Packing it out: waste and trash in desert canyon country

Anyone who has walked up to a favorite pullout on a busy weekend and found a fringe of toilet paper caught in the blackbrush knows the problem. The canyon country around Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge and Indian Creek has grown far busier over the past decade, and in 2020 many travelers chose to camp rather than stay indoors. Most of that camping is dispersed: no toilets, no dumpsters, nobody to clean up.

Human waste left on the ground or tucked under a rock is more than ugly. It carries disease, it washes into the potholes and springs that people and wildlife drink from, and left beside an alcove or a wall it is an insult to the Pueblo, Navajo and Ute families for whom those places are sacred.

Why waste lingers here

In a forest, a buried cathole breaks down within a season or two because the soil is damp and full of bacteria, fungi and insects. Desert soil has little of any of that. Rain is scarce, the top layer bakes in summer and freezes in winter, and much of the ground is bare slickrock or a few inches of sand over stone. Feces buried in that sand tend to dry out rather than decompose, and the next windstorm or flash flood can uncover them.

Archaeologists have a blunt measure of how long it lasts. Dried human feces, called coprolites, have been recovered from the region’s alcoves centuries after they were left, intact enough to show what their makers ate. The same dryness keeps a used wipe or an orange peel looking new for years.

Toilets you carry

The cleanest answer is to pack human waste out entirely. Use a flush toilet in town before driving out, and carry a waste bag kit, often called a WAG bag, for the rest of the day. It holds a powder that gels liquid and controls odor, inside a sealable outer bag. Most brands are made to go in ordinary household trash afterward, so a used kit rides out in a hard-sided container and goes in a dumpster in town. Kits are sold at outdoor stores and online.

Rules differ by area:

• Indian Creek. The BLM asks climbers and campers to pack out human waste, as its Indian Creek visitor page explains.
• San Juan River. River permits require a washable, leak-proof toilet system or an approved bag system carried in a sealed hard container.
• Cedar Mesa canyons. Without a bag, dig a cathole six to eight inches deep, at least 200 feet from water, trails, camps and any cultural site, and carry the toilet paper out. The BLM’s Cedar Mesa questions page covers each permit area.

Toilet paper, trash and dish water

Used toilet paper goes in a zip-top bag, every time, even with a cathole. Paper buried in dry sand barely breaks down and is soon dug up by animals or bared by wind. Burning it risks wildfire.

Small trash is the other quiet mess: bottle caps, twist ties, a torn wrapper corner, pistachio shells, fruit peels. Peels and shells feel natural, but here they last a year or longer and teach ravens and rodents to visit camps. A quick sweep of the ground before leaving any stop catches most of it.

For dishes, scrape food into the trash bag, wash with a little water well away from camp, strain out the bits and scatter the gray water widely, 200 feet or more from any pothole, spring or creek. Never wash in a pothole. Those pools hold fairy shrimp and other small animals that hatch only in brief wet spells, and soap or sunscreen can wipe them out.

Choosing a campsite already in use, on bare ground and well away from alcoves, limits the damage before any of this starts.