Canyonlands National Park in Utah has changed their policy for how campers deal with their personal waste, according to High Country News.
Beginning on September 22, when nature calls, visitors will have to carry their own poop out of the park. The prior method was to dig a hole and bury their excrement.
Public parks have long been trying to figure out the best way to deal with the human waste of visitors. A popular guide to help campers minimize their impact on desolate public area suggests that visitors dig a hole far from a water source and bury it far from the trail. The book calls it a "cathole," and suggests covering it so that animals and fellow hikers won't find it.
"You can't dig a cathole without hitting [another] cathole," Paul Henderson, the assistant superintendent at Canyonlands National Park, said.
Excrement would be less of a problem in an area like the Pacific Northwest, but in the desert, where there is very little rain and limited organic matter in the soil, the excrement from a few thousand people can take a long time to decompose.
Alpine ecosystems are another environment that doesn't deal well with large amounts of excrement from hikers. Mt. Whitney in California and Mt. Rainier in Washington both have mandates that require hikers to carry their waste out of the park with them.
Conundrum Hot Springs in the Maroon Bells Wilderness in Colorado, an area that doesn't have a specific mandate to deal with human waste, suggests hikers use bags that are provided on the trailhead, keeping the park clean.
Different hikers use varying types of technology to address the human waste problem, with some using receptacles and others creating contraptions they can carry with them throughout the day. There are also WAG bags, which come with powders that conceal and deodorize and waste.
Canyonlands hopes hikers choose one of these methods and stop digging catholes. Hopefully, the new restriction will keep the park cleaner for all visitors.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
