8/15/09
Meeker
Park
It's
another crappy day in paradise, which is why Doug Beahm and his
three-llama pack string are huffing up to Chasm Lake on a critical
mission: waste removal.
Beahm and his four-footed
companions are in charge of
hauling the droppings left at the latrines by hundreds of hikers in
Rocky Mountain National Park.
Wastes have been hauled from
the park for decades - but now they are
becoming a bigger concern as backcountry ethics evolve.
"Everybody's
going to use the bathroom up there - at least we hope," said Sue
Richert, a park
employee who held the waste-hauling job for eight
years. "We have to manage that."
But for the first time this
summer, rock climbers in one
part of the park are being asked to haul out their waste in chemically
lined bags - a move considered the 
future of backpacking and camping.
"We're trying to change human
behaviors - not just in
climbing sites but in all of the backcountry," said Jim Dougan, the
park's wilderness program specialist.
For decades, the recommended
method has been to bury
waste in shallow "cat holes" and either burn or carry out used toilet
paper.
After tens of millions of
visitors to popular sites such
as the national parks, many are beginning to question whether the
landscape can tolerate more human waste, which can contaminate water
and cause illness.
In addition, it doesn't break
down readily in environments like the
alpine tundra.
Dougan
suggests that a public-education campaign - similar to those that
raised the collective consciousness of littering in the 1970s - will be
required.
"We need to get people to think
about these trail
corridors the way they think about their rivers," Dougan said. "Almost
everyone on a river trip knows you have to pack your waste out."
To that end, the park and the
Golden-based American
Alpine Club have established a kiosk on a climbers' trail near Lumpy
Ridge, where hikers can pick up the "Restop 2" sanitary bags.
"It's become more a problem as
more people go into the
backcountry and as the solutions that may have been reasonable 20 years
ago may be less reasonable now," said Phil Powers, executive director
of the mountaineering organization.
Powers said the bags seal
tightly and contain odor so
well that it's no big deal to carry them, fully loaded, inside a
backpack, and that they're actually much easier to "target" than a cat
hole.
The chemicals neutralize the
waste to the point that they can be
thrown in the trash and taken to landfills.
The
bags cost the Park Service $1.50 each, but officials are distributing
them for free to climbers because of the cost and the need to develop
greater public acceptance, Dougan said.
In part, the llamas also build
that public understanding.
Heffer,
Lloyd and Borman, the woolly pack animals, never fail to attract
attention when they march nose-to-tail through the tundra.
Beahm makes weekly trips to the
park's four backcountry latrines,
packing up to 100 pounds on each animal. 
The
park has tried other methods of waste removal, but helicopters proved
too costly and intrusive, and horses tend to wear deep troughs in the
trails, unlike the soft-footed llamas.
"At one point, we tried taking
up a propane tank and
torch and tried burning it. But by the time you bring the tanks up
there, you might as well just haul it out," Richert said.
Beahm, a gregarious former
rodeo cowboy, delightedly
engages the hikers he encounters, chatting them up and posing for
photos with the llamas until the tourists get around to asking: What
are they carrying?
"People
say: 'What a terrible job,"' Beahm
said. "I go
yeah, it's terrible. I walk through God's splendor for two hours. And
yeah, there's about 10 or 15 minutes of discomfort, but there's bad
parts to every job."
