Toilet (5)

For a number of years now I have been a volunteer wilderness ranger in the Los Padres National Forest, as part of a partnership between the US Forest Service and our local Ventana Wilderness Alliance (VWA). Last Saturday we had our annual summit, where I once again got invigorated about going out on at least eight outings for the next year in our Wilderness areas: the Ventana and the Silver Peak.

VWRs (Ventana Wilderness Rangers), VWA staff,
USFS representatives: one big happy family

Today was my first such outing, with my friend and fellow ranger Lynn and our new trainee Lynne. Our goal: to move a wilderness toilet at one of the several very popular camps along Big Sur's Pine Ridge Trail. "Move" means: dig a new hole, then relocate the heavy wooden box from the old hole to the new one. Hoping the shit in the old hole hasn't piled up too high—which in this case, thankfully, it hadn't (quite). And then covering up the old shit with the dirt we dug up from the new hole. We used a shovel, a heavy digging bar, and a tomato can in this endeavor. Here are a few photos:

Lynn starts the new hole

We've made some progress!

Done!

And reconfigured!

You can see where the old toilet was;
we "naturalized" and hope everything remains stable

After completing this project, and having lunch, we checked out the second toilet at Barlow Flat. Oy! It is overfull: shit well up into the box. I am really glad that I was in on this first venture. The next one will be good experience for another one of our five trainees ;-)

We have a number of wilderness toilets under our purview: 1 at Ventana Camp, 2 at Terrace Creek Camp, 2 at Barlow Flat Camp, 3 at Sykes Camp, 1 at Pine Ridge Camp, and 1 at Willow Camp (all in the Ventana Wilderness), plus two in the Silver Peak Wilderness, at Estrella and Spruce Camps. I have a feeling that, given the increased use of these beautiful backcountry venues, we'll be seeing more toilet maintenance coming our way. It's okay. Better than picking up stray toilet paper behind random trees along the trail.

Moving toilets is just one part of our job. We also clean up and remove fire rings, pick up trash, do "brushing," repair trail tread, saw trees out of the trail, and best of all, talk to visitors. Today we met up with 15 backpackers (and two dogs). They all seemed really happy to be out on a beautiful day. 

As were we.