have been using them for decades, park officials still aren’t
sure how long it takes for all that poop to decompose.
There’s also the safety issues that come from expecting tourists to know how gravity
works—like this woman who fell into a pit toilet at Olympic National Park after trying
to save her phone… or this guy who just really liked jumping into them.
To fix this, some parks have switched to vault toilets to lessen the impact of visitors in
the backcountry.
But these self-contained toilets, which have removable pits underneath them, carry their
own problems—literally.
Each vault usually includes a tank capable of holding 750 to 1,000 gallons of Clif Bar
slurry, but unlike a pit toilet, that waste can’t just be buried.
And in remote, rural areas—where most parks are located—excavating vault toilets can
be a nightmare.
In Washington’s Olympic National Park, rangers can hike anywhere from 10 to 30 miles or 16
to 48 kilometers to remove them.
When they get there, rangers must move these 200-pound vaults to less-smellable areas,
and then again to a flat area where a helicopter can airlift the vault out.
Believe it or not, using helicopters to airlift giant tanks full of poop out of national parks
is extremely common, as it’s the most cost-effective option for quickly hauling a lot of waste
out.
In Olympic as well as Zion national parks, officials have an entire day dedicated to
airlifting out human waste from a handful of vault toilets along the parks’ most popular
trails.
First, they airlift out the vault toilets, then remove the waste in 3,000-gallon pump
trucks that are carted 250 miles or 400 kilometers round-trip to a wastewater treatment plant
in Wellington, Utah.
The entire process can cost upwards of $10,000 per toilet.
And at this point you’re probably thinking, “why do the National Parks even need toilets?
It says in the Constitution that if I pay my taxes, I’m legally allowed to pee anywhere
I want.”
But not having bathrooms in the parks creates different problems—not so much for stressed-out
rangers, but for the fragile ecosystems the parks protect.
At Rocky Mountain National Park’s popular Bear Lake, more people have been peeing in
the backcountry, which has already elevated the lake’s nitrogen levels—a problem found
by tracing elevated caffeine levels in the water back to visitors’ coffee habits.
So even if you think going #1 behind a bush won’t hurt anyone, you’re risking getting
the fish hooked on lattes that they just can’t afford in this economy.
The good news is, there are solutions to this crappy situation.
New high-tech toilets have given the NPS cheaper and more eco-friendly options for managing
visitors’ bathroom habits.
Several parks have implemented toilets from Seattle company Toilet Tech, which only have
to be emptied every five years by separating liquid and solid waste.
These toilets divert urine to the surface of the ground simply by using gravity, and
the solid waste is carted off on a conveyor belt with the very real, actual name,“poopscalator,”
that visitors activate using a foot pedal when they’re done.
Some of them even employ dung beetles to eat away at the solid waste and minimize how much
waste rangers have to carry out.
But even though they’re cost-effective as the years pass and the poop grows, most parks
don’t have the money to put $20,000 towards a single Toilet Tech contraption.
So in some places, the most cost-effective and eco-friendly solution has been encouraging
visitors to carry out their poop—and some officials have distributed powdered doggy
bags to dry out people’s bowel movements.
Ultimately, though, the National Park Service doesn’t have enough money to implement ecologically
beneficial toilet systems, because even as their visitation has skyrocketed, their budgets
have stagnated.
Dealing with visitors’ bathroom habits might be the nastiest part of a complex issue, but
it’s just that—part of a larger issue.
These places just weren’t designed to support millions of people, which the pandemic has
only made worse.
In Arches National Park, cars aren’t allowed to enter when parking lots are full, which
can create delays anywhere from 3-5 hours long—just to get past the entrance station.
To combat this, Arches, along with Yosemite, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain, instituted timed
reservation systems to space out the crowds.
As visitors wreak havoc on America’s iconic landscapes, the NPS has been left with fewer
resources to manage the ever-increasing swell.
That’s right: I tricked you into learning about wide-sweeping policy issues with a title
about poop.
You’re smarter now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Around the world, the conflict between man and nature is intensifying.
Our Wendover documentary, “The Colorado Problem,” covers the evolving crisis of
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