SCOTT KIRKWOOD
Writer + Editor + Creative Director
WHEN NATURE CALLS
Architecture students at CU-Denver design and build the one backcountry structure that nobody talks about but everybody needs.
EVERY YEAR, MORE THAN 20,000 HIKERS SET OUT TO EXPLORE LONGS PEAK, one of Colorado’s most well-known 14ers. For most of them, the 15-mile round-trip journey starts before sunrise and ends early in the evening. Which is a long time to hold it. That’s why, like it or not, toilets are an essential part of the backcountry in Rocky Mountain National Park. Last year the Park Service recognized that more than three decades of wind, rain, snow, and toothy marmots had taken a toll on the route’s outhouses, and it was time for something new—something different.
It’s the type of small-scale project that’s tailor-made for grad students at CU-Denver’s Colorado Building Workshop, who exchange 19 weeks of free labor for hands-on experience. Backcountry toilets aren’t often featured in student portfolios and glossy architecture magazines, but the project was full of intriguing design challenges, from the rigorous guidelines governing park construction to the logistics of transporting materials through designated wilderness. There are no roads or infrastructure on the trail to Longs Peak—for much of the journey, there isn’t even a trail.
“We were building in remote backcountry, at altitude, so we had to design a structure that’s heavy enough to withstand strong winds, but light enough to be transported by helicopter,” says Rick Sommerfeld, director of the Colorado Building Workshop. “The students worked with our engineering professors and outside consultants and settled on gabion cages, with rocks creating the mass, or ballast.” Simple mesh structures that effectively take the place of mortar, gabion cages let gravity do the hard work—that is, until those 100-mile-per-hour winds kick in. Students solved that problem by adding vertical steel plates for lateral stability. The most ingenious bit? The gabion cages would be filled with rocks found on the mountain, which lightened the helicopter’s load. And all those rocks can be scattered across the landscape when the structures reach the end of their useful lives.
Park Service crews built the foundations in July; in August the students hiked to the three sites to turn the helicopter’s payload into four privies at three locations: Chasm Meadows and Chasm Junction—a little more than 3 miles from the trailhead—and the Boulder Field, near the end of the 7.5-mile trail. Students camped at a site just below treeline, woke around 3:30 a.m., and hiked one to three miles each way for two weeks. Assembling the steel plates and gabion cages took only a day or two; the remaining time was spent gathering rocks, carrying them long distances, and putting them in place—all at 10,000 to 12,000 feet.
“One of the biggest challenges of the project is simply working at altitude,” says Daniel Lawson, facility manager for Rocky Mountain National Park. “You may find yourself holding a Phillips-head screwdriver in your hand, staring at a flathead screw for five minutes—your brain just doesn’t work the same up there.”
The structures’ most obvious feature—the lack of a roof—was designed to discourage hikers and animals from using them as shelter and to prevent a winter phenomenon called spindrift.
“With spindrift, wind pushes snow into impossibly small crevices, and because it has no way to escape, it blows around the structure and fills it up,” says Sommerfeld. “We worked with fluid dynamics experts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and decided to put small openings on the windward side, larger openings on the opposite side, and vents along the floor, so the snow has a better chance of moving through the structure—either out the opposite side or up and out through the roof, like a vortex.”
The work was completed last August, only a few weeks before the end of the summer season, so it’s too soon to tell how hikers feel about the new facilities. But the project has already won kudos from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
“When this project first came to us, a lot of the students said, ‘Toilets? Really?’” says Sommerfeld. “But once we went up to Long Peak and saw the site, everyone said, ‘This is a really beautiful place. How do we not mess this up? How do we make these structures almost invisible in the landscape, like ghosts that you can identify as structures, but that don’t really call themselves out?’ And by the end, there wasn’t a single student who wasn’t really excited about the finished product.”