TOTAL COLIFORM ANALYSIS OF GLACIAL MELTWATER IN MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK

Mount Rainier National Park sees an average of 10,000 climbers attempting to summit the mountain every year. Managing climbers’ waste is difficult for the Park Service considering much of the area is a fragile alpine environment. To assess if waste is contaminating downstream environments, five glacial terminus streams were tested for total coliforms using the membrane filtration method. These samples were collected from glaciers that vary in climbing activity and waste disposal methods, allowing us to evaluate the efficacy of high-alpine human waste management techniques such as blue bag collection and seasonal solar toilets. Samples were collected between the hours of 9:00am and 3:00pm during July and August, the months where the park historically experiences the highest number of climbers. Preliminary results suggest the presence of total coliforms in only the Carbon Glacier terminus stream, which could be indicative of human contamination. This result, if confirmed, could be due to a weekend of heavy climbing traffic on a route where there are no composting toilets and the only method of disposing of human waste is blue bag collection. Continued collection of samples through the end of the climbing season will target glaciers with high climbing traffic and will be timed to closely follow periods of heavy use. Our results indicate current waste management strategies are successfully containing human waste associated with mountaineering activity on Mount Rainier.