A Colorado Company Wants to Change the Way Hikers Poop in the Backcountry

This past summer, hikers on Colorado’s highest peak, 14,438-foot Mount Elbert, were met by a peculiar welcome committee.

Volunteers from Colorado Fourteeners Initiative handed out WAG bags near a padlocked receptacle marked “human waste pack-out bags only.” On some days, a researcher from Penn State University stopped visitors to ask questions about—you guessed it—poop.

Called Clean 14, the infrastructure was the latest in a multi-year research project undertaken by PACT Outdoors, a Colorado-based company that designs products for sustainable pooping in the backcountry. The project aims to improve the way that hikers and officials in Colorado, and potentially the rest of the U.S. West, handle solid human waste on public lands.

“Our stance is that if you give people better tools and processes they’ll happily use them for the betterment of themselves and everybody else,” PACT Outdoors co-founder Jake Thomas told Outside.

The problem with Colorado’s current poop protocol, Thomas said, isn’t ignorance. “People know you’re not supposed to poop in the outdoors and just leave it there,” he said.

Instead, he believes the current infrastructure and processes are to blame for the uncovered poop found alongside trails. PACT’s goal is to figure out what methods and products help people either bury their waste, or pack it out. This process involves creating product prototypes, launching pilot programs, and researching behavior.

Thomas told Outside that little research existed on the topic prior to PACT’s efforts.

“Somebody once told me that the things most in need of innovation are the things people least want to talk about,” Thomas said. “And in this case it’s true. Human waste in the outdoors is a massively under-researched topic.”

PACT conducted its first study shortly after its launch in September 2000. The company, which was founded by Thomas and Noah Schum, surveyed 25,000 customers of the now-defunct outdoor retail giant Moosejaw about their pooping habits. Seventy two percent admitted to improperly managing their poop while recreating outside. People’s understanding of the Leave No Trace principle of digging a six- to eight-inch deep cathole to bury their solid waste also varied widely.

“We realized we needed to simplify and standardize it,” Thomas said. “There are kits for so many other things in the outdoors—first aid, cooking, camping. Why not for pooping?”

The company’s first product was a compact, portable, outdoor bathroom kit containing a small but durable shovel, wipes, and hand sanitizer. The kit also contained tablets of mycelium, a fungal structure that speeds the decomposition of poop. Two years later, PACT Outdoors unveiled a streamlined version of this kit called the PACT Lite, which came with an even smaller, more ergonomic shovel that stores the mycelium tablets and wipes in its handle.

In 2023, PACT Outdoors received grant funding from Colorado Tourism to hand out 3,500 PACT Lite kits at trailheads, ranger stations, and visitors centers across the state.

“We called it “Doo” Colorado Right,” Thomas said. “It confirmed our belief that people will do the right thing if they have the right tool.”

Rangers told PACT researchers that it’s difficult to talk to outdoor users about poop preparedness. But having a product to give to people changed the tone of the conversations, Thomas said. “Suddenly they’re engaged, they feel empowered,” he said. “They are a part of the solution. They’re not just somebody who’s being managed and regulated.”

The positive response to “Doo” Colorado Right led to PACT Outdoors’ initiative on Mount Elbert. The program explored an even more unsavory topic: Picking up your own poop and packing it out via a WAG bag. The trails on fourteeners include significant stretches in the alpine, where there’s not enough soil to break down human waste. Many routes include long stretches of snow and rock, where waste will remain open to the elements. In these environments, Leave No Trace rules dictate that visitors pack their poop out.

To help communicate the WAG bag plan on Mount Elbert, PACT Outdoors borrowed from research done on pet owners. Creating physical infrastructure—specifically, bag dispensers—helps dog owners pick up and dispose of their pet’s poop.

The company also gleaned insights from three years of interviews conducted with hikers. According to this research, hikers are less prone to pick up their poop if they have nowhere to put it. Human feces is considered a biohazard because it contains pathogens that cause disease. You’re not supposed to just toss it in the trash.

PACT’s solution was to build a kiosk at the Mount Elbert trailhead stocked with complimentary WAG bags, and a sanitary receptacle for disposing of them. A researcher from Penn State tracked results for 20 days and surveyed hikers on their general attitude toward WAG bags.

Thomas says the results, reported in November by Vail Daily, surprised PACT staffers. For 30 percent of the hikers, nature’s call aligned with the presence of a pit toilet. The other 70 percent had to do their business in the wild. Of those who pooped in the wild, 57 percent were in a place where they could bury it, and the other 43 percent used the complimentary WAG bag. “The long-standing belief that people just aren’t going to pack out their poop didn’t hold up,” he said.

“We feel pretty confident from the study that we’ve not been giving people enough credit for what they’re willing to do if it’s properly introduced,” he added.

PACT Outdoors’ vision is to put a WAG bag kit kiosk and human waste receptacle on all 58 of Colorado’s Fourteeners. Each kit will be printed with instructions in big bold letters, as well as information to help drive greater adoption. There will also be humor: The backside of the outer packaging is called The Daily Dump, a mock newspaper. The kit will include an enzyme that deodorizes and dehydrates the poop, killing some of the pathogens and making it easier to pack out.

It’s an ambitious plan that could have a huge impact on some of the busiest trails in the state. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative recorded 260,000 hiker use days on the peaks in 2023. Mount Elbert sees 15,000 hikers a year, most of them in a highly concentrated span of eight to ten weeks in the late summer. According to PACT, an estimated 1,650 people poop on the mountain each season, and many of them are unfamiliar with packing out their own poop. Currently, Rangers hike the peak with llamas to haul the feces back down.

Thomas points out that people are quick to understand the environmental impacts of human feces in the wild, for example as a water source contaminant. And we all grok the negative effect on both locals and tourists when someone slips in a pile of human poop at an otherwise iconic Colorado wilderness site. But far fewer people realize how expensive and resource-intensive the status quo waste management process is for the Forest Service and BLM. “Districts or offices in high use areas have told us that it’s about half of their annual budget,” Thomas said. “That’s huge.”

The current protocol generally includes pumping and cleaning vault toilets and disposing of mishandled waste. Thomas and his colleagues think PACT Outdoors’ innovations will eliminate the cost of having to clean up rogue poop. Plus, fostering a pack-out-your-poop culture will alleviate usage on existing vault toilets, as well as reduce the need for building more of them in the future.

“There’s a lot of steps that need to happen between now and then,” Thomas said. “But the first step, in our minds, was will people pack out in this type of environment? And we feel pretty confident that the answer is yes.”