Lake In Wyoming's Wind River Range Tests At 324X The Safe Limit For Fecal Bacteria [View all]

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Lonesome Lake has long been reputed to be unfit for drinking and even swimming. That’s due to contamination presumed to be from the hordes of humans who poop while traveling through the popular backcountry basin. Now there’s a datapoint to back it up. On Aug. 9, 2022, during the height of the recreation season, environmental regulators gathered a water sample from a foot below the surface near the outlet of Lonesome Lake.

The concentration of Enterococci—bacteria indicative of fecal matter—jumped off the page. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency didn’t make the results public for two years. When they were published, heads turned. Lonesome Lake’s sample contained 490,895 calibrator cell equivalents of Enterococci for every 100 milliliters. The EPA’s safety threshold for swimming is 1,280 CCE/100 mL.


A group of backpackers from the Salt Lake City area cross the outlet of Lonesome Lake on July 9. Credit: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile

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Regardless of who’s doing the pooping, there’s a lot of it and it’s easy to find. WyoFile visited Lonesome Lake in July and within minutes found seven makeshift latrines in likely areas—in the trees, not far off the trail. Most were loosely buried to varying degrees. In other places, toilet paper and excrement had become exposed.

And it’s not yet peak busy season. Early July, according to the trail-counter data, attracts 100 people or fewer to Lonesome Lake weekly. By early August, the weekly counts crest 250 wilderness travelers, and by the middle of August, a whopping 400 people are trekking into the Cirque of the Towers every seven days. Collectively, it’s a lot of biomass. A decent chunk of it gets left behind. Back-of-the-napkin poop math suggests that, at roughly a quarter pound per stool, perhaps 100 pounds of human feces are getting squished under rocks or buried in the shallow soil that rings Lonesome Lake on a weekly basis during the height of summer.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19072025/wyoming-lonesome-lake-fecal-contamination/