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There’s a crappy situation in Colorado’s backcountry: too many pooping hikers

Outdoor recreation groups hope handing out poop-disposal kits will cut down on the problem piling up on Colorado’s public lands

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Nancy Lofholm
The Colorado Sun
Noah Schum holds a prototype of PACT Lite, outside his home in Crested Butte, Colorado on Dec. 11, 2022. PACT Lite is a light weight, easy-to-use tool for disposing of human waste in the backcounty. The kit contains a small shovel in which everything is carried, tabs that expand into biodegradable sheets of toilet paper; hand sanitizer and tablets of mycelium that help break down waste. PACT Lite was created by Schum and his partner Jake Thomas who founded PACT Outdoors in the fall of 2020.
Dean Krakel/Special to The Colorado Sun

Hey, backcountry visitors, do Colorado a favor.

With a handy-dandy poop kit, help solve the crappy crisis of waste littering the state’s trails and dispersed campsites.

The concept of taking along a ready-made poop-disposal kit when hitting the outdoors got a boost last week when the Colorado Tourism Office chose the Gunnison Crested Butte Tourism Association’s “Doo” Colorado Right effort as one of 17 recipients of grants designed to promote sustainable tourism.

Amid the other grantee projects that address things like redesigning websites, upping interest in dude ranches and promoting midweek skiing, the Gunnison group’s project stands out for being the only proposal with a focus on defecation.

It’s not really a stretch. Tourism and poop are very intertwined. Where humans go, they do tend to “go,” and that has created a polluting problem on public lands.

Read more on ColoradoSun.com.

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