Keeping the Lost Coast Clean and Healthy

There are no toilets along the Lost Coast Trail. Human waste should be buried at least 8" deep in wet sand or wet gravel below the high tide mark on the beach. Many visitors come to the Lost Coast with much experience backpacking in the Sierra, the Trinity Alps, or other mountain wildernesses. There, the ethic is "200' from water". I find it understandable, therefore, that many folks are surprised to learn that on the Lost Coast the ethic is "as close to the ocean as you can safely get".

There is controversy here. Once upon a time, the National Leave-No-Trace organization advocated this "intertidal" disposal of human waste. Since then, LNT has changed their position and no longer advocates this practice. Unfortunately for wilderness users, LNT has offered no alternative or replacement for their old policy. Coastal wilderness is very unique--there are few in the United States--and so perhaps the jury is still out. Perhaps LNT hopes that all wilderness visitors to the Lost Coast will pack everything out?

In my experience, intertidal burial is the best option for feces disposal. Packing it out would be great but I fear that very few people would actually do this.

The camp areas along the Lost Coast tend to be in the mouths of narrow, steep-walled gorges. Some of these are completely isolated at high tide. Campers may sit high and dry in their campsite but have few other options as far as "places to go" when the call of nature comes. I often tell people on the beach, "Time your squat with the low tide".

When desperate people try to find a place to defecate 200' from water, they wind up scrambling up loose and sometimes dangerous slopes to dig their hole in a semiarid, biologically inactive soil. Inevitably, they find that digging a hole in that rocky ground is nearly impossible and... a few days later the ranger comes along and finds toilet paper streamers in the bushes that need to be reburied.

Below this desperate searcher, there is an ocean full of biological activity. Though there really is no place to go at extreme high tide, at most tide levels there is a place to go that will be inundated sometime soon. At low tide the options are endless. The digging is comparatively easy in the sand. Even on rocky beaches, though, a suitable place can be found.

One night, before going to bed at Buck Creek, I dug my hole in the wet sand right below the camp. Immediately to my right was about two cubic yards of wet gravel in a pile. To my left was a half-buried boulder. I took note of the spot and also noted that the high tide would be 7.4 feet (pretty high) at 1:00am. The next morning at 8am, I went in search of my spot with a shovel. I intended, as part of my experiment, to dig for my poop and see how the tide had affected it.

The two-cubic-yard gravel pile was gone. The boulder that I had squatted beside was largely exposed. The sandy spot that I had dug my hole in, the night before, was all rocks. I poked around a little but I'm confident that everything that I put in that hole went out to sea. It went out to sea where the sea lions, seals, humpback whales, sharks, and fish are all defecating on a regular basis. It went out to sea where the chitons and mollusks, nature's scouring pads, are probably long since finished metabolizing my waste. May yours be metabolized in a similar fashion.