Who drinks wild water on tour?
 

I've been going on camping trips where I have trouble keeping enough water handy. It may take me a couple hours of riding to reach my campsite. I start that process with five water bottles and five more in a collapsible container. By the time I exit the forest the next morning and get back to my water stop, I might have a couple bottles left.

That's all manageable but it doesn't leave me enough time for exploring in the forest. This weekend I reached my campsite just after noon and would like to go hiking or ride some of the trails. But I have to conserve effort so I don't need too much water.

I've never learned to treat wild water but there's plenty of it in the forest. The forest is a water shed for the Atlanta area and hosts the Etowah River and the Amicalola Creek.

Who treats water on your tours? What equipment or tablets do you carry? How concerned do I need to be about what's upstream?

This is an interesting post and I am also looking forward to the replies.

i have a Sawyer mini it weighs only 2 oz i have not used it yet but I thinking of bringing it on my tour.

I carry a Sawyer inline because I do a good bit of back-country camping while on my tours. Here's my gravity filter system in action. I can also use it in a water bottle as a "sipper".

http://ziligy.com/photos/posts/FilteringWater.jpg

Aquamira is all I have used when it's been necessary to drink from streams and lakes. I've used it thru-hiking on the Long Trail, following Rte 389 in Quebec/Labrador, on the K & P Trail in Ontario for those occasions when the only water available is "wild."

Who drinks wild water on tour?
 

The only place I've drunk wild water was on New Zealand's south island. Both from lakes and melting glacier ice which was wonderful! :)

I've had a Katadyn Pocket filter but rarely used it and can't justify the weight. Will buy a Sawyer next time I'm in the USA (haven't seen them in europe)

This article explains my confidence in the stuff: Backpacking Light magazine

Phil

I've brought similar on a week long hiking trip through the north shore of Lake Superior only it was in tablet form. We were able to keep supplied on water without resorting to their use though.

I've got and MSR filter pump combo (at least I think I do now that I think about it I haven't seen it for a while) which works pretty well. That being said I hike and bike in the same area you do and I've been known to drink untreated spring water if I can find its exit point and it looks clean. Stupid I know but so far I'm parasite free.

Travel Water Purifier, Aquapure Traveller, Bottled Filtration | Pure Hydration

Aquapure Traveller. Unbeatable.

another shopping tout thread..


I bought Katadyne Pocket Filter 30 years ago, to allow stream water to be pumped through it , to be safe.
a silver impregnated swiss made ceramic filter sleeve
water is sucked through it , so outside silt can be cleaned off if source is muddy.

any Buyers? it will out last my lifespan.

I carry 1 x 750ml water bottle on my bike with another 750ml or 1.5L bottle on the bike depending on the tour. I usually also have an empty 2L water bag in my pack.

I fill from creeks along the route during the day. If I am high up in the mountains where I can see the source of the creek I won't bother treating it at all.

If I am lower down I'll mix up some Pristine drops and throw it into the bottle.

I fill up the 2L water bag at camp or just before camp when there is no water at camp. This gives me water for dinner and breakfast. If I am boiling the water I don't bother treating it.

I have been eyeing up one of those water bottles with the built in filter so I can just scoop water out of a creek and go without mixing the Pristine drops.

I'm mostly touring in the mountains of BC where there are loads of quality water sources along almost every route.

As an aside; I was Scout in the late 60's, we started boiling all our free range water to avoid "beaver fever". I recall hiking the Sequoia-Whitney trail in the early 80's & we boiled (I carried a small portable pressure cooker... sweet!) & treated all water, even the water from 10'000'+ lakes with floating bergs. We came across a bear that the rangers had tipped us off about. That bear did a daily 4,000' elevation gain hike just to harass campers at like 11'000 feet. I still carry purification tablets out of ancient habit but there are sure a lot of options for filtering and treatment.

All my bike touring is near enough to civilization that I do not bring filters or chemical treatment.

Canoeing, backpacking, kayaking, I bring a filter and I usually bring some chlorine bleach as a backup.

Filters. I use a Katadyn Combi filter for canoeing or kayaking. I also have a Katadyn mini which takes about four times as long to pump any water thru it, I only bring the mini on backpacking trips where I want to go ultra light because this filter is so slow to get any water. A friend that I camp with also likes the MSR filter. All of the filters I cite here are ceramic filters.

Chemicals. For those rare times when I do not us a filter, I use chlorine bleach. Have a small one oz bottle with a flip top closure. I use 4 drops per liter which is twice the dosage that EPA recommends for emergency water supplies. If you use chemical treatment, make sure that the bottle lid and threads are also treated. See this link for dosage information:
Emergency Disinfection of Drinking Water | Emergency Preparedness | US EPA

Filters do not screen out viruses. Chemicals might not kill some of the largest microbes like giardia. But of the bad things out there, generally viruses are not a concern if you are far from civilization, that is more of a concern where humans or domesticated animals are present. When I backpacked on Isle Royale, the park staff were clear to everyone that chemical treatment was inadequate there, boiling or filters were necessary because of a parasite associated with their moose population.

Other options - unless the problem is chemical contamination, boiling should make any water drinkable since that will kill off any microbial population of concern. This is not convenient for large quantities, but because boiling works, I do not bother to filter my coffee water before I boil it. I only filter water that I will not boil. Because boiling is effective, you could boil up a batch of water in the evening and let it cool in your cooking pot(s) during the night before you put it in your bottles in the morning.

When I saw the title, I assumed "wild water" was some new energy drink. I have never heard anyone refer to wild water before.

I carried an MSR Waterworks filter on my last tour (3 weeks in Central Colorado, combination of dirt roads, hiking, and a little bit of singletrack), and was pleased with it. It takes about 1 minute per liter, and the ceramic filter is easy to clean when it gets dirty. It's a bit heavy (18 oz or so), and if I was doing a short tour (2-3 days), I'd probably just take chlorine dioxide tablets. Those take about 6 hours to be effective, and I wouldn't want to use them for more than a few days, but they're a lot lighter than the filter.

The only time I've ever used wild water without treating was when I found a spring along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and a local road cyclist assured me he drank the water from that spring regularly without a problem.

Who drinks wild water on tour?
 

This thread reminded me, back in the day I carried a small phial of potassium permanganate crystals.

The idea was that pink water is potable, more concentrated purple, antiseptic. Dunno how accurate this was, I only used it a couple of times.

Customs at international borders loved finding my wierdly coloured crystals, but became disapointed over my explanation :/

I have one of the SteriPen UV sterilizer gadgets. It does require that the water be reasonably clear so the UV light reaches anything nasty in the water. Takes 90 seconds to purify a liter of water and is supposed to take care of both viruses and bacteria.

Tough to beat the new Sawyer Mini filter. Light, small, cheap, and woks great.

Don't we all :)



(that being somewhere in time)

Glad I asked. Thanks to everybody for the Sawyer tip.

Nice to know there are people still drinking water. I have needed to recondition myself to tap water. Imagine, I got so spoiled with drinking bottled water I started to lose my taste for tap water. Now I drink from the tap regularly (yes... Even at Ft Hood, TX). I am one of those guys that will stop and tackle a sprinkler in a front yard for water. Filtering wild, water is not a big issue now days with all the compact filtering devices out there. Let's not forget the old school ways of improvising CLOROX and 2% IODINE tincture. Here is the basic formula used by most of the military guys all over the world.

1st: Select as clean as a source as possible and filter through something. (Coffee filter, sock, T-shirt...) This will get floaties out of the water and make your chem treatment more effective.

2nd: For a liter of clear water add 5 drops of regular CLOROX (the EPA suggests 8 drops per gallon). In the military we found that 5 drops per liter was about the maximum amount of Clorox you can stand without any side effects giving you a three drop extra "kill the bugs" effect. Note: 5 drops per liter smells and tastes like about 36 PPM but could be as high as 90 PPM (Water Buffalo or Lister Bag water).

3rd: Wait for the chemicals to take effect. The colder the environment, the longer it takes. Twenty min or so...

If you are going to use 2% Tenture of Iodine then use two drops per liter.

Also remember that direct sunlight can treat water. Supposedly you can take clear plastic bottles of water and leave them in the direct sunlight for a few hours and kill pertinent bugs from its ultraviolet light.

OK... That's the old school way, meaning 60s and 70s. Wish I had a line on a US Army 68 Siera. Then I could find out how out of line I am...

I ordered a Sawyer and I guess I'll get started with that. As to what's "remote" from civilization, that seems a little ambiguous. How far away is far enough? Case in point, I frequently camp in Dawson Forest. This is 10k acres of forest. It is bordered by a "relatively" rural area. But then again it's really not all that far from Atlanta. Is that water safe from viruses? And what about chemicals? How would I know?

Interesting. Is this chemical method protecting me from more than what a filter will do? I would think if the water is visibly cloudy then I'd want to filter it whether I treat it chemically or not. Would you agree?

I have some concern about the long term effects of chemical treatment.

I'll filter it, boil it and drink it. I don't really trust the chemical treatments that much. The ion treatment systems, with my luck, would run out of battery out in the middle of nowhere.
Boiling for 3 minutes at a rolling boil kills everything I know of. That's actually overkill, but if you've ever had giardia, overkill isn't a bad thing.

As I understand it, UV doesn't actually kill most bugs, it just neutralizes them and prevents them from reproducing for a certain amount of time. The idea is that they get through your digestive system before they can make more of themselves. So if you do UV, make sure you either drink or discard the treated water and don't leave it sitting in your bottles for more than a day or so.