Boil your water, then after it cools run it through a charcoal and/or osmosis filter. Even then, it’s still not great. Commercial/community water treatment isn’t some silly little optional process.
Get a water filter that’s designed for camping. The two varieties I’ve seen are either a hand pump or using gravity to force the water through a ceramic filter. Try to pick water that is relatively clean looking (not obviously murky, and it helps to pick flowing water).
Best tasting water I’ve ever had and you won’t get giardia (the most common cause of diarrhea symptoms described above).
I tried a hand pump while camping and never used it again. The tannins in the water (decayed plant matter secretion) isn’t captured by the filter and hit me pretty hard.
Yet.
The biggest risk out in the woods is microorganisms. If you boil it or use a well designed filter you are likely going to be fine if you’re drinking otherwise clear water.
I wouldn’t just filter the water from the Hudson river and go to town, but if it’s 10 miles to the nearest road I think you’re probably doing better than your tap
If you’re going to do all that and still end up with “not great”, why not just distill it?
If you have a licenced portable distillery to take with you camping then power to you.
A pot, a sheet of plastic, a cup, a rock, some sticks and rope and you can distill water.
And a massive amount of fuel.
Have you ever tried to evaporate a liter of water? It takes a lot of energy to do so. Fun for a science project, but if you need enough to stay alive/be comfortable, it’s a lot easier to bring water.
If you’re in the woods, you have access to a virtually unlimited amount of fuel. If you’re in a desert, the fuel source is nuclear. This is a technique taught in survival courses/manuals and military field guides all over the world.
Sure, but gathering wood takes a lot of effort and energy. It’s an option if you don’t have the filters, but the original question was why not distill if boiling and filtering ends up in “not great”.
If I have to survive, and I can do with boiling and filtering, I’ll take “not great” water over spending hours gathering and chopping wood to keep a fire going long enough to vaporize a liter of water.
Not a good idea to drink distilled water.
distilled water is fine the issue is if you drink mostly or only distilled water, it doesn’t have the minerals you’ll find in tap water and long-term missing those isn’t healthy. even so you can get those minerals from other sources like food or supplements most of the time.
Unless you’re starving to death, you absolutely get those from food. The amount of minerals in even hard water is miniscule compared to what’s in food. Drinking distilled or RO water, even regularly is not going to hurt you.
Drinking giardia on the other hand…
A Brita filter =/= a survival straw. There ARE filters you can use to drink directly from water sources in nature that will filter out all contaminants but a Brita ain’t one.
Exactly, there are filters for tap water and there are backpacking or survival filters for filtering dirty water. I use both regularly, but wouldn’t ever take my filter pitcher hiking.
Imagine using the right product for the right job
You must be new here?
I was just about to say you are wrong. Lifestraws don’t filter out things like lead.
Just learn new ones do though.
Do those straws also take out pathogens? I thought you’d still need to boil the water pre filtering.
Yes
At least bacteria. Viruses are a whole different beast but usually viruses are also not the problem in natural watersources.
Be free comes to mind, very popular in europe. Sawyer filters are very popular in the US
There are also combo filters that filter sediment and bacteria and pass the water through a charcoal filter to remove taste and organics.
From Lifestraw website:
The majority of LifeStraw products for individual use are microfilters with an absolute pore size of 0.2 microns which remove bacteria, parasites, microplastics, and dirt/silt.
LifeStraw also manufactures ultrafilters/purifiers that, in addition to the above contaminants, also remove viruses. The absolute pore size on these purifiers is 0.02 micron.Said a moment ago, one saved my ass. Cut the top off a beer can and sucked river water out of it kayaking. Tasted like nothing, like tap water that’s been in the sun for a while.
I used a Sawyer in the boundary waters for a week, nothing short of miraculous and I didn’t shit my pants even once
Sawyer filter inline with a camelback is awesome. I’d just fill up my camelback in a stream using a (clean) handkerchief to get the large debris out and then let the filter do the rest.
The most common cause of symptoms like in OP’s story are multicellular organisms. While still microscopic, they are plenty large enough to get caught in a filter. The filters are usually good enough to catch bacteria too.
I always wondered: does these filters degrade?
If they filtering stuff that small, do they clog? Do you need to rinse them? Run water in opposite direction to remove what they blocked before?
They clog and you do need to rinse them, and running (clean) water in the opposite direction is a common way to clean them.
They do eventually degrade or clog to the point of being unable to function and then you have to replace them. Usually they fail such that it gets slower to filter the water rather than letting dirty water through, although that’s not always the case. One time I had a cracked filter, and the symptom was the filtering went suspiciously quickly. I think I drank some only partially filtered water before I figured it out (didn’t get sick though).
Welcome to giardia or whatever other parasites and bacteria are in natural water sources.
Pretty much all natural surface water, no matter the source, is gonna have stuff in it that can make you sick. Maybe some cramps and diarrhea, some potentially lethal. Any time you drink untreated water it’s a risk no matter the “bro science” about how some is “safe”. Even glacial water has bacteria in it. Just some sources the concentration of bad stuff is going to be low enough that your body can hopefully deal with it without you becoming symptomatic.
Use proper filters and treatments designed for biologically contaminated water, or filter and boil your water before consuming. Stay safe out there!
How come animals are fine drinking it? And what about pre industrial people? Was everyone just always sick?
Plenty of animals are riddled with parasites, and early humans absolutely got sick. Think of all the cholera epidemics even in recent history. I’m sure some animals get sick but I’d bet their stomachs are a far harsher environment for bacteria and parasites to survive so it’s less likely for them to be ill.
Honesty didn’t expect the answer to be “yeah they are just sick all the time lmao”
If parasites weren’t an effective life strategy, there wouldn’t be parasites in the world
IDK why, but your comment made me think of a really awful business idea… Immunity building microdose water. Basically you sell and advertise water that has a few parts per billion bacteria to build your immune system.
Will you get sick, maybe? Do we accept any liability… no it says so right on the bottle.
2% milk
Drink of that with a few bites of Crunchy Frog candy.
Delectable.
I feel like boiling PLUS the Brita would be a pretty solid combo. Boil to kill everything then Brita to remove the remaining inert sediment. I can’t think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you after you’ve killed anything that was alive.
I can’t think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you
We’re talking about rivers like the one in Cleveland that they caught on fire?
Twice?!
IDK what’s in that but I’ll leave my cup for you haha
It happened 13 times. But not since 1969. The Cuyahoga is now a shining example of environmental restoration with even the most polluted sections meeting the standards of the water quality act.
“we must make america great again. The woke mob has stolen our beautiful burning rivers. We aim to bring them back bigger and better!”
US right wingers when the invisible hand of the free markets somehow fails to un-pollute their rivers:
Cuyahoga is also a great track on REM’s album “Life’s Rich Pagent”
Don’t look at Lake Eerie too closely tho lol
everything has outliers
Yes, this is what I was told in a survival course (as a company team building). You have to filter out large particles, even a few layers of cloths is enough. Then you boil it to get rid of bacteria or other problematic stuff.
Wouldn’t boiling first be better so you don’t end up with a bacteria colony in your filter?
My mostly on my gut feeling based counter argument would be:
-
So what? You are cooking the water afterwards cross-contamination between water samples isn’t a huge deal. Additionally, Filters (especially things like cloth) are cleanable and potentially sterilisable via cooking.
-
cooking is a violent process, grinding down particles, lessening the effectiveness of the filter. So you are potentially worse off, for no real gain.
-
You can’t always cook. Sometimes you have to sterilise water another way. E.g. via exposure to as much UV/Sunlight as possible. Particles in the water lessen the effect or prevent this from happening
-
Boiling isn’t necessary. They make antimicrobial tablets you can add as well. We used them when I was on a 2 week backpacking trip and basically just used a bandana folded over 4 times for sediment, fill at the top of the water with the neck facing downstream, and then add a disinfectant tab and let it sit for however long it says. It tasted a bit like pool water if you drank it immediately, but if you filled all your bottles at once, they usually didn’t taste very chlorinated and it was pretty amazing water.
I mean, everything that kills the bad stuff works. If you had a strong portable radioactivity source, that would probably work just fine, too. Sadly, the people at the airport don’t like it when I bring my enriched uranium to the camping vacation.
Jokes aside, I would say that chlorine tabs are nice for an emergency, but for a planned trip I’d assume I’d have access to heat anyway. Or, just bring a filter.
When we’re hiking 15 miles per day and were drinking 4 gallons of water per person in the New Mexico heat, stopping to set up a fire and boil ~40 gallons of water in the middle of the hike wasn’t really an option. I also appreciated not having to carry 32lbs of water on me all day long.
Fair point. My last camping trip was in mid-temperature weather, and rather relaxed, so I basically lived off instant coffee and tea. Plus, the water was really clean, so in some cases I just risked filling my bottle from like the middle of a lake without treatment. But a filter is definitely on my to-buy list.
The chlorine tablets taste like ass IMO getting a good filter is the way to go.
I had a similar experience at a pseudo pagan ritual/drum thing/moonlit naked dance thing. They’d stocked the sweat lodge with several bottles of water. Some for drinking and others full of river water for tossing on the stones. I failed to correctly identify them in the dark and was very sick as a result.
Editted for spelling
$ sudo pagan ritual sudo: pagan: command not foundPS: I am appropriately sad that I am a person that knows linux and not a person that visits moonlit naked dancing rituals. Meh, you can’t have it all.
You forgot the path “ritual/drum thing/moonlit”.
Hmm. Time to right a CLI utility called
pagan*rite
Write at rite, right?
You can. The group was a mix of crusties, hippies and nerds. Plenty of Linux users among them. Myself included.
:(
It’s a common error. You have to spell it like daemon:
$ sudo paegan ritualOh but you can. You just have to identity a goal and work towards it.
Since people are just going to make command line jokes and leave you confused, the spelling is “pseudo”.
It’s also the stuff Walter White needed to make the meth tastier or something. Idk, I’m not a chemist.
I actually do know the correct spelling. I’m just sleep deprived.
We went on a vacay when I was maybe twelve. Canada and Montana, saw a moose, hiked in the forest. My dad told me to drink from a stream. The water seemed super fresh and clean.
I puked my guts out at the airport and on the flight home. Other people were donating their barf bags on the plane because I was so sick. My mom was really pissed at my dad.
I grew up in Canada and regularly drank from the streams. Bad luck
It can be hit or moose
no, you had extremely good luck
I regularly drank from a stream in Canada as well haha. There was a stream fed by a spring near where we lived that we tested and was clean. We’d then fill up jugs right from the spring to drink at home.
If you’re going anywhere in the wilderness for an extended amount of time, it’s best to have the person driving to bring a case of water in the trunk for this situation (and also first aid)
wilderness for an extended amount of time
person driving
Those don’t seem to fit together quite right.
Anyway, bring a LifeStraw or the like. Saved my ass onetime.
I know when I leave for a big trip I leave straight from my house
If you’re in an emergency in the wilderness, the car is, by definition, far away.
“Don’t want to freeze to death? Pack extra clothes in the trunk!”
The missed pro tip: don’t believe everything you see on tv
Are you saying the media would LIE??? On TELEVISION??? Are you sure about this?
In my own home might I add!
At no point does Brita Water Filters claim to remove biological pathogens from the water.
Well yeah, next time wait for the water to trickle through the filter instead of gulping from the loading compartment
Lol, that filter isn’t gonna do shit for the bacteria that’s gonna make you sick. You need a life filter or whatever they’re called.
Anon confused a tap water filter for a camping filter
Some filters can do that, not all. Gotta check what your filter is rated for!
The Brita would (should) pull out various carcinogens from the water since they will stick to the filter rather than the water. But it won’t do anything for bacteria, viruses, amoeba or any other protists. Which would make you acutely sick.
Britta’d. I think a bottle with and ranging from very fine at the bottom to pebbles on top might be one of those survival things that actually work. Or just boil it. Or both.
Both is the answer. One is for reducing bigger impurities the other for killing any bacteria
Bro trust an ads about thing sell on amazon
Just boil the water instead. Then you can have instant soup.
