Sorry, George, was not trying to be snarky. I find it ironic that SEKI NP has this nice looking toilet at Pear Lake within a designated wilderness that happens to be due west of Mt Whitney. Has an engineer looked at the composting issues there or is this left to Rangers to figure out? This elevation is probably about as high as you want to go with a composter type, a dehydrator starts to be a better choice. In order for a composting toilet to work here, the building must be very well insulated and solar heated as much as possible. It looks like it's had a makeover in the photo, I wonder if they insulated the inside of those pretty stone masonry walls.
I didn't realize Bearpaw was in an enclave boundary excluded from designated wilderness, but it's been there for 75 yrs so it makes sense. Muir Trail Ranch is like that, right on the JMT, also with toilets of course. Same with the Yosemite High Sierra Camps. Here's the quote from the Bearpaw website, "Bearpaw is set 11.5 miles into pristine national park backcountry, high atop a 7,800-foot granite saddle overlooking the Great Western Divide. Central shower house with flush toilets and hot showers." Nice little business in the middle of a wilderness.
I think we just have to agree to disagree about this one, George. You're a Ranger recommending hiring more Rangers to pick up plastic bags, and I'm an engineer recommending toilets as the best solution for a popular area like the Whitney Zone. I look at that toilet in the photo and I don't see impacts, I see proven environmental protection that's perfect for a lot of people in a sensitive area. The costs are shared by many and it comes out similar to the plastic bags full of chemicals. We both understand the difficulty of reversing what has been done at Whitney, but I thought you could at least stop claiming they don't work. I hope you can acknowledge that toilets are not unusual in the backcountry, whether it's designated wilderness or a carved out enclave surrounded by designated wilderness.
