Last year, I watched a man squat and relieve himself 30ft (9 metres) from me, holding on to his vehicle’s front wheel with one hand to steady himself. My dog and I were on our usual walk up the dirt road that bisects our old mining town, nestled just shy of 10,000ft (3km) in south-western Colorado.
It was a short walk from the house, and we were out just to get a little movement. Not to see one.
The stool itself was unremarkable: it was not the panicked, loose follow-up to an ill-advised meal, nor a heaping feat that could render a body incapable of holding on to it any longer. The man threw his toilet paper on to the log like a napkin on to a finished plate, and then got back into his SUV, a 15-minute walk from my house.
It was the summer of 2024 when we noticed the uptick in shit. Years of overlanding traffic had rumbled through our sleepy bedroom town, with visitors stopping now and then for a red-cup lemonade, a homemade cookie or – if the kids were feeling entrepreneurial – a rock billed as a crystal. Tourists came and they went, leaving nothing but dust and a few dollars.
Until last summer, when their numbers finally added up to something else: public dumps.
This is not what I would call my preferred watching, but by the fourth time you find human shit on your dog-walk loop in a national forest in a week, you start to become curious. You start to wonder, what compels a person to shit directly on the road?
I became a bit of a fecal fanatic.
“We are definitely seeing an escalation in human waste impacts,” JD Tanner told me. Tanner is the director of education and training for Leave No Trace, the organization promoting the same principle as its name. “Park and land managers consistently report that improper human waste is now among the top backcountry issues – from surface feces to visible toilet paper near campsites and water sources.”
Despite decades of public service announcements, backcountry signage and the many guiding traces of Leave No Trace educators, an astonishing number of hikers, campers, Jeepers and general park-goers still treat nature like us humans didn’t fully extricate ourselves from it. Toilet-paper piles appear like mushroom clusters. Dogs return to trail, tongues furiously working to hide the evidence.
Land managers from Vermont to Patagonia are asking the same question: why is it so hard for humans to bury their poop?
It starts with a simple misunderstanding: most people don’t see why they should. We’re animals, right? Just poop how animals poop.
Alas, it isn’t so simple. “In a lot of outdoor places, especially popular trails and fragile environments, human waste doesn’t break down the way we think it does,” Tanner said. Instead, it can take poop and its pal toilet paper years in some environments to break down.
Plus, the idea that animals are just shitting willy-nilly in the woods isn’t even always true. Hares, badgers, raccoons and many other species are actually more like the best behaved of humans: they use latrines, going to the bathroom in specific areas for territory and sanitation. And crucially, they’re only putting into the ecosystem what they took out.
Humans are an unusually disruptive species, and we’ve done just about everything possible to remove ourselves from nature. Our diets, disease profiles and toilet-paper trails don’t resemble those of deer, bears or even dogs. We’re too far removed, and when we don’t remove our poop, or at least bury it, it sticks. Literally.
“It can stick around for years, spread disease, pollute water sources and ruin the experience for the next person,” Tanner said.
But does anyone care about the next person? It’s a classic case of the “tragedy of the commons”. If it’s just me out here in these big ol’ woods – how bad could one unburied poop with a little toilet paper be?
Jeff Marion, a recreation ecologist and a founding member of the Leave No Trace board of directors, said that improperly disposed human waste quickly becomes a delivery vehicle for disease. Flies land on feces, then on your dinner plate. “But how far can a fly actually fly?” I asked, intonating that most of the people pooping in my backyard are also immediately driving away.
“Oh, miles. Wherever you’re going, they’re going.”
The flies land on our food. The food makes us sick. We need to go to the bathroom. The cycle continues.
The first line of defense we have is simple: if you need to go, dig a cathole.
The cathole has long been hailed as the gold standard of backcountry pooping. A simple 6-8in hole, at least 200ft (61 metres) from any trail, water or camp. Deep enough to prevent runoff, shallow enough to decompose, and far enough to avoid health and aesthetic issues. The more thoughtful hikers carry small trowels to dig their holes, the cheapest of which you can get for a few bucks. Experienced car campers and overlanders often have shovels that make for easy digging. And plenty of catholes have been dug with rocks and sticks.
It’s not complicated. But it’s also not happening. First, 200ft is two-thirds of a football field. When ambling from a campsite at night with a headlamp, most people simply will not do this. Even in broad daylight, most people don’t venture very far off the trail. I asked Marion if there were studies measuring human poop along trails. He said not really – most are done near campsites.
Then a memory of one trail in particular caught his attention.
Marion was once being driven by an Appalachian Trail volunteer to the trailhead, who asked if she and her dog could tag along with him for the first hour.
After he agreed, she made a confession: her dog was a bit of a shit-hound. It had a nose for human waste.
“I couldn’t believe how many improperly disposed human waste sites this dog found, invariably within 20ft of the trail on either side,” Marion said. Within an hour, the dog found at least a dozen, typically 12-20ft from the trail – all above ground with toilet paper. This was over a decade ago.
Marion was quick to mention it’s hard to study the bathroom behaviors of through-hikers, but he estimated 3-4% just surface dispose of their human waste. If some 750 people attempt to hike the full Appalachian Trail each year, and on average it takes them about six months, that 3% turns into nearly 4,000 open-air poops every year – and that’s not including the thousands of people who hike shorter portions of the trail.
Why don’t people dig holes? Marion shrugged. Is it ignorance? Ethics? It’s hard to know. Surveys require federal approval and funding, which are hard to come by.
Marion once helped with a study on why people leave trails. Obviously, he thought, one reason is they’re going to the bathroom. The team included that as a survey option, but the office of management and budget struck it. Too inappropriate, they said.
“We didn’t say ‘have sex in the woods’ or anything like that. We just listed a biological necessity!”
However willing the digger, sometimes it’s the trail itself that poses a problem.
In certain terrain, surface disposal just seems like the only option. When catholes aren’t feasible – on rock, in alpine tundra or in deserts – some responsible and experienced recreators turn to the smear technique.
It is exactly what you are imagining. You grab a rock or stick and smear your feces as thinly as you can in any area that gets sun exposure. It can work, but researchers concluded it’s only effective in remote areas by trained campers.
So what’s your regular front-ranger to do? The modern recommendation is to pack it out. Enter the Wag bag: a resealable, odor-containing, waste-stabilizing bag that allows you to carry out your business, similar to how you might bag your dog’s poop.
But “might” is the key word, given how unpopular it is. The idea of carrying your own feces, even carefully double-bagged, seems to be a breaking point for many outdoorspeople.
Since people seemingly won’t bury or carry, surely all of this would be solved by more toilets. But oh, how simple that would be.
Geoff Hill, PhD, didn’t set out to become the country’s leading expert on wilderness poop. But a field assignment in the Canadian Arctic on Nunavut land changed his path by sheer force. While there, they couldn’t leave their feces behind, so the team had to defecate into a metal bucket frozen into the permafrost. Then, whoever drew the short straw had to wrestle the bucket out of the frozen hole, drag it into the intertidal zone with a hazmat suit on, and chop the frozen poop out with a hatchet.
Hill laughed while telling the story.
“I was doing this, fully coated and splattered with crystallized poo bits, and I thought, there’s a better way, there’s got to be a better way.”
Hill’s company, ToiletTech, designs waste-separating systems for parks around the world. But why separate? Hill explained that one of the worst things you can do in waste management is mix pee and poop together and leave them in a dark place.
“You end up with this horrible mix of high ammonia, undecomposed organic matter rich with pathogens that’s not going to be decomposed by the natural soil invertebrate ecosystem.”
Mammals in the wild separate pee and poop, and Hill’s system imitates this. You do your business on a regular toilet seat, the liquid falls into the tank below, while the solids land on the belt to be scooted back into a different tank. Parks that use this kind of technology – from Glacier Bay to Death Valley – report lower maintenance costs, better user satisfaction and, crucially, fewer poop sightings in the wild.
But even the best toilets won’t work if people don’t use them, or use them correctly.
When Hill was doing this research, he had to set up experiments both in bathrooms and under bathrooms, including getting sensors out of the inside of composting toilets and setting up pet scales to weigh diverted urine versus poop. Regardless of whatever red tape was up, people who felt the need to relieve did so at their leisure.
“They’d step over my toolboxes, go past signs that said ‘Do not enter – Closed.’” Hill said when it comes to going to the bathroom, most people enter with a “nothing’s gonna stop me” mentality, including pooping on Hill himself.
“I got pooped on and peed on more than one time,” he says. “People are crazy in bathrooms.”
To really make progress, we need to widen the lens – from backyard trails and surface poops to the infrastructure, history and psychology that got us here in the first place.
Long before catholes and Wag bags, Americans pooped in the woods with little thought for posterity. In the early 20th century, the US Forest Service and National Park Service were preoccupied with trail building, visitor access and managing fire.
Sanitation was an afterthought – until it wasn’t. As recreational use surged in the postwar era, so did the stink.
Early wilderness toilets were literal pits: a shallow hole, a wooden seat, sometimes a shed. In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act and subsequent Underground Injection Control (UIC) rules made it illegal to simply dump human waste into the ground in many public areas. Parks began scrambling for alternatives, leading to the proliferation of vault toilets, fly-ridden composting experiments and labor-intensive haul-out programs.
Even as toilets improved, behavior didn’t. The idea that nature would absorb human waste, like it absorbs deer poop or dead leaves, persisted in the cultural imagination. This myth was especially popularized during the rise of outdoor recreation in the 1960s and 1970s, when everything from Boy Scout manuals to National Geographic articles framed the wilderness as a rugged, forgiving space that welcomed self-sufficiency and personal freedom.
That framing stuck. If your grandfather squatted behind a tree and left his poop, why couldn’t you?
However vast the backcountry can seem, it isn’t equipped to process human waste at modern volume. Most popular parks today host millions of visitors per year. A 2019 National Park Service report estimated over 300m annual visits to public lands, and each visitor produces, on average, one to two bowel movements a day.
That’s hundreds of millions of poops. A deluge of shit. How many do you think land a few feet off the trail?
The question, then, isn’t just about disposal; it’s about instinct. Humans are wired to treat their waste with secrecy and urgency. Pooping is private. And in public, it’s often rushed. When discomfort strikes in the woods – no toilet in sight, body on high alert – the brain prioritizes speed and invisibility over stewardship. All it takes to swing from predator to prey is having your pants down.
Culturally, Americans have a particularly conflicted relationship with bodily functions. We sanitize them. We euphemize them. We hide them behind stall doors and scented sprays. The idea of carrying out one’s own poop, even sealed in a leakproof Nasa-grade polymer bag, feels humiliating to many.
There’s a shame to the act, and somehow a deeper shame in being seen doing the right thing.
But humor can help. Tanner told me that Leave No Trace intentionally incorporates humor (like “Nature” appearing on caller ID when “nature calls”) into their training and campaigns. Not only does it mitigate some of the discomfort around an awkward topic, but it helps people to internalize proper practices.
When passing through Four Corners Monument on a road trip, I stopped to take the obligatory photo where the four states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico touch. I also stopped to use the facilities. On my way out of the bathroom, a woman asked me how they were.
“Pretty good. Mostly clean. Wouldn’t stay longer than I needed to.” I said the last part with a chuckle. Bathroom humor. She did not laugh.
“But do the toilets flush?”
They didn’t. It was some kind of vault toilet, and when I told the woman that, she balked.
“I’ll just find something to hide behind.”
The Four Corners Monument is situated on a high desert. The best and perhaps only thing to hide behind was the toilets themselves.
Backcountry rangers see this dynamic play out daily. A visitor in an endless stream of cars will recoil at the idea of using the same bathroom as millions of others. And a visitor who will spend $400 on a down quilt and $200 on a titanium stove will laugh at the idea of carrying a free waste kit. The math isn’t rational; it’s emotional. It’s about what we think wilderness should be: a place where we can disappear to be and do what we want.
Internationally, some places have tackled the issue with design, policy and cultural norms. In New Zealand’s Fiordland and Abel Tasman national parks, composting toilets are routinely helicoptered out and swapped when they reach capacity. These toilets don’t rely on user compliance, they rely on park infrastructure. In the Swiss Alps, waste is also frequently piped or airlifted away from high-altitude huts.
In Norway, toilets are not only better built, they’re often architecturally stunning: small cabins perched along trails with views of mountains or fjords, maintained with pride. And in parts of Japan, forest toilets are so well-designed that they can feel like tea houses – quiet, clean and integrated into the landscape. In these contexts, pooping is a matter-of-fact part of being human in nature, not an aberration.
These efforts are expensive. But so is the alternative. Denali national park spends tens of thousands each year removing human waste from glaciers and base camps. Mount Rainier has similar costs associated with fly-out waste barrels. And just one contract for vault toilet cleaning services at the Clear Creek ranger district recreation sites came in at almost $10,000 a year.
In remote regions of British Columbia, local governments are experimenting with solar dehydrating toilets and black soldier fly larvae to break down human feces. These innovations are promising, but still niche. Most US parks are left with a patchwork of Porta Potties, half-funded composters, and volunteer-run privy programs. How much would you need to love the outdoors to volunteer to carry other people’s poop?
As for my neck of the woods, there are no public facilities. We’re sandwiched between national forests and bisected by a mountain pass frequently taken by overlanders. From my house, the closest public toilet is at least 25 minutes, probably 40 if you account for parking in the popular resort town. There’s one portable toilet across from the post office, but it’s locked. It’s the postman’s toilet, and he walks across the road from the 8×8 shed we call our post office to use it.
Locally, we’ve talked about increasing signage, but the existing signage about speed limits, dust and whether or not the pass is even open seems to go unnoticed. Creating a bathroom-specific sign that says: “Please go to the bathroom here instead of in the woods because our dogs are eating your feces” is a lot to put on a placard. But it’s the detail that gets people’s attention.
Because poop only matters when it becomes personal.
When people mockingly ask, “does a bear shit in the woods?” It’s worth remembering that they don’t shit at all during hibernation. They form a fecal plug and then wait until they’re out of the den in the spring to release it.
Maybe it’s time we learn to wait, too.
About The Author
