Elsewhere: The Problem of Human Waste Management in the Wilderness

[American Alpine Club]

It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Geoff Hill had chopped up frozen human waste—overflowing from a 200-liter barrel. He was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), studying the effects of climate change in the Canadian Arctic. The university had arranged a deal with the Inuit whose land he was standing on. The students could conduct research there, but they could not leave any trace, including human waste—hence the chopping.
All around him, the Arctic gleamed in shades of dense ice, the ocean a penetrating blue. Below the tundra, in a hole, out of sight, was where the research team kept the thing no one ever talks about: a frozen bucket of human waste, a.k.a. a “sht barrel,” as Hill often calls it. Tucked away. Put elsewhere.
And that’s the trouble. In a wilderness like the Arctic, there is no elsewhere.
As a climber who fell in love with alpine rock, Hill has spent much time on the road driving toward his next climbing destination. He learned quickly that what he loved most was swimming through a 5.10 hand crack high on a steep, sunny wall. That lifelong thirst for high-country granite would bring him to many wild places, including Mt. Barrill in the Ruth Gorge, El Cap, the Bugaboos, and Mont Blanc’s aiguilles. An epic during an alpine climb in the Canadian Rockies in 2004 spurred him to start reading Accidents in North American Climbing, and he would continue engaging with the AAC throughout his climbing career—for the rescue benefit, community, and research grants that would, in turn, help catalyze his calling.
His passion for these alpine landscapes was boundless, but Hill’s educational path in environmental science was bringing him up against the reality of outdoor recreation’s environmental impact. He wanted to do something about it.
Hill began with driving, launching the Biodiesel Project at UBC, which added sodium hydroxide and methanol to a vat of recycled cooking oil to create an alternative to diesel. “It was fun and dangerous in the beginning,” he recalls. “The pH is crazy. Like, if it splashed in your eye, for sure it would have dissolved a hole in your eyeball.” But it worked. He would fuel up his 1993 Volkswagen Jetta with this biofuel and hit the road to Canmore, Squamish, and even Yosemite. He would later teach some Yosemite rangers how to run their own trucks on biofuel from their waste kitchen grease.
Called by the mountains, Hill toyed with becoming an ACMG Guide (the AMGA equivalent in Canada), but when he failed his exam, he realized his heart wasn’t in it and that he’d rather serve the mountain environment itself—not clients.
Funded by Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (and an AAC Research Grant), Hill started ringing up the rangers and national park personnel he’d worked with during his previous studies and guide training. He wanted to study the alpine environment in a way that would produce practical results: What did they need help with?
Again and again, the National Park Service spoke to the problem of human waste management. Tara Vessella, who runs the backcountry program in Rocky Mountain National Park, spoke of the ongoing struggle to find new land for pit toilets. As Hill recalls her saying, “I cannot find a spot in the forest to put a new pit toilet because every time I dig a hole in the ground, I find old sht.” The pit-toilet model, so ubiquitous in the United States, wasn’t sustainable for backcountry landscapes with such intense visitation numbers. So Hill, recalling his frozen-waste-chopping days, embarked on a PhD that would make everyone else’s “business” into his business.
Humans expel feces and urine daily—what we term “waste” when it’s not well integrated into the ecosystem, especially our poop. Yet when we look at the terms more commonly used for animal poop—dung, scat, droppings, guano—the “waste” subtext is absent, revealing a bias toward thinking that human excrement is dysfunctionally related to the natural environment. But Geoff Hill believes it doesn’t have to be that way.
The science is pretty straightforward: Human urine (and all mammal urine, for that matter) is excellent plant fertilizer. Meanwhile, human poop is food for invertebrates and microorganisms—in fact, in the process of eating mammal poop, microorganisms produce rich organic matter that makes for fertile soil.

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Elsewhere: The Problem of Human Waste Management in the Wilderness — American Alpine Club

A Profile of AAC Member Geoff Hill By Hannah Provost Originally published in Guidebook XVII . It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Geoff Hill had chopped up frozen human waste—overflowing from a 200-liter barrel. He was a graduate student at the University of British Col

American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org)