Million-dollar privy doesn't do the job

Even though Sperry Chalet is tucked seven miles into Glacier National Park's backcountry, expensive renovation work there attracted a lot of attention in the late 1990s.

Now, seven years after it was finished, the centerpiece of the project - a rock-sided restroom facility designed to match the historic architecture at the chalet - has never worked as it was expected to, says John Kilpatrick, Glacier's facilities chief.

Instead of a state-of-the-art composting toilet at Sperry, there are now simple removable drums that have to be flown out by helicopter once a year.

It's been a disappointing and confounding situation for Kilpatrick and others at the park, considering that the four-hole, solar-powered privy cost about $1 million as part of a $2.4 million overhaul at Sperry that was finished in 1998.

"It has never worked as effectively as it was designed to," Kilpatrick says, explaining that the composting system was actually a hybrid system as a result of the project shifting through at least two designers.

"We just weren't reaching the temperatures that would allow us to compost, even in the summer. Over the course of the summer, the temperatures were never getting up to where you get composting and you get reductions in [waste] volume," Kilpatrick said.

After years of filling with little composting, the toilet units had to be removed entirely last summer. They were flown out by helicopter and emptied at the park's new tertiary

sewage treatment plant near Apgar.

In their place, the park installed capped drums that collect waste and can be easily removed once a year.

Even if the composting toilets had worked, park officials had always expected them to be periodically cleaned out, with lesser volumes of waste being flown out.

"Under any case, we were always going to use helicopters to remove waste," Kilpatrick said. That's the way it works with virtually all of the park's backcountry restrooms, including the toilets at Granite Park Chalet.

The upside of the capped drums at Sperry is that park employees are not required to shovel waste or handle it any fashion, whereas the composting toilets required some manual maintenance, Kilpatrick said.

"It was always very difficult to remove material from those [composting] units," he said.

While the cost of the Sperry overhaul drew some criticism, Kilpatrick says the bulk of the cost can be directly attributed to the remote, rugged location of the chalet.

"The real expense in that project was the construction of the restrooms in a historic setting, and it was a tough site to work in. The cost wasn't with these units themselves," he said. "Everything had to be brought in by horse or helicopter."

But waste management was the driver behind the overhaul.

Sperry and Granite Park chalets - the last backcountry chalets built by the Great Northern Railway soon after the park was established - were closed in 1992 after Montana water quality officials determined that the long-standing practice of emptying septic tanks on the slopes below the chalets was no longer acceptable. Pushed by Montana's congressional delegation and a strong constituency that wanted the chalets reopened, the park had to find a solution.

The project was turned over to the National Park Service's Denver Service Center, an engineering and design think tank that had a reputation for big spending. The service center, which had just completed a severe reduction in staffing and responsibilities because of that reputation, was in charge of engineering, designing and supervising the Sperry project - overhead work that cost $800,000, or one-third of the total project budget.

It was work that required teams of service-center engineers and architects to visit the chalet, and at least one full-time supervisor at the job site for three summers of work.

But mothballing the chalet wasn't an acceptable option for the park service.

"The public resoundingly wanted that facility to stay open for the use that it's currently being used for," Kilpatrick said. And that required a new way to manage waste at both Sperry and Granite Park chalets.

Granite Park has become an even more difficult problem.

The chalet has two toilet units designed to reduce waste through composting, evaporation and drying, and they are not working properly.

"The problem is those units are getting so much use that they aren't functioning well," Kilpatrick said. "We still aren't able to keep up with the volume that people use there. We have 300 to 350 uses every day there."

As a result, the park has to fly out Granite Park's waste once a year.

And Kilpatrick does not see any technology or funding on the horizon to change the way waste is managed at the backcountry chalets.

"At all these backcountry sites, we're going to have to fly waste out as far into the future as I can see," he said. "That's not going to change."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com