Like much of the outdoors industry, hiking has a waste problem. If we hikers, who live outdoors and ostensibly for it, aren’t obsessive stewards of shared resources, how can we expect anyone else to be? We must do better. I reached the Canadian border a week later, toting more than a twinge of guilt. That was less than a quarter of my hike, meaning I’d likely tossed an excess of 3,000 bits of junk overall, more than one per mile. And those were only the ones I remembered to count during a month when I tried to curb my waste. By the start of September, I’d somehow discarded 686 separate items, or more than 20 each day. On and on it went, from pizza boxes to joint containers, red pepper pouches to two garlic bulbs. I discarded so many compostable coffee pouches that I could not compost that I now cannot bear to type the number.
There were 17 ketchup packets, almost as much hot sauce, and one plastic pint of Southern Comfort. I trashed nine hummus containers and 30 Ziploc bags, two shoes and 34 cans of stove fuel, beer, and soda water. So from Oregon’s enchanting Crater Lake to the faux Bavarian burg of Leavenworth, Washington, I catalogued every bit of my waste, chronicling each outgoing parcel in a single cellphone note that grew so long scanning it began to feel like a personal doomscroll.
How much stuff, I wondered, was I wasting? The sheer quantity was impressive in a Mad Max prequel kind of way.
There were snapped trekking poles and overspent hiking shoes, empty pouches of dehydrated food and crumpled vestiges of instant coffee. 5 Rules to Reduce Waste on the Trail A thru-hiker’s best tips for decreasing your garbageįor the first three months of my trek, I’d seen trashcans at almost every trailhead or convenience store my fellow Hiker Trash friends frequented, overflowing with our collective refuse.