There is a lot of poop on Colorado’s highest peak.
A recently published survey of hikers on Mount Elbert in the Sawatch Range above Leadville shows that as many as 11% of hikers on the 14,440-foot mountain poop along the trail and fewer than a third of them use the vault toilets at the trailhead.
“I think it’s very revealing that this trailhead infrastructure at a place like Mount Elbert is absorbing only 30% of the demand,” says Jack Edelson, whose two-year, 283-page dissertation included perspectives from hikers at Grand Teton National Park and a national park in New Zealand. The work earned Edelson a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University for what is likely the world’s most exhaustive study of public land pooping behaviors.
Edelson surveyed 410 hikers on Mount Elbert in the summer of 2024, when the majority of the peak’s 17,000 to 20,000 annual visitors spend as long as eight hours scrambling to the summit. Of the hikers who pooped along the trail, 30% used the free human waste bags — provided by Gunnison County’s PACT Outdoors, and packed those bags back down to the trailhead. And 40% dug holes for their deposits. So for those who are counting, that’s about 880 poops a year on Mount Elbert. If the free bags weren’t there, there could be another 650-ish holes full of feces.
That’s a lot of waste in a delicate alpine landscape ill suited for processing poop.
“We joke but it’s a serious issue because at the alpine there are not bio-organisms in the soil to biodegrade poop,” says Lloyd Athearn, the boss at the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative who, at the start of his mountainous career, helped develop the Clean Mountain Can for hauling human waste up and down Mount Denali in Alaska.
Read the full article on The Colorado Sun's website.