#mylar balloons | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pcttrailsidereader · 19 days

Text

Trash on the Trail -- What's Out There

Bandages, balloons, bullet casings: Here’s how much trash is on the Pacific Crest Trail

A pair of environmental scientists who thru-hiked the trail last year conducted the largest known and most comprehensive survey of litter on the Pacific Crest Trail. Illustration by Sophie D'Amato/The Chronicle from No Trace Trails elements.

Their findings reflected my own perception of trash on the PCT. The litter I have encountered does seem to be concentrated around highway crossings, campgrounds, trailheads, and high-use areas with easy road access. The issue of toilet paper along the trail is a more complicated issue . . . one that seemingly combines awareness, behavioral change, and some infrastructure support.

ByGregory Thomas and Harsha Devulapalli

Roughly 1 million people per year venture onto the wild and scenic Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile hiking route that winds through the West Coast’s soaring mountain ranges between Mexico and Canada.

That includes hikers out for a day in the woods, backpackers on multiday trips and thru-hikers seeking to conquer the whole thing in one long trek. Inevitably, some of those nature lovers leave behind micro-trash and bits of plastic litter. No one has sought to quantify the impact of trash on the trail — until now.

A pair of environmental scientists who thru-hiked the trail last year conducted the largest known survey of litter on the PCT, providing a sharp look at the kinds of materials people leave on the trail, in what concentrations, and where. The project was carried out, mile by mile, by Tori McGruer, 29, who holds a doctorate in environmental toxicology, and Macy Gustavus, 25, who holds a master’s degree in watershed sciences.

Here’s what they found.

A look at a few of McGruer and Gustavus’ findings

Graphic by Sophie D'Amato/The Chronicle from No Trace Trails elements

McGruer and Gustavus started their journey in March 2023 in Campo (San Diego County), near the Mexican border, the launchpad for northbound thru-hikers. They’d secured $16,000 in funding through grants and partnerships, quit their jobs and hit the trail.

From the get-go, they found significant concentrations of litter — bottle caps, gum wrappers and rubber fragments.

Over the next six months, McGruer (right) and Gustavus hiked the full 2,650-mile trail, which crosses the High Sierra and the Cascade Range, to the Canadian border. They cataloged — and usually collected — more than 1,000 pieces of trash. They found lots of snack wrappers, used toilet paper, Band-Aids and cigarette butts as well as novelties like Mylar balloons, a spent shotgun cartridge and a rusty horseshoe.

The researchers surveyed 1-kilometer segments of trail at 10-mile intervals — a total of 260 survey areas ● (a rate of about 2-3 per day). Each hiker scoped for litter on her respective side of the trail to a distance of about 6 feet from its center.

They handled trash objects with plastic salad tongs for sanitary reasons and deposited them into waterproof stuff sacks, “so if there was something gross we could put it in there and not worry about it leaching out,” McGruer said.

Certain heavy or cumbersome items, like pieces of an abandoned car, were cataloged but left on the trail. They categorized each item using Rubbish, a mobile app that helps users organize and geolocate litter in open spaces.

So, the dirtiest stretch of the entire trail?

A long segment bookending the San Gabriel Mountains on the outskirts of Los Angeles was the dirtiest of the entire PCT, presumably due to its proximity to a major metropolis. One-third of all the trash the researchers logged during their trip came from this region.

A few survey areas there contained hundreds of litter items. However, the researchers set a 100-item maximum when counting litter in a given survey area. When they hit that threshold, they believed they could extrapolate the trash concentration with reasonable accuracy, they said.

Mylar Balloons

Those shiny, metallic, helium-filled balloons are remarkably durable and capable of floating long distances. Strangely, they are winding up in remote wilderness areas at a rate that is concerning to biologists, as the Chronicle has recently reported.

McGruer retrieved several of them in the Southern California desert — one stuck in a patch of bushes, another submerged in a river. Survey aside, she made it a personal mission to remove the ones she found.

“One day I had like three partially inflated ones attached to my pack and someone passing us on the trail said ‘happy birthday’ to me,” she said.

The researchers found trash in about 60% of the 260 survey zones, meaning 40% contained no discernible litter. The hot spots along the trail tended to correlate with areas of easy access and high human traffic like highway crossings, campgrounds and day-use areas.

Brian Feulner/Special to the Chronicle

Many of the zero-trash areas were in remote mountain regions like Northern California’s High Sierra and Washington’s Cascade Range, where few people set foot.

That finding tracks with the experience of Jack Haskel, trail information manager for the Pacific Crest Trail Association, which maintains the trail on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service.

“Much of the trail is pretty pristine regarding trash but you do find hot spots where there’s a lot of it,” he said.

The most common trash materials found were: soft plastics, such as bits of bar wrappers or cuts of duct tape; hard plastics like water bottles and broken trekking pole baskets; brass bullet casings; paper shreds and used toilet paper; cigarette butts; and miscellaneous fragments.

In many instances, researchers encountered single pieces of stray trash, one at a time. But sometimes they’d find dozens of pieces of litter linked to a single event. For instance, in the backcountry of Shasta County they found 50 or more strands of tree-flagging tape used by foresters scattered on the ground.

What’s that?

In some cases, differentiating rubbish from natural ground materials was challenging. Identifying and classifying objects required four of the five senses — sight, smell, touch and, at one point, taste.

Unsure about the makeup of a smooth chunk of translucent detritus they found in the dirt –— was it plastic? glass? a natural mineral? — Gustavus popped it into her mouth and bit down. Glass, she decided.

“That’s not common,” Gustavus said. “I don’t encourage people to do that.”

Toilet paper

Used toilet paper left along the trail — half-buried, stuffed under a rock, clinging to bushes — is the PCT’s single, stand-out trash problem, according to Haskel of the Pacific Crest Trail Association. It is a gross, unsightly bane of trail rangers and volunteer stewards. The trash researchers found a lot of it — particularly in the northern states.

“In Oregon and Washington there was toilet paper everywhere,” McGruer said. “I was like, what is happening?”

In lieu of using a toilet, backpackers and hikers should bury their waste several inches deep in the ground, or use a wag bag and carry it out, and take their soiled toilet paper with them. Poop carries toxins and bacteria that, even when buried, can leach into nearby water sources and infect wildlife, Haskel said.

Biodegradables

Sunflower seeds, pistachio and peanut shells, orange peels — the researchers found them scattered along the entire trail route, and seeing them drove Gustavus “absolutely insane.” Yes, they should technically break down over time, she said, but hikers shouldn’t feel free to dump them in the natural environment.

“It’s kind of a misguided principle,” Gustavus said. “That stuff does not belong out there.”

Pictured: Pistachio shells on the trail in the mountains of Washington State.

The pair completed their thru-hike in September 2023. McGruer (left) and Gustavus are shown here at the PCT's northern terminus in the remote mountains where Washington State meets Canada.

It’s important to note that many PCT users actively beautify the trail each year.

Local volunteer groups, rangers and backpackers are all known to pick up trash they encounter on their outings as a simple act of altruism. Also, eight years ago a pair of young men made it their mission to remove the junk they encountered during their thru-hike; they ended up with more than 700 pounds of stuff, including a mattress.

Extrapolating from their data, McGruer and Gustavus estimate there to be about 200,000 pieces of trash along the trail at any given moment. But that’s not to say the trail feels trashy, McGruer said.

“We frequently saw trash, but often there would be a small piece in one of our 1-kilometer surveys. You wouldn't register that as a ton of trash,” she said. “I think what our survey findings say is that people leave a trash footprint wherever we go with these materials that really don't break down in the environment.”

The survey project, which the researchers dubbed No Trace Trails, was supported by grant funding and financial backing through the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research in Long Beach via the Richard Lounsbery Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the American Alpine Club.

McGruer and Gustavus are putting together a research manuscript for peer review. They’re also seeking funds to help analyze the microplastic content of a series of soil samples they collected during their hike.

Sarah “Mountain Goat” Steinbauer from Austria hikes the Pacific Crest Trail near Quincy (Plumas County) on June 19, 2023. The heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada that year created special challenges for thru-hikers along the PCT. Brian Feulner / Special To The Chronicle

Credits

Reporting by Gregory Thomas. Reporting and graphics development by Harsha Devulapalli. Editing by Yoohyun Jung and Kate Galbraith. Design, development and illustration by Sophie D'Amato. Design editing by Alex K. Fong. Visuals editing by Ramin Rahimian. Powered by the Hearst Newspapers DevHub.

#Trash #Garbage #Mylar balloons #Trash on the PCT #Toilet Paper

8 notes · View notes