Winter can be a great time to explore the outdoors in Western New York, but it can get tricky if you need the bathroom.

“It's their winter wonderland! My daughter calls this Elsa's castle,” said Kristi Kozlowski, a mom from Cheektowaga.

She and her kids love the park in winter. They only live a few blocks away from Cheektowaga Town Park, but things can get difficult when her kids have to go.

“We live just far enough that if we run home, we're going to stay home,” said Kozlowski. “[My daughter] will try to hold it and then we're walking home and she has an accident or she's had an accident here and it's just wildly inconvenient.”

At Cheektowaga Town Park, like many local, county and state parks, the bathrooms are closed during the winter so the pipes don’t freeze. There are bathrooms at the ice rink, but they are only open nights and weekends. 

Unlike in the summer, this time of year there are no portable bathrooms around.

“I wish they could be out longer, but no facilities…it makes it really tough,” said Kozlowski. “You only have as long as their bladder will let you stay there for.”

She’s not the only one dealing with these frustrations. 

People with certain medical conditions are also limited in the winter and runners like Melissa Graefs plan their routes around where bathrooms are outside of parks like Isleview in Tonawanda.

“Which is kind of unfortunate because it puts us in more highly trafficked areas,” Graefs explained. “It's not as safe as running on a route running on a bike path.”

She and her running partners come prepared with toilet paper, in case they need to go outside, and so she’d love to see more portable bathrooms throughout the area.

Spectrum News 1 reached out to both Erie County and Cheektowaga Town Parks about this. In a statement, the county said parks do leave at least one heated restroom open at each park.

Graefz says she hasn’t seen these where she runs.

The county adds that portable bathrooms “have never been a part of the plan for the winter” because they “need to be rented, placed, maintained, supervised and emptied,” which would be costly.

“Everyone wants to be able to do stuff in the winter,” Graefs said. “So having that available would be really nice as a woman, as a mom, as a runner.”

Cheektowaga Parks do have portable bathrooms at some higher trafficked parks. They say putting one in at Cheektowaga Town Park would be about $10 a day, if not more, for what they expect to be minimal usage.

They also point out that portable bathrooms can be targets for vandals. That includes two instances where they were set on fire.

That being said, if more people request one, that could be reconsidered. 

“It would be huge because we'd have something we could do that wasn't just sitting at home or having to drive places we could stay here a little longer,” said Kozlowski.

In the meantime, Kozlowski will continue checking the clock, hoping more accidents don’t happen.