Years ago my friends and I took a trip to the Wallowas in Oregon near the Idaho border. We were mostly camping backcountry with a few nights at campgrounds. I filtered my water at the campgrounds, but when we went backcountry, I was about to just put my bottle in the stream and one of my friends stopped me and told me to filter it and to never just drink out of a stream regardless of where you are in the US.
He was from that area and told me that ranchers will let their cattle graze where ever they want, even on protected federal land, polluting pretty much every water source and everything downstream. They were very right. We saw cattle feces everywhere. It was very unsettling.
Edit: I also got giardia at Smith Rock one time and it wasn't fucking pleasant.
Many ranchers have (scandalously low-priced, but that is another story) leases to run their cattle on specific federal lands. Cattle drop poop pretty much everywhere they go. (Weirdly, donkeys apparently collect theirs into big piles. Oddest thing I've ever seen.) If cow manure is unsettling, you may want to be careful what parts of the outdoors you visit.
That's BLM and National Forest lands. Anything beyond that is illegal but you should still protect yourself from unscrupulous ranchers just as you should look both ways on a one-way street.
In many parts of the world you should be wary of drinking from a stream if you don't know the area well, but unfortunately a filter won't help: the water may have been contaminated by a mine upstream, but filters can’t remove mining byproducts.
First rule of the Wallowas: Don't tell anyone else how awesome it is there, we don't want an influx of people. ;-)
Having grown up backpacking the Wallowas, it really depends on where you are as to the safety of the water. Down in the Minam where the cows are grazing everywhere? Yes, definitely filter. Way up in the high country, running water? Not a problem.
But, I don't blame you for filtering wherever you are. The risks in general aren't worth it.
The Crooked River near Smith Rock is downstream of a lot of land, including the city of Prineville, a couple of reservoirs and a whole lot of rangeland.
BTW: like patio11's standing invitation, if you're ever in Bend, say hi and we'll have a beer.
The primary reason to always filter in the United States is that giardia is everywhere. You can drink from the clearest mountain stream far above any cattle and still get it.
Giardia used to be very rare in some places like Europe, but I think that may have changed over time.
Bears, deer, and other animals make this an issue even in the absence of cattle.
US natural water sources are actually relatively very clean. We don’t have any issues with viruses or chemicals, which means we can safely use ~0.2 micron filters while some regions require more expensive ~0.02 micron filters.
> He was from that area and told me that ranchers will let their cattle graze where ever they want, even on protected federal land, polluting pretty much every water source and everything downstream. They were very right. We saw cattle feces everywhere. It was very unsettling.
Maybe this is an ignorant thing to say, but before cattle, there were massive herds of buffalo everywhere doing the same thing, right?
[1] Obvious caveat that particularly awful periods of history in some locations had bad life expectancies - wars that killed a third of the population, the Black Plague, genocide, etc. The idea that human life expectancy has improved over time is a myth - unless you start counting in 1900. It's gone up and down throughout history, but ours is nothing special.
I missed seeing the mentioned article, but I wonder if this is an inevitable result of the natural fallacy that has taken over Western culture.
Let's all get back to the Earth and live the way many of our ancestors did: dying off in our youth or dealing with either preventable and crippling diseases or even just wandering around with weird diseases that just make life far less enjoyable.
On the one hand, if we were to take this approach, it would speed up natural selection for us and whatever germs develop to kill us. But for chemicals and things we do for purification of water supplies, we can at least control the chemicals and how often we use them, and I have yet heard of a any really serious bugs that can survive chlorine or just pure heat.
I guess I just can't grok the way people claim to wish to live in the past, but what they're really describing often is similar to how we would describe living in a third world.
Unless you really believe our feces is cleaner than most, that unfiltered water your drinking could very well contain the feces of someone ignorant enough (or a pranking trollish person) to drop a deuce into the local stream.
And I have a great appreciation for just how blunder headed we can be, so it wouldn't shock me if and when that'd happen.
And ultimately, what's the real goal of the original article? Is it to make sure people increase their risk? Or to provide some confirmation bias to those who will do it either way?
The mentioned article https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/filtering-stream-water-... - is typical muckraking journalism. The original Slate author is trying to create a scandal out of the idea that outdoor gear makers are deceiving you in order to sell junk you don't need.
He then throws in salacious and irrelevant intimations about race and class ("Because the outdoor recreation community is far whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the U.S. population at large, it’s an interesting case study in how misinformation propagates through privileged communities.")
It's clickbait, exactly the sort of garbage published on the front page of every newsprint weekly - taxi drivers without medallions: scandalous! Boat owners profit from people fishing: another scandal! The real scandal is how any of this passes as journalism.
>He then throws in salacious and irrelevant intimations about race and class
He's not totally wrong about those things (though I think it's class that matters orders of magnitude more than race). In enthusiast communities where the bar to entry is low (most outdoor recreation is cheap to do at a basic level) there's a class segregation effect. I can't quite put my finger on it or describe the details but there's definitely community/social pressure to make things needlessly expensive and develop an attitude of "if your wallet can't support going all out don't go at all" as a bar to entry.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by the term "natural fallacy". I don't think it's the "naturalistic fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy - it sounds more like simple nostalgia. Just because people like some things about the past doesn't mean they want to literally return to the past.
It basically is the naturalistic fallacy. It's taking nature as the way things ought to be and human developments as dangerous aberrations. There is an element of nostalgia to it as well, but the nostalgia is for a time when we were "closer to nature."
I notice a lot more of what I'd call the "fallacy of progress" - the idea that because humans did more of something in the past, it must be outmoded and not worth doing. Exercise and fresh air are still good for you, even though cavemen had much easier access to them than modern urbanites.
Who have you meet that denies the value of exercise? Seems to be one of the few almost universal values in Western society, from the joggers to the football fans (of both kinds of football), and also public policy. Even us lazy slobs will (more or less begrudgingly) admit its importance.
That's why I use exercise as a counter-example to the GP for mocking people who "wish to live in the past" and "live the way many of our ancestors did." Compared with today, the lifestyles of our ancestors had both advantages and disadvantages; one advantage was that adequate exercise came pretty much automatically.
Some "old ways" are healthier and some are less healthy. They have to be evaluated individually. Saying across the board, as you are, that pre-industrial lifestyles were universally less healthy in every way, is just as false as saying the opposite.
- eating fresh foods instead of processed starches
- no factories and industrial agriculture producing greenhouse gasses
- social organization based on communal resources and personal autonomy (hunter-gatherers) instead of authoritarianism and hierarchy (settled agricultural governments)
You can eat fresh food and the food today is overall much safer even the processed food.
People in the past didn’t had fresh food this didn’t last long they ate processed food which would be preserved.
Fresh food was an occasional luxury and even then it would be much less safe than it is today.
Greenhouse gases have no direct impact on health, smoke and pollution does and even London’s historic smog wasn’t nearly as bad as the average cave lung.
Social organization... how exactly does this relates to health again?
Even the worse life style today (health wise) is better than anything you could do in antiquity.
An average life style is considerably healthier.
And if you selectively choose to live the healthiest life style possible in any period nothing in the past beats today.
Nobody is saying that you can't have healthy habits in 2018. Now they have to be a deliberate choice, because the default is driving / riding to work (as most people do). Nor is anyone saying the past was ideal. I am saying we can selectively choose certain aspects of the past as a model for how to make better choices for ourselves in the present. Some other advantages:
- default lifestyle (for economic reasons) is living in the city / suburbs where walking is often aesthetically unpleasant; humans have an aesthetic response to being in nature.
- again for economic reasons, processed food like bread is the default choice; it's hard for some to afford (in time and money) to get all their calories from fresh vegetables and meats. Again the past is a model (I'm talking about humans' natural diet in the days before food preservation / grain agriculture).
- let's shoot for no smog and no cave lung
- social stratification led directly to mass starvation and poverty (poorest segment of society experiences stress-related declines in longevity)
If we assume that every change that's ever happened is for the better in every way, it blinds us as to how to make improvements.
I really think you have some mythical view on how people used to live.
Regardless of how far back you go life was harsh, miserable and unforgiving and the further you go the worse it gets.
Fresh food was never a staple diet, hunting wasn’t done on a daily basis it was seasonal meat would be smoked and salted to be preserved.
Fat would be fermented and preserved.
Plants as well would be fermented or dried to be preserved for later consumption.
Famine and starvation was abound whole populations were wiped out due to famine multiple times even before we started to live in large cities.
Living in caves and huts burning wood would result in lung damage even before counting things like cavers lung.
The smallest of injuries could be fatal and it often was.
There was essentially no period in which we were healthier than we are today even if you are an alcoholic coal miner who’s living only on KFC.
>The fact that it’s natural means nothing nature is a cunt.
Natural means, what a human body has been accustomed to, over the course of its evolution. That is what is natural. Not something coming directly from nature. Often both are same since most of the things that we were exposed to during the long course of evolution came directly from nature.
Also, from your other comments, you have a skewed definition of health. You seem to consider a human being healthy even if they can only survive with the help of medicines or modern health care..which is quite stupid...
Not OP, but "natural fallacy" might mean the idea that what's natural is good, and what's "chemical" is bad. It's prevalent, and wrong, I think.
For me, that's quite distinct from the naturalistic fallacy, which is really related to the is-ought distinction (often attributed to Hume). The fallacy consists of going from a descriptive statement (this is how things are) to a normative statement (thus, this is how things should be). A (fallacious) example would be that strong animals devour weaker animals, thus it's good and proper also in our society that the strong exploit the weak. For me, that's an illicit move from "is" to "ought", and quite distinct from the "untreated water is natural and thus must be healthy", "vaccines are chemical and unnatural and thus must be bad" fallacy.
However, from the Wikipedia page it seems that some people also use "naturalistic fallacy" in the former sense ("appeal to nature").
(Note that Sam Harris and others are arguing (convincingly, in my view) that ultimately, our "oughts" must be informed and even follow from "is", from descriptive statements, rejecting the whole strict is/ought distinction.)
Sorry, I did indeed mean naturalistic fallacy.
It's probably a mix of nostalgia that's girded with this entire fallacy that things from the Earth are somehow all just here to help us live the eternal life we were designed to have, if that evil man-made brain of ours didn't try to confuse us with it's destructive powers of fighting cancer and lupus and starvation.
For me, it tends to germinate with that one fallacy.
Their ability to resist heat has been greatly exaggerated. The kernel of truth is that some sterilization procedures are insufficient to eliminate them and that definitive guidelines have not been fully agreed on. Common folklore translates this into "they are impervious to heat."
Sure, though that's entirely different from the grandparent post's statement about "Denaturing a protein generally", which happens well below boiling point.
I both agree and strongly disagree with you on this. Allow me to explain. The way you frame the proposition as a luddite removal of technology based on some superficial desire to live like back in the day, I agree with. It obviously won't solve many of the issues that hunter_gatherers and early agricultural cultures and civilizations had to deal with. That said though, and I didn't rtfa, so I'm just addressing this common retort more generally, it is you who are being logically fallacious pretending that is what people who call for a return to the old ways mean. Essentially you are ad homeniming their position. (Not saying there aren't those who take the position you claim they do, but after talking to many of them I find most are being overly rhetorical and understand the need for a moderate approach).
I grew up in the mountains, around Apache, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people, who I have learned a great deal from, and they recognize the vast quality of life improvements modern science, medicine and technology have brough, and embrace it. The fact they understand that though doesn't stop them from admonishing us in how most Americans treat the land and live out of symbiosis. They aren't calling for a naive luddite-esque return to the old ways, they are calling on us to use our technology to augment the benefits the old ways have, and that is a huge distinction.
Of course there are some hippy groups that naively take that position, such as the Rainbows, and then after they've destroyed a section of forest during a party they still put on their suit and tie and drive their BMW back to California or wherever. Nobody from the forest has respect for them because their views are immature and superficial, but it is a large mistake to extrapolate that type of position to all those calling for a review of how we live in relationship to the land. There is a lot of good discussion and knowledge to be had if you can get past that.
I could ramble on with some stories that illustrate what I mean, but let me summarize the position most of the native American culture from my old stomping grounds take: value community, but also value self-sufficiency within that community, because those two things make a person and a people strong and able to weather storms.
Personally, when I think about thinks like space exploration, I think that approach has much wisdom in it, and given my experience of the Internet, I think decentralization is a key strength of that viewpoint as well.
You know, most of them pretty much expect us to destroy ourselves because we don't listen to their wisdom. They say stuff like "We were here before America and unless they change we will be here after America."
Something that's I've always found striking is how long lived ancient peoples were, if they made it to adulthood. Early life deaths is what really used to bring up mortality rates. If one out of 3 children make it 20, but the child that does lives to an average of 80 then you have an aggregate life expectancy of something like 30-40 years - but that's obviously quite misleading. When you look at those that did make it to adulthood and died of some natural cause (as opposed to human caused things like warfare or famine) the longevity of people does not seem to have really changed all that much.
The Ancient Greeks were pretty much clueless on medicine still viewing things through the lens of miasma theory, yet go search for any name you're familiar with and you'll find the distribution of ages to not be as low as you'd expect. Granted there is a bias in that people that died earlier in adulthood might not have had a chance to make their mark to the point that you'd know their name today, but I don't think that's the predominant issue. The names we know we'd still know even had they died much earlier. Aristotle was an outlier living to be only 61, yet he certainly made his name even well before that. Socrates - 71 (death by execution), Plato - 80, Eratosthenes - 82, Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, etc, etc.
Modern medicine should certainly have enabled ancient civilizations to extend their lives substantially. What if it were possible to live the lifestyle of one such as the Ancient Greeks, yet given the availability of modern medicine in case of urgent need? And it's there that I completely agree with you. I think the goal should be to use modern medicine to supplement, not supplant, traditional life values.
There's certainly a concern of being a luddite, yet on the other hand I think people are at times too quick to forget that our level of understanding of things like human physiology is still quite superficial. We have no real causal understanding and while correlations can and do enable enormously beneficial breakthroughs, they are also subject to a never ending stream of unforeseen consequences. Decisions our species made for hundreds of thousands of years to survive were obviously not always optimal or ideal, but they did prove to be, if nothing else, sustainable and deterministic.
I think you and I are in 100% agreement, because I didn't try to ad-hominem all people who value nature, I was being a very tiny bit reductionistic in describing a large vocal population, which are people who demonize technology or our current state because it doesn't fit into their personal narrative (often surprisingly fed by many 90's movies).
So I was targeting it towards the idiocy of the original author, not of those on every side that realize nuance and balance are just as important.
I really think there's no specific fallacy or deeper philosophy behind this. It's just that there are various random idiots talking crap about stuff they don't understand and they occasionally stumble on to a platform to raise the profile of their stupid ideas.
I think the general sentiments motivating and bolstering particular piece of BS are "I wish things were simpler", "I don't trust big organizations", "I want people to pay attention to me", "I don't care about the consequences of what I say."
On the other hand, I suppose there is a general populist trend which encourages a site like slate to give thoughtless immature authors a platform for their stupid ideas as long as they stroke populist themes.
There are actually many things that can survive in chlorinated water, but fortunately the way things work out it's not really a concern the vast majority of the time. Cryptospiridium spores, for example, can resist chlorination.
Just out of curiosity, where do Indians who live near the Ganges river get all their drinking water?? That river has got to be a record holder for parts of feces per million water molecules :)
I hiked over 600 miles of the Appalachian Trail last year, and just about everyone filtered their water. Bacteria and protozoa[1] in the water can make you very ill, and even cause longer term health problems if you’re unlucky.
Filtering water in the backcountry is extremely easy with products like the Sawyer Mini ($25), which you just screw to the top of a standard water bottle and drink through. It’s stupid to take the risk when the precautions are so easy and so cheap. And it’s unbelievable that people in civilization, with abundant access to clean water, would actually pay a premium for dirty water.
Yes, primitive people drank water straight from streams. They built up resistance to a lot of the pathogens, but they also had lots of parasites and diseases, and didn’t regularly live into their 80s, so I’m not sure why you’d model your food and water safety on theirs.
[1] Viruses are a problem in much of the world too. Thankfully, streams in the US don’t generally have viruses in them, and the most popular filters for hikers don’t filter out all viruses. But for the extra careful, chlorine dioxide drops and some pump filters do.
There's a bit of a trope about how in history everyone died in their 30s from war or disease.
http://www.hormones.gr/211/article/article.html concerns Ancient Greece, so not primitive. But, I think you should be cautious about declaring primitive people as having their lives markedly shortened by waterborn pathogens; at least cautious enough to be able to cite some strong evidence?
The Ancient Greeks filtered their water and sought out purer water sources.
I didn’t claim that people died in their 30s or that waterborne pathogens were a major cause of shortened life. The latter certainly seems plausible though. My point there was only that basing your water sanitation on the habits of primitive people is obviously misguided.
I can't say how much this shortened the average lifespan overall, but these are some pretty significant diseases which are largely transmitted by contaminated water (or food), and which are largely eliminated by water and sanitation treatment systems. I'm sure there's some others, these are just the first two that came to mind.
Giardia by comparison is more of a "nuisance", but with treatment methods so cheap (I mean, iodine tablets are on the order .15 a tablet or so) I really don't see a reason to take the risk of that or other stomach-upsetting bugs getting in you.
> Yes, primitive people drank water straight from streams. They built up resistance to a lot of the pathogens, but they also had lots of parasites and diseases, and didn’t regularly live into their 80s, so I’m not sure why you’d model your food and water safety on theirs.
And their streamwater was a lot cleaner than ours. Unless you're high in the mountains, there's a good chance that any given waterway in the US has a farm or factory somewhere upstream.
And they still have beavers in those streams, and those beaver still shit in the woods. Your point is taken, but really, there never was this magical time in the past when unfiltered water was a good thing.
... I bet every regular outdoor campers' head popped reading this article, just like mine. I can't conceive of anything stupider than drinking unfiltered stream water, anywhere (unless you were sure it was springhead, and even then, no).
Lifestraw is a decent emergency filter to have around. You can also use a SteriPen UV light - which is great. It's light, fast and you can use it on the go. Scoop up a full Nalgene bottle of untreated water, then treat with SteriPen. Used both many times camping and on long portages with great success.
I would like to give a shout out to MSR. Their products (including water filters) are astoundingly well designed. They are in my top 10 favorite tool design groups in the world (among Beretta, Chris Reeve, and Trijicon).
MSR especially has a tremendous focus on user maintainability and repairability. All of their products are designed to be easy to strip down to base components and reassemble - critical for life-preserving hardware.
I keep their TrailShot filter in my bag whenever I go hiking. I also have one of those pen-style filters and never use it; the TrailShot is vastly more practical.
Big fan of the lifestraw. It's easy to use, effective and they do amazing things for folks in areas with low water security. I live in the city and keep one in my earthquake preparedness kit.
I use the Sawyer Mini. Had the SteriPen for one trip but didn't like the reliance on batteries, worrying about getting them recharged, etc. Had one hike where our batteries went dead in the cold overnight and we had to rely on meeting someone on the trail and borrowing their filter.
I carry a steripen for primary purification, plus some chlorine tabs as a backup if something were to go wrong with it. I find that single-use AA lithium batteries in the steripen are very long lasting and the device itself has stood up to many trail miles knocking around my pack.
Between pumping, backflushing and protecting filters from freezing I really don’t mind the reliance on batteries/electronics and the need to carry a lightweight backup. Plus I usually have a stove should it come to that.
I use a SteriPen but spend the extra money on non-rechargable Lithium batteries. They are way lighter, pack more power and hold their charge for years. I bring two sets in case one runs out which has yet to happen on my week long backpacking trips.
Do they suffer in the cold though? At this point, in cold weather I already have in my sleeping bag: phone, iPad (drone controller), Anker battery packs, etc.
Q: Do you have to use it with a nalgene-type container? Would it work with a flexible bag-like container? see less
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A: I would be careful. Plastic absorbs all ultraviolet (UV) light. If the plastic folds around the bulb (or at all), then the water is effectively shielded from the light. see less
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A: Yes, the uv light MUST be under the surface of the water. Does not get hot so probably ok for the bag.. see less
Different purposes, really. The steripen is for refilling your bottles, the straw is for drinking directly from a suspect source.
For camping I much prefer my steripen, it's far more convenient especially with multiple people. But it does require batteries and it feels breakable to me (although mine has survived some abuse with no problems) so you have to be aware that you might need to boil as a plan B. The life straw requires no power and is somewhat more packable, making it ideal for true emergency situations where you want something with maximum reliability.
For longer trips during which you set up a more substantial camp (canoe camping - for instance) I really can't recommend a gravity filter enough. It's pretty slick to simply dip a "dirty water" bag/hang it from a tree and end up with a few liters of clean water by the time camp is set.
Ditto on the gravity bag, we have a 5 liter that filters to micron level, so mechanically removes viruses.
Still, I always bring unexpired tablets, their weight is essentially zero. I was taught to dissolve them, invert the water bottle, and unscrew the lid enough to let the solution flush out the water from the threads, as even that could be enough to get you. Not sure how this can work with a steripen.
I tried to break one. I needed a mercury lamp for a project, and a Steripen seemed like an affordable way to get one. My impression was that the Steripen is actually quite rugged and well made.
You can achieve a WHO approved method with a coke bottle and sunlight. Put water in a PET bottle, then leave it in the sun for 6 hours. It is now safe to drink. If it's overcast or the water is murky, you need 2 days.
As a bonus, coke bottles (or any fizzy drink bottle) are ideal as a water container for hiking; lightweight, capable of holding pressure (so they can withstand being squashed in a pack), and surprisingly resilient when falling from a height (compared to purchased bottles). And they cost nothing.
Sure but this is a highly impractical method when you are hiking from dawn to dusk and consuming 1L of the water an hour on a backpacking trip. For most backcountry excursions, water purification methods must not only be effective, but also reasonably time efficient. It’s a different story if you are setting up camp somewhere for a prolonged period of time, but then you can just boil water.
Sure; it really depends how you're walking. But I know plenty of hikers who'll set off at 7 or 8am, and have their day's hike finished by midday; this could easily work that mode during summer time.
Regarding boiling - why would you waste fuel if you don't need to?
Also, this is a _really_ good one to remember in emergency/unexpected situations. Stove broke? Run out or spilled your fuel? Steripen out of battery? As long as you have the right bottle and some sun, you can still clean your water.
There are two reasons why you should absolutely boil your water instead of purifying with the sun on a backpacking trip.
1. Fuel is light, water is heavy.
A liter of water weighs roughly 2.2 pounds. That is not including the weight of the containers holding the water. Assuming a person is hiking from 8AM until 12PM, and drinking approximately 1 liter of water an hour, they will consume approximately 4 liters of water on their hike. Then, they will likely need at least 3 liters of water at camp for cooking, cleaning, and drinking (I use about 2 liters on average in camp for solo trips but I hike until sundown so I'm adding some extra drinking water for sitting in camp during the hottest part of the day). So, using a fairly conservative water estimate, a hiker like you described would need about 7 liters of water in a day, which would weight about 15.4 pounds plus the weight of containers.
Using the sunlight method you are advocating, the person will need to carry all of that weight during their hike. Even worse, the sun is unreliable. On cloudy days, it could take up to 48 hours to purify the water. So the hiker would want to carry 2 days worth of water (14 liters at 30.8 pounds plus container weight) to ensure a steady supply unless absolutely guaranteed a perfectly sunny weather window (which is rarely a guarantee that can be reasonably made). Adding in the last piece, container weight, makes the situation worse. An average empty 1 liter SmartWater bottle (a good analog for the coke bottles you mentioned and a commonly used option by the backpacker community) weighs 1.3 ounces. So to carry 14 liters of water, you will need 14 bottles, weighting 18.2 ounces or 1.13 pounds. The total weight of water carried for a leisurely backpacking trip using your proposed method would be a shade under 32 pounds.
Now to the boiling method. Using a modern backpacking canister stove, you can boil a liter of water with about 15-20 grams of fuel depending on elevation, temperature, and wind conditions. Lets say 20 grams to be conservative. So to boil that 2 day supply of 14 liters of water, you would need to carry 280 grams worth of fuel, which is about 0.6 pounds. This is not including the weight of the fuel container because I am assuming the hiker is already bringing a canister stove for other purposes, as most backpackers do. Other stove types such as alcohol and esbit weigh even less. By bringing this 0.6 pounds of fuel, you no longer need to carry most of the water during your hike. The majority of long distance hikes in the US and around the world have regular sources of water along the route. Most hikers will only carry 1-2 liters of water during the day, filling up and purifying along the route. Then they top off shortly before making camp for the night. So now, with a faster purification method, the hiker only needs to carry 2 liters of water, which weighs 4.6 pounds with containers. Add the fuel weight and the hiker will be carrying 5.2 pounds total for their water system, a weight savings of 26.4 pounds over your method. Even adding a few more liters of water for more water scarce routes (such as the southern portion of the Pacific Crest Trail) will result in double digit weight savings.
When most backpackers these days are aiming to keep their total pack weight under 30 pounds for most trips, this weight savings is a HUGE deal.
2. Boiling is reliable, sunlight is not.
When you boil water, you can be reasonable assured that your water has been properly purified. Sunlight purifying is not so simple. As you said in your first post, the sunlight method requires variable amounts of time based on weather conditions. This causes scheduling problems on a backpacking trip because you need to wait longer for your water to be drinkable in bad weather. As I mentioned above, this forces the hiker to carry more water to account for bad weather.
But even worse, there is no concrete sign with sunlight purifying that your water is ready to drink. Assuming you can figure out how to strap 14 liters of water to the outside of your pack while you are walking so that they all get equal sun exposure (which is probably not possible) and it is a sunny day, you could hope that the water would be ready to drink in 6 hours. And maybe it is. Or maybe you were walking through shadier paths than you realized, or your shadow from your hiking hat blocked some sunlight, or 1 of 100 other things happened to prevent your water from being exposed to the sun properly. Then the water is not ready in 6 hours, but you drink it thinking it is. Now you are vulnerable to all the same problems you would be if you didn't purify at all.
If you boil your water for 3 minutes, it is always pure. If you use sunlight purifying, you are playing a dangerous lottery while out in the wilderness far from medical assistance.
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Finally, a note about using sunlight purifying as an emergency method in the backcountry. You are right that it could potentially be used in such a way. However, this would very rarely be necessary or practical. Most backpackers brings 2-3 methods of water filtration with them. Usually those methods are a filter/steripen/etc, filtration tablets as a backup (because they weigh almost nothing and work in less than 30 minutes), and their stove to boil water as a last resort. The situation where you are in an emergency situation and all 3 of your purification methods are inaccessible would be extremely rare. The only instance I could think of would be if you lost your pack, maps, the trail, and had no idea where you were going but were otherwise uninjured (so you could handle trips to a water source and carry large amounts of water to sunny purifying locations) and had access to containers to hold large amounts of water. Then maybe, hunkering down and purifying water with sunlight would be the right move while waiting for rescue. However, the odds of this happening are extremely rare. I have hiked thousands (probably tens of thousands) of miles in my life in very remote places. I have never had such a situation happen to me or anyone else I know who is a backcountry enthusiast. You should absolutely be more prepared than that!
In most instances, an emergency situation involves you being lost of injured. If you are lost, hunker down, make yourself visible, activate your beacon (which you should have in particularly remote areas away from trafficked trails) and wait for help while you use your normal filtration methods (1 of 3 at least should work). Rescue should come within a day or 2. Same thing if you are slightly injured and don't think you can walk out under your own power. Or if you can walk, just get out as fast as you can. If you are severely injured and lost your pack (maybe from a severe fall or bear attack), make it to a water source if possible and just drink the water. If you don't get help within a day or 2, you are probably dead anyway from your injuries. The most important thing is to stay hydrated and make yourself visible, not sit around waiting for your water to purify for 6-48 hours. I'd rather be found alive and deal with Giardia for a month than be found dead with some nice clean water next to me.
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TLDR: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't rely on sunlight as a method of backcountry water purification. It is well suited for purifying water cheaply in water troubled villages, but uniquely unsuitable for backpacking. Always learn proper backpacking techniques for water filtration (along with first aid, navigation, camping, etc), know your physical limits, thoroughly research your route, and have the right gear before setting out into the backcountry. My mountain community buried 9 people last year who died in the backcountry. Most of those deaths were caused by inexperience and were completely preventable. Please don't add to that number.
I caught giardia and who knows what else while I was in India for a year. I had diarrhea 10+ times a day for over a month, vomited a few times, bloated and lactose intolerant for over a year, and two years on I'm still not feeling 100% even after taking over 100 pills to nuke everything.
You might be lucky and not be too affected by this stuff but it's not something to mess around with.
Not to mention the alarming levels of antibiotics in animal feed such that you get in contact with resistant bacteria by merely swimming in lakes. In fact, even Colistin and Colistin-resistant mutants were recently found (Colistin being put on the RESERVE level by WHO, to be used for humans only, and as last resort).
Between the effectiveness of chlorine and the simplicity of a pump, there's just no way I'm going to save ~8oz for the risk of explosive diarrhea. Having both diarrhea and having to walk back t the trail head to get help would be an awful combination.
Pumps may be simple but I’ve heard experts in outdoor gear question whether filters are reliable. They can develop micro cracks and therefore invisible failure modes. Now, low failure rate plus low incidence of ineffective in the water multiply to low risk. But they’re not perfect. It’s also very easy to get a degree of cross-contamination.
Personally I mostly use iodine and boiling though I do have a pump. I’d consider getting a steripen though.
I feel like drinking unpurified water out of desperation is a tale you'll eventually hear from people that've been outdoors a lot. It will either end unpleasantly or with extreme emphasis on how lucky they were that it didn't end unpleasantly.
I think i heard this on "Survivorman", but also from many thru-hiker friends.
Dying of dehydration is a whole lot faster than giardiasis. If you're in a survival situation and are reasonably sure of a rescue in less than 14 days, go ahead and drink that water! Otherwise, don't.
Yep. If you're dehydrated because you didn't bring adequate water or a filter, and drinking unfiltered water will get you to civilization (trailhead, car, etc), it is better to have giardia (in a few hours) than to be dead.
This is also why Imodium is included in most thru-hikers first aid kits. It decreases the effects of diarrhea to keep you hydrated long enough to reach civilization if you get giardia in the backcountry.
Sure drinking it out of desperation is a tale. A shit ton of us grew up drinking water on the philosophy "clear+fast=safe" it's just that "I was a kid and half a mile from my house and thirsty" isn't much of a story to tell. Not that I under the impression that it's inherently safe just that none of the umpteen millions of us who surive and don't think it's a story.
I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve certainly had some untreated water from time to time and never had an issue. To be clear I don’t advocate putting yourself in a position where you have to do so. But I also don’t think it’s extraordinary luck to not get giardiasis because I end up swallowing a mouthful of water whitewater paddling or because I’m dehydrated and have no water treatment.
From the article “There is no good epidemiologic evidence that North American wilderness waters are inherently unsafe for consumption,...”
Right - and there isn't any evidence that wilderness waters are 100% safe either. I don't gamble in Vegas and I don't gamble with what I drink. Water can look fine, but is there a dead deer just upstream? No thanks.
Filtering is cheap and easy, a great insurance policy.
Yeah I'm not really getting the reason for caring whether it is likely to get sick from unfiltered water or not. Why not just always filter? (Assuming cost is low)
Anecdote, we drank unfiltered water from a melt pool on a glacier and were fine. Glacial melt pools are probably some of the only places on earth anymore where you can do that. Two days later, only 2000 feet below the glacier, a girl with us drank unfiltered water from a river and got sick
I wouldn't categorically rule meltwater as safe. People can and do dump garbage and human waste into glacier crevasses. What gifts you leave for the glacier, the glacier eventually returns.
Actually melting snow via solar radiation on tarps, we still always boiled it before consuming. I'm strictly talking about glacier water that is pretty much untouched
I know people who have been drinking unfiltered stream water for 20 years with no ill effects. The key is to make sure that the water doesn't pass through any human inhabited areas.
There may not be humans or cattle around, but all sorts of wild animals defecate, urinate, procreate, etc. in water. Treat the water (boil, filter, pills, etc.) before using it and you'll be OK.
If I'm in an area where there aren't poison drops and where there is no human interference, I'll take the risk. Outdoor activities are inherently risky.
I've come close enough to dying in the outdoors in other ways that I'm not concerned about getting the small chance of getting the shits from drinking from a stream that I'm 99.9% sure is safe.
It's a matter of applying a bit of common sense. Don't drink the water where there are cattle, or downstream of a beaver dam. Take your water from higher elevations, where the UV light will quickly kill most pathogens (just like a SteriPen!).
Also, giardiasis is not that bad. Get some metronidazol and you'll feel better in no time.
I've done it both ways. Waiting out the diarrhea sucks, but it won't kill you if you have access to potable water. Getting rid of it with drugs requires a significant shake-down from the health care racket in the States, or pocket change elsewhere. In any case, you are unlikely to have to make the choice more than once in your lifetime if you exercise a bit of caution and common sense.
Does this have anything to do with that "raw water" nonsense from 2 weeks ago? The idea that you wouldn't want to clean your water is absolutely insane to me.
What gets to me with the "raw water" thing is that people are willing to pay so much money for untreated water, literally thousands of times what it would cost public water, and there's millions of people all over the world who are suffering and dying because all they can afford to drink is "raw water".
There's something so perverse, so fucked up, about the elitism of the people drinking this (literally) shitty water.
I still drink out of some of our creeks and springs in our NF areas when backpacking and hiking in the Ozarks. You have to know the terrain and what's on and around it to do that though. I've never gotten sick from that here.
I did the same back in the `70-80s in the Sequoia NF. I was taught by old timers there when I was a kid to take your water where it was running clear over rock and sand, not from still pools, and take a good look upstream and around you for carcasses or other contaminants.
I've still never seen a carcass near where I decided to take a drink, but I always look.
A few months ago I spent a week hiking through the Cordillera Blanca mountain range with 6 other people. We ALL got diarrhea at some point, it was absolutely brutal.
Not necessarily "filtration" but rather "treatment". There are a number of various chemical treatments that can be used. For clear water I use MSR water treatment tablets (chlorine dioxide?), for seriously muddy and dirty water I rely on my partner's filter. We walked over 500 miles of desert in Utah and Arizona, the water tends to be very hard to come by and what's available is often contaminated by cattle, etc. Water treatment is a must.
I go hiking in Conundrum in Aspen, and never filter water once I'm above a certain elevation. As long as there are no beaver dams above, I feel safe to do so.
A friend's grandfather never wore his seatbelt. He was in fine health. One day, they rear ended someone. He was in the back seat and died because he was essentially thrown underneath the driver's seat. Had he been wearing a seatbelt he may have been injured, and given his age it may have been severe, but he would have lived. No one else in the car was seriously hurt (all wearing seatbelts).
Two weeks ago a driver decided to do a U-turn from the right lane. I was in the left lane. I was spun around from the impact. While I am injured, because of the seatbelt it's just whiplash and other soft tissue injuries. If I hadn't been wearing my seatbelt I know I would've been tossed around inside the cabin, or I would have had to tense up more to maintain my position in the seat. Either would have resulted in more severe injuries.
These are relatively uncommon events. You cannot control the driver of your vehicle screwing up and hitting someone. And as a driver you cannot prevent others from hitting you in every case. Seatbelts may be uncomfortable (though after 35+ years I don't notice anymore), but 20 minutes or a few hours of discomfort are worth it to prevent life changing or life ending injuries.
I can tell you firsthand that seatbelts prevent injury. I was recently in a wreck where the driver overcooked a turn in the wet on the off-ramp from the Mass Pike to 128 We hit the guard rail on the inside of the turn once or twice, and the concrete barrier on the outside of the turn twice, including head-on at the end of our spin-out. Either the driver or I or some object hurled forward between the seats folded my phone in half, which was sitting in a narrow pocket in the center console. I sprained a finger on the door handle. I would surely have hit my head more than once on the windshield and side glass had I not been belted in.
Once out of the car we could tell it was quite a wreck: the engine was pushed in and the whole front end crumpled. The front wheels were destroyed. Both sides of the back were rounded off. The doors opened with some difficulty. The smell of airbag propellant makes me think it must be similar to model rocket propellant.
I've had that happen to me a few times (no collisions, fortunately, but close calls) where a driver makes a u-turn from the right lane. What on earth possesses someone to make that decision? The best I can figure is that they need the width of the entire road to do the u-turn, and they don't check the lane properly.
While we're on car safety, remember to put the damned cellphone away while you're driving!
I've been rear-ended 3 times in the last 8 years by people on their cellphones! Two were at 40+mph (blithely drove into my rear at full speed) and totaled both cars.
One of the most irritating things is seeing "professional" drivers using their phone while driving. I've seen countless taxi drivers texting while driving around passengers and it's a big reason why I prefer to walk 30 minutes+ to my destination over ever riding in a taxi.
Yeah I've stopped sans putting it in a holster that is in the same FOV as the windshield and using it for navigation. I had a close call or two and realized that by default may people will not only use their phone in a dangerous way, but use it in their lap. Moving your FOV to your lap while controlling a car is absurd.
I crashed a truck into a hillside a few years back. I came out unscathed, except for a small amount of bruising from the seatbelt. It was a hard enough crash that it ruined my phone, and my glasses flew off my head.
If I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, my head most certainly would've connected with the windscreen or the steering wheel, likely giving me a broken nose or jaw.
Which brings me to another safety tip, don't have unsecured items sitting in the back of your car. Because if you crash, they literally become missiles.
I tboned another vehicle once going about 45mph, without my seatbelt on. My head did impact the windshield, and that left me with a knot on my head, and a small cut. I also had a small cut on my knee from something under the steering wheel. I was otherwise unharmed.
I, of course, think it's imperative to wear your seatbelt, but our anecdotes don't really do much to tell that story.
I don't drink unfiltered water, but I am a little skeptical of all the stories about unfiltered water making people sick: What percentage of them actually got sick from improper personal hygiene? How many tainted water cases are actually self-inflicted E. coli cases?
Anecdote is not data, but ok, here is an anecdote: When I was a boy scout growing up in the Bay Area we would camp in the mountains for a weekend or even as long as a week. We filled our canteens in any clean looking fast running stream. Everybody did that and they were fine. Sure it is possible this has gotten more dangerous but I am inclined to believe the paranoia has increased faster than the danger.
When I was in scouts, two separate groups of us went to Philmont, on different trails. Both crews had a variety of purification methods but ended up using a specific model of filter the most because it filtered really quickly and didn't taste off. Halfway through the trip one crew became seriously ill. That was when we realized that the 'fast' filters were fast because they were assembled incorrectly and weren't filtering at all.
So yeah, backcountry streams can be totally fine. If you want to play the parasite lottery, be my guest, but know that it is a lottery.
Meanwhile, my longtime hiking partner (of over 20 years now) thru-hiked a big chunk of the PCT and ended his trip with giardia, which caused him significant digestive issues for quite a while afterward (over a year altogether).
And I've occasionally taken unfiltered freshwater from streams over the years but have generally been picky about where/when/why and have accepted each time that I was foolishly rolling the dice.
And and, a popular recreational "lake" in the area was recently found to have a major problem with e. coli after it hospitalized a young child with complete renal failure.
Cattle are grazed all over the backcountry, people poop out there (and it lasts a -lot- longer in the wilderness than you'd guess, especially when people use TP and leave it out for the squirrels to gather for nesting material), and people do the same on snow which melts into streams at high elevation.
If there's a 1 in 20 chance of picking up a parasite from drinking unfiltered water in a backcountry area (minimum 20 miles to civilization), then the average person will be lucky enough to get away with it their entire life and then tell other people, "but I did it and I'm fine!"
This seems weirdly inverted to my boy scouting experience (in San Diego). Our training put a huge emphasis on filtering our water before we drank it, it was considered fool-hearty to drink water from a river or stream before filtering. Anything from garbage to a rotting deer carcass could be up stream.
I think the issue is that it's hard to know which sources are actually safe and part of the reason people are so serious about disinfecting water is that it's generally just so easy
Easy, inexpensive, lightweight and effective. With many things, you'd have to choose only between two or three of these attributes, but with water filtration, there are — practically speaking — no drawbacks.
Given this, it's a total no-brainer to err reasonably on the safe side when it comes to natural water sources, in my opinion.
And my anecdote as a scout was exactly opposite: we were trained to not drink from a natural water source except as a very last resort, and then, to prefer moving water over stagnant water. But as the motto says, you were supposed to Be Prepared, and that included bringing water.
The risk is somewhat correlated with elevation, since higher elevation water is less likely to have been contaminated by humans or animals. But it is no guarantee and not something you should rely on.
Filtering water is extremely easy with products like the Sawyer Mini ($25), which you just screw to the top of a standard water bottle and drink through. It’s stupid to take the risk when the precautions are so easy and so cheap.
It is unfathomably irresponsible to let other people’s children, in your care, drink straight from the stream.
I notice marmot droppings and various birds and smaller rodents everywhere I've been in the Sierra Nevada, right up to the peak of Mt. Whitney at 14k feet even far about the tree-line. Those are all potential sources of pathogens even if there isn't human waste involved.
I am in my forties now, and I would conservatively observe that at least 20% of hikers and backpackers will choose "pure" and "pristine" streams or bodies of water as a great place to take a swim and wash the trail gunk off their feet or nethers. And I'd guess that at least 10% will casually ignore rules about where to relieve themselves and often do it far too close to trails, streams, and lakes.
People can get caught up in the romance of the wilderness and forget that countless other people enjoy those same spaces before and after your visit, even if you manage to find some place remote enough to actually be alone for a few hours or days. They assume the environment is more pristine than it actually is, and also underestimate their impact on it.
Huh I am surprised that the boy scouts taught you to do that. Sawyer filters are cheap and boiling with a fire can be free. I view filtering/boiling water like wearing a seatbelt, it's not particularly expensive of inconvenient and it will seriously improve your health in situations where it turned out to be important.
In general, my understanding is that the danger has increased in Boy Scouts in the seventies we basically just filled up from a stream. That said, even if the danger has objectively increased in many areas due to population growth etc., like seat belts, we’ve also moved toward trying to mitigate more a$more risks where we can.
When I was a Boy Scout, we filled canteens in any clean looking stream. But we also added iodine. And then we generally added Kool-Aid, because the iodine tasted terrible.
He was from that area and told me that ranchers will let their cattle graze where ever they want, even on protected federal land, polluting pretty much every water source and everything downstream. They were very right. We saw cattle feces everywhere. It was very unsettling.
Edit: I also got giardia at Smith Rock one time and it wasn't fucking pleasant.