There are 378 parks in the National Park system, covering 83 million acres.  In 1998, 287 million people visited those parks.  The park facilities are simply overwhelmed.  Because each park sets its budget allocations differently, there's no telling how much of the system's $1.7 billion annual budget is spent on poop management, according to a National Park Service official, but most of the money goes for other essentials.  

At Yosemite, workers are experimenting with a solar baker, or "hot box," essentially a sun-powered oven that breaks down human poop helicoptered in from the remote composting toilets.  The poop in the toilets is combined with wood chips.  Once it's baked and made safe, it's used for topsoil in the park's gardens.  Note: A similar method, known as "making brownies," has been employed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Still, Yosemite is struggling with the poop management issue in the back country, according to John Clark, a facility management specialist for the National Park Service.  The composting toilets, he says, don't really work because they're overused and the excessive moisture prevents the poop from decomposing.  That's why the hot box is used.  "Away from the service areas," Clark said, "we have cement vault toilets where the waste has to be pumped out.  This is very costly.  And people don't like to use them because they don't smell very good."

The park gets complaints at heavily traveled Inspiration Point "all the time," according to Clark. "Sometimes you pull over to the side of the road to take a picture and you look over the edge and see toilet paper and human poop splayed down the side," he said.

Swain and Oye say the poop problem has affected some animal behavior, a no-no in Leave No Trace circles.  Mountain goats and bighorn sheep have been known to paw at soil and rocks because of the scent of human urine on them.  Deer have been seen licking the rocks because of the high salt content in human urine.  "One  solution is dilution," says Swain, explaining that "pouring water over urine will reduce the scent and wash away the salt."  But then that means using the precious water one is carrying to dilute one's own pee.  As James Joyce wrote, "look before you leak."

Roger Drake, who oversaw the "blue bag program" at Mount Rainier before transferring to the Grand Canyon, says health concerns have grown in recent years. "It's pretty disgusting to think about it," Drake said, "but after being around these bags for a few years, I've seen some people do it pretty well and others make a mess of it.  Clearly, there's a need for a better solution."

Oye and others say the answer to wilderness poop management will not necessarily be more rules or greater enforcement — park rangers hiding behind trees and writing tickets.  Instead, it'll come down to encouraging people to deal with their own poop appropriately.  "How we're eventually going to get people to deal with this, I don't know.  A lot of people would like to joke about this but eventually the joking has to cease and we have to look at what problems this presents us," said Oye.  "It's really out of control now."