This "stone latrine" stands at nearly 13,000 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park/Erik Sommerfeld

There's the million-dollar restroom at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, the outhouse with a view in Grand Teton National Park, and now there's the stone latrine atop Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The first is breathtaking because of its price, the second because of the view down into the rugged Jedediah Smith Wilderness, and the last because of its novel functionality. So novel was the construction -- it's built almost entirely out of rocks collected on site -- and function of the stone latrines that the American Institute of Architects awarded it with a 2019 Small Project Award.

Those Longs Peak structures, at not quite 13,000 feet above sea level, aren't as lux as that facility at the Delaware River NRA, and lack the captivating view to be had from the Lower Saddle at Grand Teton, but they were quick to construct and utilize waste technology that is expected to greatly reduce the labor needed to haul off human waste from the high country.

The design was the brainchild of the Colorado Building Workshop, which is part of the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado. Students there, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Lab and the National Park Service, came up with a design that relies on a series of prefabricated thin steel plates as a frame to hold rocks collected on-site to form walls. Not only were the structures quickly constructed -- it took just eight days, with some of the supplies helicoptered in -- but they harken back to the ancestral Puebloan people's knack for blending their cliff dwellings into the surrounding cliffs. The students carefully stacked rocks into the frames almost like Jigsaw puzzle pieces -- they fit snugly together.

The latrines blend into the surrounding landscape high above sea level/Erik Sommerfeld

Stone latrine interior, showing closeup of rock design/Jesse Kuroiwa

The toilet technology was borrowed from Toilet Tech Solutions, a company that designed a system that diverts urine away into the surrounding landscape while allowing solid waste to decompose. Similar systems from the company have been used at the high camps at Mount Rainier National Park and for Angels Landing in Zion National Park.

Thanks to the decomposition of wastes, park crews don't have to make so many trips a season to haul it off. And when you consider that two park staff spend roughly 75 percent of their time shoveling human waste into 5-gallon buckets that are ferried out of the backcountry with two llamas, that's a huge benefit. 

The airy design of the stone latrines aids in minimizing, if not eliminating, smells. Along with the two waste systems in the latrines located in the Boulderfield on Longs Park, similar ones are in place at Chasm Meadow, Chasm Junction, and at Gem Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Jesse Kuroiwa photo