A crusade to combat the proliferation of poop in Colorado’s backcountry entered a new frontier this week with the creation of a “Clean 14” initiative focusing on the state’s iconic 14,000-foot peaks.

A kiosk opened Tuesday at the north trailhead to Mount Elbert, the state’s highest peak at 14,437 feet, where hikers can pick up free bags designed to pack out human waste. Bags used on the trail can be left in a receptacle contained in the kiosk, 4,400 feet below the summit. The Clean 14 effort is a partnership involving the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics and Pact Outdoors, a Gunnison company that produces the pack-out bags.

Last year, Pact Outdoors participated in a program called Doo Colorado Right involving another of its products, Pact Lite, a tool designed to reduce human waste in the backcountry by burying it with a substance that accelerates decomposition. Through a grant from the Colorado Tourism Office, in association with the Tourism and Prosperity Partnership of Gunnison and Crested Butte, Pact Outdoors distributed thousands of free Pact Lite kits at ranger stations, Colorado visitor centers and trailheads. Doo Colorado Right is back again this year with new distribution partners, including the Steamboat Chamber of Commerce, the Aspen Resort Chamber, the Telluride Tourism Board and the Town of Vail.

Kits like those don’t eliminate all the problems presented by poop, though. In the harsh high-alpine environment above timberline on fourteeners, there is little or no soil. Digging holes is hard, if not impossible, and poop won’t decompose even with an accelerating agent.

Mount Elbert tops out at 3,000 feet above timberline. Fourteeners, as Pact Outdoors co-founder Jake Thomas puts it, “are really piles of rocks.” Thus the focus on fourteeners.

Read more from John Meyer at DenverPost.com.