The Continental Divide Trail: Is Lonesome Lake Really Polluted?

Poo’s Prometheus, part two

«In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.»

—Yogi Berra

doThose damn Huck Smores shoes were killing me.

I cut off the heel of my shoe and then a piece of the collar of the other shoe. I put away my knife. «I think that will help. It has to be that way,» I told Ice Cream. He stood there silently, as he usually does when I’m suffering. I had seen too much of this trail. The horrible COVID attack on the Bob Marshall, a constant battle with ingrown toenails, now this.

I haven’t mentioned ingrown toenails much, but I periodically carved out my large toenails by hand with a 1/16-inch Dremel sanding bit and then pulled out what I could with a pair of forceps, a process that took days but gave me two or three weeks of relief before they grew back enough to start hurting again. Now, the cursed shoes had increased my discomfort and walking had become unbearable.

I was still on the floor, feeling guilty, sewing up the injured shoes with dental floss and a candle needle. «Sorry I’m stopping so long.»

«Don’t be sorry to suffer. If you need to stop again and eliminate more, that’s fine. Do you think you can make it to Lander with those?»

I nodded. «Yeah, probably, I don’t think the shoes will fall apart as long as I don’t cut too much.» I put my newly mutilated shoes back on and took a few test steps. The right shoe no longer felt like it had a piece of plastic cutting into the back of my heel, the left one stopped rubbing against my ankle bone. «Let’s try again.»

Shoe modifications helped. I had eliminated the pain from the shoe, although the toenail cycle repeated itself (pain, surgery, relief, pain). I bought some miles. One thing at a time. Pinedale was behind us, the Cirque of the Towers and the rest of the Winds in front. Lander, a real city with a real supplier, was still days away, at the northern edge of the Great Dividing Basin. If the shoes fell apart before then, I was screwed.

one thing at a time.

Next up: Texas Pass, the southern entrance to Cirque.

Texas Pass is located at 11,508 feet. The SOBOs approach it along a beautiful alpine trail lined with lakes dotting the granite walls and stone spiers. Then up, up, up. Steep, but not technical. Ice Cream and I passed the day hikers along the way. We’re not fast, but cardio is king and we don’t need to take breaks. At the hill we took a photo on a sign almost as worn as the mountains. We had asked an elderly hiker who was waiting for her husband to take our photo. As I walked over to retrieve my phone, she said, «No offense, but you two look like a retired couple in their fifties in this photo. Should I take another one?»

This took me by surprise and I laughed as I looked at the photo. I didn’t see what he meant, but I wished I had. «This is fine. Thank you.» We exchanged a Happy trails and she left her there waiting for her husband, who kept coming up huffing and puffing.

The bowl that houses the Circus of the Towers opens just beyond the sign. The towers were to the right: stone spiers that climbers obsess over and everyone else just photographs. To me they looked like ancient fortresses, long fallen battlements, windows sealed and covered by time and maybe a little magic.

Ice Cream stood on the edge, looking towards the Circus. After a long moment, he said, «It’s not really that pretty, is it?»

I laughed and quoted something she had said at the top of Knapsack. «Mountains are just big rocks.»

She smiled. «Gray and dead. Take me back to the Green Tunnel. I want life!» -he called to the towers. They didn’t answer anything.

We came across some NOBO whippers resting there and, as was our custom, asked what we should see as we headed south. The guy scratched a stubble as gray as the mountains as he thought about it. «New Mexico is an incredible place.»

“Are you a desert rat?” I asked.

He shook his head. «It’s not that. It’s just that, well, nobody has as much misery as New Mexico.»

“What a support!” I chuckled. “I can’t wait to see the place.” I had already done it and knew what he meant.

We continued forward, but out of curiosity about what we could see, we did not take the trail and opted to follow the ridge to our left. It ended at a lookout toward the next bowl, and hundreds of feet below was a lake as blue and round as the eye of a Norse god. He looked back, but had no wisdom or warnings to share, so we turned around and rock-hopped as best we could back to the trail and toward Lonesome Lake.

In my Arizona Trail series I had written about Poo’s Prometheus, and here he was again, now chained to a rock in the center of Lonesome Lake. We had been seeing the warnings on FarOut, even reading a Trek article about it. My spidey microbiology senses were tingling and my skepticism was going crazy. With statements like the following, how could it not be so?

«This figure dramatically exceeds the EPA’s safety threshold for swimming (1280 CCE/100 ml) by 384 times, making it a cause for concern for both human health and the environment.»

From above, the lake looked as blue and beautiful as any in the Winds, and it was just as clear and beautiful when I reached its shore. I filled our CNOCs, hung up the water to filter it, and walked up to my knees. I thought about taking a bath, but, although skeptical, I remained cautious. I came back and found Ice Cream on his Nemo foam pad. He shaded his eyes and asked, «What does it look like?»

«It looks good, but the bacteria are very small, or so I’ve heard.» I plopped down on my own platform and got ready to make lunch. As I watched the water boil, I let my mind chew on Poopsome Lake, over my earlier epiphany that each hiker I didn’t see amounted to about one turd a day, that most people tended to camp near the water, and that more than zero people didn’t bury well enough, or at all.

On the other hand, the data I was able to find in the study didn’t look good, and scientific studies in general are often weak or unfinished before journalists get hold of them, see a juicy headline, and begin the process of turning weak data into misinformation, whether innocently or not.

Regarding the study, I noticed a few things:

1. The initial study (and the only current one at this time) indicated that values ​​for enterococci (a genus of bacteria native to the intestines) were high, but this is not the usual species to look for when testing for contamination. E. coli is the usual target and E. coli is what the confirmatory test would look for.
2. It appeared that only one sample was taken from the lake. A study like this should sample from multiple points to rule out poor collection. For example, collecting near the shore near a pile of horse droppings will not give an accurate analysis of what is in the lake. He’ll tell you what’s in the shit.
3. Numbers that Levels much higher than safe in a mountain lake should immediately raise suspicions. How many idiots would it take to create such high values ​​on such a large lake?

So let’s do some math with the back of the napkin. We’re not filming to be perfectly accurate here; We are shooting to leave a point.

Before we begin, a note about the units used to measure bacteria:
* Colony forming units (CFU) are a culture-based way of measuring viable bacteria; CCE, or calibrator cell equivalents, is a DNA-based method used in similar scenarios. The EPA has recreational swimming guidelines for both; In this context, 35 CFU and 1280 CCE are used as equivalent safety thresholds, not as a direct conversion of units. *

1. Lonesome Lake is a 35-acre alpine lake containing approximately 1.3 billion liters of water.
2. The average human bowel movement weighs 128 grams.
3. The average number of enterococci per gram of feces is approximately 5 million CFU, that is, 640 million CFU per bowel movement.
4. EPA safety thresholds for enterococci in recreational waters are on the order of 35 CFU per 100 mL or 1280 CCE per 100 mL for swimming.
5. Lonesome Lake’s initial readings were: 490,895 CCE per 100 ml, or about 4.9 million CCE per liter.
6. Mortality rate in cold alpine waters: 90% every 2 days. Sunlight and cold temperatures quickly kill native fecal bacteria in the protective heat of mammalian intestines.

Therefore:

If bacteria never died: 10 million accumulated droppings would be needed to reach the original reading of ~500,000 CCE. That’s one person pooping directly into the lake daily for 27,000 years, or 14,000 people doing it for two years straight, or Gandalf leading the entire Rohirrim army and their horses over Jackass Pass into the lake, all taking poops to break the siege directly into the water the day before the Science Nerd shows up to collect the sample.

But the bacteria die. With 90% mortality every two days, maintaining those pollution levels would require millions of people to defecate directly into the lake every day, mixing it well, indefinitely. Solo sees about 50 hikers on a busy summer day. Even if my estimates are wildly wrong (let’s say I’m off by a hundred times on any or all of the variables), it would take thousands of times more people than actually visit the lake to get numbers as high as those in the original study. The math doesn’t work. The single original sample almost certainly captured a localized hotspot: coastal runoff near a campground, contaminated sample container, mislabeling in the lab with another sample, etc.

The sweet sound of parsimony!

And guess what?

The follow-up study he did everything well. Between July and September 2025, they collected ten samples over sixty days at two different locations, all near high-traffic areas where fecal matter concentrations, if present, would be highest. They collected these samples between 0.3 and 1 meter deep to better avoid contamination of the samples. Appropriate quality controls were used, duplicate samples were run in parallel, and blanks were run to ensure that the analyzers read zero as a true negative. And they tested for E. coli, the standard bacteria for analyzing fecal contamination of fresh water. The results? Very low levels of E. coli, within Wyoming standards. Lonesome Lake was clean enough to swim in, although filtering is always recommended. The Prometheus of Poo was no longer chained here as in the Gila River.

So we drank from Lonesome Lake and, just as we had done on the Gila River, we huddled in the protective, filtering arms of our sawyers.

The shoe modifications also held up, better than expected. Damn Chuck Smores shoes would take me way beyond Lander.

Lonesome Lake and the surrounding Cirque Towers

Unless I am given express permission to use them, all names and path names in my articles have been changed. Any resemblance to real people is a coincidence. If you like my writing, feel free to subscribe or buy me a coffee using the Suggest the Author button below.