(this is another excerpt from the forthcoming book. This is not the entire chapter on Water Procurement, but it’s a lengthy excerpt, with some important considerations in it, that deal with some common–ill-founded–choices made for survival preparedness. Next week will be the last book excerpt I post, I think, and we’ll return to other topics. –JM) Your body loses water through normal body processes such as sweating, urinating, defecating, and respiration. During average daily exertion, when the average atmospheric temperature is around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the average human adult will lose 2-3 quarts of water daily. This means, even under regular conditions, you’re going to need to replace that amount, every single day. Additional factors, such as heat exposure, cold exposure, heavy physical exertion, the dry air of high elevation, burn injuries, or illness, will all cause your body to lose more water, that also must be replaced. Dehydration occurs from inadequate replacement of lost body fluids. It negatively impacts efficiency, and if injured or ill, will dramatically increase your chances of succumbing to shock. There are some commonly accepted results that occur as a result of dehydration: a 5% loss of body fluids results in thirst sensations. In unconditioned people, it can result in irritability, nausea, and physical weakness. While it is popular to say you can’t “train for dehydration,” this is demonstrably false. It is entirely possible to condition yourself to function at a 5% dehydration rate, through experience and exposure, to a point where you won’t notice these symptoms, or can consciously ignore them. At 10%, you may experience dizziness, headaches, reduced motor skills when walking, and a tingling sensation in the distal extremities. You’re still not going to die, and many people can function with a 10% dehydration headache. Less conditioned people who experience the other issues may find that they are immobilized, but it is also possible to condition yourself to function at this level. A 15% level of dehydration starts getting dangerous even to conditioned, experienced people. This can result in dimming vision at times, painful urination, swelling of the tongue, auditory exclusion, and numbness or tingling in the skin. While I’ve experienced this probably two dozen times in my life, it is at this level that I really start noting decreased ability to function in basic tasks. This level of dehydration, in my personal experience, has always occurred in tandem with other heat injuries, including both heat exhaustion and heat stroke at different times. In all cases, this has only occurred in extreme heat conditions, and only once resulted in complete failure, when I passed out from heat stroke. The last time I experienced this level of dehydration, was years ago in Utah, in August. I had broken down and had to walk out of the desert, in triple digit temperatures. Instead of being sensible and waiting until dark, I started walking at about two in the afternoon. By six, when a Forest Ranger drove past and stopped to give me a ride, I was in pretty rough shape. I wasn’t going to die, but I wasn’t going to walk much further either. In my experience, this is not a level of dehydration you can condition yourself for. You can simply suck it up and drive on for awhile until you find water, or you die. A loss greater than 15% of body fluids may result in death. The most common signs and symptoms of dehydration are dark urine with a very strong odor. All of the waste products normally transported by your urine are concentrated because of the reduced amount of fluid in your body. This may be accompanied by a reduced urine output, which means you may not notice as early as we would like. Another common sign is dark, sunken eyes and fatigue. Of course, in hot weather conditions, this can also be mistaken for heat exhaustion, rather than dehydration. Under normal conditions, with strenuous physical activity, it may be mistaken for simple fatigue as well. Fortunately, in all of these, the treatment of drinking fluids is beneficial, so it requires no great diagnostic skill to come up with a treatment. You need to strive to replace fluids as you lose them. Struggling to make up a deficit is difficult in survival situations, and this is one of the reasons that during foot marches, you should strive to plan for rest breaks at water sources, so you can replenish lost fluids as efficiently and conveniently as possible. The level of thirst sensation you experience is not a reliable indicator of water loss. As pointed out above, it is entirely possible to acclimate yourself to a surprisingly high level of dehydration, and still function without noticing thirst sensations, and already be well over two percent dehydrated. If you are under physical and mental stress, or subject to severe adverse conditions, increase your water intake. Drink enough liquids to maintain a urine output of at least half a quart every 24 hours. In any situation where food intake is restricted, try to drink six to eight quarts of water per day. In extremely arid climates—hot or cold—the average person will lose three to four quarts of water per hour. In this type of climate, you may need to try and consume as much as 30 quarts of water per day. In severe arid climates, under adverse survival conditions, this may require staying put near a reliable water source for a long period of time, if you don’t have the equipment or physical conditioning to carry large amounts of water a sufficient distance to reach a next water source. Unfortunately, combined with the loss of water is a loss of electrolytes, or body salt. The average diet can normally keep up with these losses without trouble, but in extreme conditions, with a lack of food, or when suffering from an illness or injury, additional sources of electrolytes need to be provided for. An addition of a mere quarter teaspoon of salt to a quart of water will usually provide a concentration that the body can absorb. It’s certainly something that should be tested before you need to rely on it, although the same concentration that is tolerable when you’re actually dehydrated may be unpalatable under normal circumstances1. Of all the physical problems that can present in a survival situation, the loss of water is usually the most preventable, except in extremely rare circumstances. There are some basic guidelines for preventing dehydration that are proven over time to work as well as can be expected: always drink water when eating. Water is consumed by the processes of digestion. While food will provide some level of fluid, it is not always enough to balance out the digestion processes. Acclimatize. Your body performs more efficiently in extreme conditions when it is acclimatized to the conditions. The body that is struggling to deal with a temperature or environmental extreme is working harder than normal. The acceleration of bodily functions results in accelerated use of bodily fluids as well. Conserve sweat, not water. Limit sweat producing activities, especially in arid climates, but make sure you’re drinking at least a minimal ration of available water. Ration water. Until you find a suitable source of water, ration your water sensibly. A daily intake of around a half-quart of water, with 2 teaspoons of sugar in it will be adequate to prevent dehydration for up to a week, if you can reduce losses by limiting activities to the minimum, and performing those minimums in a manner and time frame that reduces heat loss or gain. One of the great myths of modern exercise science, and survival training is that somehow, only “pure” water counts towards rehydration. The reality is, any fluids are going to contribute to preventing dehydration. While some will act as diuretics and increase urination, that fluid is still going to work through your body and provide benefit before you urinate it out. You can develop an ability to make rough estimates of fluid loss by several methods. A standard USGI “field dressing” holds about a quarter of a quart of fluid before it becomes so saturated it starts dripping. A soaked cotton t-shirt will hold between one half and three quarters of a quart of fluid. You can also use vital signs checks to estimate rough fluid loss. Less than three quarters of a quart lost will not induce much change. While signs may be slightly elevated, the distal radial pulse will still register under 100 bpm, and respiratory rate will remain under 20 per minute. Between three quarters and 1.5 quarts down, the typical conditioned pulse rate will jump to 100-120 bpm, and respiration will accelerate to 20-30 breaths per minute. Between 1.5 and two quarts of fluid loss will drive the heart rate to 120-140 bpm, and respiration will generally accelerate to a ragged 30-40 panting breaths per minute. At this point, you definitely need to find a way to get some fluids into the victim, because anything worse than that is going to require some pretty advanced medical interventions to deal with. You can very easily, work to conserve sweat, using simple, sensible methods. People raised in arid climates learn early, to reduce losses on particularly hot days, by keeping their mouths shut. Breathing is done through the nose, and talking is kept to a minimum. The moist membranes of the mouth, combined with exhalation of moist air from the lungs and throat, result in huge losses of moisture if exposed to air. It pays, in hot weather, to shut your pie hole, besides being a good idea from a security perspective. Another common practice in hot, arid climates, especially for those who actually work in the outdoors, or just subsist therein, is to cover all of your exposed skin with clothing. This will reduce the UV/solar exposure of the skin, keeping it cooler, while also reducing perspiration losses. When you do sweat, the moisture tends to be absorbed by the covering garments, and then evaporates form there, further increasing the protection by evaporative cooling, which of course, reduces follow-on perspiration. How Much Water Should You Carry In a survival situation, you don’t have the luxury of just turning on the faucet in the sink to get a drink of clean, potable water. In any kind of arid region, you’re going to have to carry a lot more water than you’d like. In some alpine areas or jungle/swamps, you might not need to carry much at all, if any, on the other hand. Even in those regions though, there are often long, dry stretches between the otherwise commonplace surface water sources. Unless you’re absolutely sure of your next, nearby water source, either from experience, word of mouth, or imagery in the form of maps and satellite photos, it’s always a good idea to carry at least one quart of water on your person. In the desert though—and many urban areas should be considered deserts, owing to the lack of trustworthy, openly accessible surface water sources—water becomes the most precious item in your equipment, and typically the heaviest. Backpacking in southern Utah, and the greater southern Deseret region that includes northern Arizona and parts of easternmost Nevada, I made it a regular habit to leave every water source with no less than 1.5-2 gallons of water, in any season there wasn’t good snow cover on the ground to act as a resupply in an emergency. Two gallons of water, of course, is a shade over 16 pounds, and that’s heavy, when the base weight of your pack is less than 30 pounds. In those seasons, I’d walk in the evenings, until shortly after dark—or longer if the moon was bright enough to avoid stepping off a cliff, or onto a rattlesnake. I would then drink at least two quarts before bedding down, and in the morning, drink another two quarts, before stepping off long before sunrise. I could then walk until roughly noon, when the heat became particularly loathsome, before finding—or fabricating shade—to hide from the sun until evening again. If I didn’t make it to a water source before my noon stop, I’d still have half a gallon or a gallon of water for the evening foot march continuing on towards my goal. Over the course of four or five summers, I never ran dry on water, even though water sources were sometimes 30-40 miles distant. I also never felt particularly bothered by thirst, because of how much I was force hydrating at meals. The amount you will need under specific conditions is something you’re going to have to determine via experimentation and experience, because as with food, requirements from person to person will vary greatly. For me, under normal circumstances, two one quart water bottles and a two-quart canteen or bladder is typically sufficient. This gives me two quarts to imbibe during movement, and another two gallons as a “buffer” if I find myself forced by circumstance to remain overnight in a “dry” camp location. Long experience has taught me that I don’t need a lot of water to maintain health and function, and I force hydrate any time I’m stopped at a water source anyway. Despite that, I lean towards safety. I’ve had enough experience with heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and simple dehydration, that I’d rather play it safe than sorry. The reality is, I’ve spent a lot of time solo in some very remote, very rugged places. The margin, in such places, between safety and potential tragedy, is very, very narrow. A moment of carelessness or misjudgment can send you to Hell. A simple misstep, miles from water, may be enough, if you severely sprain an ankle. With a broken leg, it probably would be a death knell for many people in those circumstances2. You cannot possibly be prepared for, or avoid, every potential calamitous possibility. At some point, you have to simply accept that luck and good judgment are key factors. On the same hand, as the proverb says, “Fortune is infatuated with efficiency.” I’ve avoided serious injury in the backcountry, and thus avoided calamity, by exercising good judgment. How Often/Much to Drink The old Apache Indian practice of drinking water at infrequent intervals, and very rarely between meals, makes sense for training warriors. It’s a good way to enforce the physical and moral discipline needed by warriors, and it’s a toughening process. Under survival conditions though, for individuals who have access to water, it tends to be a piss-poor idea, unless simply unavoidable. It tends to be extremely inefficient at conserving water. In the first place, the level of dehydration in the individual gets to a point that, when they do get to drink, they tend to down unnecessarily large volumes. Second, while thirst may not become an actual discomfort, even at milder levels of dehydration, you will find your mental acuity and senses dulled. Given the right equipment, like the Lifestraw of the Sawyer Squeeze pocket water filters, you can actually sneak a sip at pretty much any convenient creek or lake you happen to pass. Up high, in the shoulder seasons, and in the winter, I tend to suck on ice as I move. I’ll simply shovel up a mitten full of snow from the surface, compress it in my hands into a small sphere of ice, and pop it in my mouth3. Water Sources In assessing the safety of any water source—even in the remotest backcountry regions of North America, let alone in an urban or suburban stream or rivulet—the only safe rule is: “Treat is as tainted.” In my youth, and even in some of my early backpacking adventures as a young soldier and NCO, I regularly drank from creeks without worry about filtration or treatment, if I was sufficiently remote from civilization to feel reasonably safe. Today, between having children, and being more circumspect about my previously cavalier attitude towards my own safety, welfare, and survival, I’m much more responsible. Even when high in the alpine fastnesses of the legally-designated and protected Wilderness, I filter or purify my water. The sad reality is, absent absolute necessity, the days of drinking directly from streams is over unless you’re a complete fool. It can be challenging, standing next to an apparently pristine mountain stream, with a torrent of cold, clear, glacier fed water flowing past, to believe that it is almost certainly polluted, but chances are, it is. The potential danger can arise from any of numerous infectious organisms, but the majority—probably 90% or more, most transmitted by feces—account for most of the potential trouble. If you don’t think that the problem will be even worse, in a grid-down type emergency, with people defecating wherever they feel the urge, while lacking enough sense to properly dispose of their own wastes, remember that previous fact: most transmitted by feces. In much of the US, the most common of these is going to be Giardia. Giardia lamblia is most most often passed from organism to organism in the form of a microscopic oval cyst roughly 10-20 microns in size, although they may be as small as seven microns4. One stool from an infected mammal can produce about 300 million of these cysts, and it only takes about 10 of them to effectively infect you. The cysts are swallowed, most often in water that the feces has polluted, and reach the small intestine. Once they reach the small intestine, they hatch into active, wineskin-shaped trophozoites, then divide and multiply, and soon establish a ravenous colony. Of the tens of millions of Americans now likely infected with giardisis, or “backpacker’s disease,” many are only carriers, remaining apparently perfectly healthy, with no signs or symptoms manifesting, but they can excrete live cysts for weeks, months, or even years, post-infection. Those unlucky who do manifest symptoms though, find it onerous, at best. After an incubation period of one to two weeks, you will suffer diarrhea, cramps, visible bloating and explosive gasiness. Weight loss, both from the direct actions of dehydration and due to loss of appetite, soon follow. Unfortunately, humans are only the initial vector in many places. Other animals that act as both carriers and sufferers include cattle and horses, dogs and cats, rabbits, coyotes, and beavers, hence the other common sobriquet, “beaver fever.” All of these are of course, much less fastidious about the location of their toilets than even the most careless humans, outside of urban ghettos, are. These wildlife carriers make it so that, once a watershed is infected, there’s little chances of ever eradicating Giardia in that area. In addition to biological contaminants like Giardia, Cryptosporidium, various bacteria, and even viruses, there is the risk of other, non-biological contaminants in water that needs to be considered, especially in urban and other well-populated areas. While generally safe from Giardia and Cryptosporidium, mineral springs, especially in the desert, can be toxic. One common culprit in the western US deserts is arsenic. What you do if you suspect an unposted, bitter tasting spring is laced with arsenic I’m not sure. I suppose if you’re in immediate danger of dying from dehydration, you take a drink anyway, and hope for the best. If you’re not in immediate danger of dying, you stand around debating the merits of drinking it, versus being thirsty for awhile, then you shrug your shoulders and walk away5. On the other hand, I’ve known more than a few vile looking springs, both in the West and the Southeastern US, that were regularly utilized by some tougher than boiled boot leather old timer, “with nary a ill effect!” Another common source of toxicity in standing water sources in the Western US is selenium. In trace quantities, selenium is a necessary micronutrient for mammals, thus the presence of selenium salt blocks for livestock. Standing surface water though can contain deadly amounts. The water itself may bear no visible signs, but from my personally limited experience with known deposits of selenium in ponds, there’s a slight garlic smell to it. Allegedly, the presence of the plant called “Princess Plume” is also a good indicator of high levels of selenium. A distinctively visible sign of potential danger is what used to be referred to as “alkali water.” This will be noticeable as a whitish crust around the edges of the water hole, indicating high levels of dissolved salts in the water. If it’s not toxic, it will—at the very least—be extremely laxative in effect, with the same dehydration dangers as giardisis. Again, if you’re dying, it might be worth it to take the risk, but…probably not. Dying is bad enough. Dying with Montezuma’s Revenge would be humiliating. In “civilized” areas, where mining, farming, ranching, or other industry has taken place upstream, heavy metals, nitrates, phosphates, herbicides, and pesticides can all be found, and not all filters will remove chemical compounds from waters. In winter, in some places, snow will be the surest, and often only, source of water. I’ve spent so many years in the northern Rockies that I no longer view snow as some sort of implacable winter foe, but as an old—if temperamental—friend and confidant. For every commonly voiced complaint about snow, in the North country, there are 2-3 corresponding benefits; it just takes experience and exposure and mental adjustment to discover the wonders6. The real hurdle in getting potable water from snow is not the moisture content, but the state change from solid to liquid. Pushing solid water—ice–the last one degree of temperature to a liquid state, requires an extremely expensive 80 calories per gram. This is why putting a water bottle full of snow inside your clothes or sleeping bag to thaw, is a terrible idea. It’s going to suck your body heat away, and drive you straight to hypothermia. Even in the depths of winter, whenever remotely possible, it is important to strive to find open water for use. While snow-covered streams promise unreliable footing, and often requires lowering water containers via a rope or string, it’s still a net saver of both time and fuel. The surest way to reliably get adequate water from snow is to concentrate the water content. Once you’ve eaten for the evening, had water hot/warm drinks you’re going to consume, and cleaned up after yourself, let your fire die down, or turn the stove off, and set a pan of snow on it, with just a swallow or two of water included. Let the residual heat melt the snow—instead of burning the snow with direct heat. In the morning, the refrozen ice melts more quickly, and produces more water than the same pan full of fluffy snow. When you wake, take a couple of healthy swallows of cold water to refresh yourself and get your bodily systems working, ignite the fire or stove, and pour the rest of the water into the ice-filled pot to aid in the melting process, and soon you’ll have another pot of potable water. Water Purification Even the coolest, cleanest looking stream in the most remote corner of the Bob Marshall Wilderness will yield an unhealthy army, poised to bring you to your knees. Fortunately, from the wonders of modern manufacturing comes several potential solutions, almost none of them as effective as promised by the marketing gurus and Internet experts. Lo these many years ago, in the dim recesses of ancient time, in 1996, Backpacker magazine published one of the single most useful articles that much lamented journal7 ever produced. A special report by author Mark Jenkins, it was what still stands as one of the most understandable treatments of water filters and purifiers for the backcountry written. In companion with the 1998 book Purification of Wilderness Waters by David Cooney, you have a graduate level education in the “icky” in wilderness water, and how to remove it. Cooney’s book, has not only detailed explanations of various contaminants, but includes a thorough look at the different chemical treatments and the most common water filters on the market at the time. While twenty five years might seem like a long time ago, when it comes to water filter technology, the explanations Cooney—a chemical engineer by training and profession—provides about why the various filters work or don’t, is useful when comparing to more modern iterations. Most gastrointestinal distress from “polluted” water involves three different types of microorganisms that spend at least a portion of their life cycle inside your digestive tract. Protozoa are simple one-celled beasts that for shelled oocysts, from 4-20 microns in size. Bacteria tend to be about 1/10th that size, from 0.3 micron to 2 micron. Bacteria come in three basic shapes: spherical, identified with the prefix cocci-, rods, known as baccilli, and spirals, recognized by the prefix spirillia-. While many bacteria naturally reside in your gut, including benign strains of E. coli, where they are essential for digestive processes and general good health, in water we need to drink, these tend to indicate contamination by other disease-causing organisms. Viruses are subcellular masses of nucleic acid coated with proteins, ranging in size from 0.02 to 0.1 micron. A disturbingly astounding 97% of 10,000 water samples tested in one study showed positive for one of the three. The tested samples were “from streams all across America, Alaska to Arizona, and we didn’t find one without Giardia.” Despite all this infestation, there is still a significant portion of long-time outdoorsmen—including myself—who have drank freely of wild surface waters without getting sick, more often than not8. One likely reason for this is simple luck. Low concentrations of the organisms may simply be too thin numerically, to successfully colonize the digestive system of a person with a functioning immune system. A second reason is simply that some people have better resistance. The very young, very old, or those with compromised immune systems will suffer more than those in robust, good, physical health. A third is the most common: some of us just end up as carriers. Post-illness, no matter how mild the symptoms, we walk around for months or years with the little buggers in our bellies, but suffer no apparent symptoms. There is also the simple probability rule. Whether protozoans, bacteria, or viruses, the consensus of the experts—and common sense—agrees that the numbers will be much more highly concentrated within the host and their waste products, than when dispersed into the volume of water in even a relatively small alpine lake or southern swamp or bayou. Your chances of contracting Montezuma’s Revenge from a digestive tract infection are much greater from the direct contamination of food, unwashed hands, or shared utensils, than they are from consuming untreated water in the outdoors. Apparently, the freedom of the Apocalypse doesn’t include the freedom to not wash your hands. Another major factor however, is temperature, and it’s one that can be useful. The dormant, shelled oocysts of protozoa are extremely tough little things. In water near freezing, Giardia cysts can survive for close to 90 days. Shigella bacteria can survive indefinitely in ice, and so can viruses, in simple dormant states. Boiling, on the other hand, kills them all, without prejudice. The thermal death point (TDP) is the temperature at which an organism cannot survive longer than five minutes. In his book, Cooney cited a TDP for Giardia of 147F, while other protozoa have TDP ranging from 147-169F. In other words, sustaining a water temperature of at least 170F, for a couple of minutes will inarguably slaughter them all. Unfortunately, while boiling is a standard trope for water purification, it has some potentially severe drawbacks. First, boiling consumes time and fuel, and may be impossible, due to security concerns surrounding using fire or stove in a given place at a given time. If hostile actors are in close proximity, the smell and visual signature of a fire—even of a camp stove—may be prohibitively dangerous. Cooling the water back to a drinkable temperature takes more time. Boiled water also tastes atrocious, unless you dump it back and forth between containers for a few minutes to aerate it, although tea or drink mixes can mask this to an extent. Worst—and most important for those surviving in or near inhabited or densely built-up areas—boiling will not remove non-volatile chemicals and heavy metals that are commonly found in surface water in those areas, such as arsenic. If you’re in a relatively wild, rural area, with little or no agricultural production or old mining sites upstream of your location, boiling may be sufficient, and it’s something I use religiously for water purification in wintertime here, but if you’re in a built-up area, you need to look at other options, except in the most dire straits. Chemical Treatments There are two primary, common chemical treatments for questionable or known polluted water. Chlorine, or bleach is the first. The amount of chlorine is most municipal water supplies is approximately 0.5g per liter. That is not enough of a concentration to kill either Giardia or Cryptosporidium cysts. Even in higher doses, chlorine is not particularly effective. Chlorine also loses most of its effectiveness in cold or heavily alkaline water9. It also doesn’t work well with water that has a high organic content in the form of silt, algae, or dead leaf matter. It does though, react strongly to this organic matter in water, producing carcinogenic chloromines and trihalomethanes. All that having been said, if you’re treating apparently clear, clean water, from a running stream, chlorine may be sufficient10. For this, the recommended dose of liquid chlorine bleach11 is 0.2 milliliters per quart of water, with a 30-minute contact time. That means, after adding the bleach to the water, you need to wait an absolute minimum of 30 minutes for the chlorine to kill the microorganisms. You should not use powdered laundry bleach, or anything with additives of any sort. The traditional chlorine treatment for military and recreational outdoorsmen, were Halazone tablets. It took five tablets to treat one quart of water, and that lost 75 percent of its chlorine within two days after being exposed to air, which of course, happened every time you opened the package to treat water. More modern treatments include the ever popular prepper standby Aqua Mira. It treats up to 115 liters of water using a chlorine dioxide and phosphoric acid combination. These are mixed, seven drops each, and allowed to stand for five minutes, before adding to the water bottle to be treated. It still requires a 20-minute wait for treatment to take effect. If you are treating with bleach, the smell and taste can still be gag-inducing, and there are some concerns with the idea of drinking bleach, even in small quantities. Adding a small amount of absorbic acid12 will help mask the taste, and will react with the hypochlorite, reducing it to colorless, odorless chloride, which is harmless. What chloride won’t do though, is have any effect at all on the microorganisms in the water, so it is essential to wait the full treatment time before adding it. Most drink mixes contain some amount of absorbic acid, and I’ve had good luck in the past just dropping a couple of Vitamin C supplement tablets into the water. Iodine is cheap, lightweight, and has long been favored by both mass market outdoor programs, such as NOLS and Outward Bound, as well as the US military. This extremely broad range of users has brought some significant issues to light, over the decades though. First of all, a rather significant number of people turn out to be rather significantly allergic to iodine. If you’re allergic to shellfish, you may actually be allergic to iodine, and suffer the same ill effects from using iodine as you get from consuming shellfish. This is obviously something you should determine prior to investing a lot of money and time into planning to use iodine for water treatment under survival conditions. Dying of anaphylactic shock would be a bad end to your survival planning. This can be achieved through your doctor’s assistance, or by at-home testing. Buy a case of bottled water and “treat” it with the planned dose of iodine. Drink the treated water and nothing else for a day or two and see how your body responds. If you do have allergic reactions, medical assistance is reasonably close by under the circumstances. For the majority of people who are not apparently allergic to iodine, according to the US military, it is perfectly harmless to use iodine, although some other respectable studies indicate that it builds up in your body over time, to toxic levels, so you should not be using it continuously for weeks or months at a time. A second major issue with iodine is that it doesn’t kill Cryptosporidium. While Cryptosporidium doesn’t get the popular press scare mongering that Giardia does, it has similar ill-effects, and is actually probably the most common waterborne pathogen in the world, including in the United States. While iodine has an even worse—subjective, admittedly—gag inducing flavor than chlorine, absorbic acid will have the same effect on that as chlorine, reducing it to an iodide. The most popular currently available iodine tablets seem to be Potable Aqua. These were what we were being issued, even when I was a young Ranger private. The tablets are only for treating water. If you swallow them, you’re going to get messed up, because they are concentrated to a toxic level. They also must be protected from UV light and moisture in the air, which is why they come in a dark brown bottle. If exposed to air, they’ll lose about 1/3 of their effectiveness within a few days. Don’t try to go all ultralight backpacker by repacking them in a Ziplock bag. Keep them in the original bottle, and make sure it is always recapped tightly. A yellow tinge to the tablets is a sign of deterioration, as is crust building up around the threads of the bottle’s neck, indicating it’s time to replace the unused portion remaining. Iodine can kill some protozoans, such as Giardia. A 1989 test though, published in the American Journal of Public Health, 13 used clear, cold water14 and showed that after 30 minutes, almost every commercially available iodine treatments left behind enough live Giardia cysts to make a person sick, with some taking up to eight hours to finally kill of all the cysts. The same test found that not a single chlorine treatment was able to achieve a 100% kill rate against Giardia. An additional weakness of iodine is that, water with a high tannin content, from leaves and other organic substances in the water, will react with the iodine, transforming it into the useless iodide ions. Since it also still doesn’t kill Cryptosporidium, every commercial iodine water treatment product I’ve ever seen strongly urged the use of a filter after treatment. The popular prepper water treatment plan of using regular pharmacy tincture of iodine may work in water at 68F and above, but it needs to be measured out. Dr. Cooney suggested the small plastic bottle intended for eye drops. Carefully and thoroughly washed out, and clearly labeled IODINE in indelible ink, you can use five drops per quart of water as a starting point. Regardless of which chemical treatment you choose to utilize, there are some universals to consider: turbid water should be settled well to allow sediment and other large pollutants to separate, or should be filtered through something like a tight weave bandanna or a coffee filter prior to treatment. After you add the water treatment, shaking speeds up the process, and it is absolutely critical to loosen the cap slightly and slosh some of the treated water to rinse the lips and threads of the container. For many preppers and outdoorsmen, the small size of the containers and the apparent convenience of just putting a couple tablets of something into the water and forgetting about it make chemical treatment a primary option. Combined with the fact that so many of us were issued iodine treatments in the military—even if they were rarely actually used—this provides a degree of peace of mind about using chemical treatments in lieu of drinking potentially polluted water. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, these have some serious drawbacks, making them, while potentially feasible under the direst of straits, no more ideal than boiling water for most preppers’ imagined scenarios. That leaves us with option of using filters and/or purifiers. 1I actually experience this with Gatorade. Under normal circumstances, Gatorade is almost vomit inducing to me, but if I’m actually beginning to be dehydrated, I can drink gallons of the stuff and it tastes like the elixir of the gods. 2I’ve never broken a leg in the backcountry, but I’ve severely sprained my ankle a few times, to the point of having to splint it, and cut myself a crutch, to hobble my way to somewhere that I could get help, or to get back to my vehicle. 3This is a terrible idea if you’re stationary in cold weather, because it can hasten hypothermia. When actually moving and working in the cold though, I find it actually helps slow perspiration, and while not exactly thirst-quenching, it can alleviate some of the symptoms of early onset dehydration. The trick though is compressing it to ice, to mash out all the dry air encompassed in our Rocky Mountain snow. 4A micron is one-millionth of a kilometer. If my math is correct, that is 0.001 millimeter. 5A lack of insects around and in the water is a good clue that it’s not life-supporting water. 6Long time readers will have noticed an increased mention in snow and winter conditions concerns over the last several years. This is entirely due to our return to the Northern Rockies, and the central importance of snow in the outdoors life here. It can snow in any month of the year, and even at relatively low elevations. The important aspect of snow though, is the moisture content. For our Rocky Mountain powder, that is generally less than 10%, whereas for maritime and “lake effect” influenced snow, it will run 50% or more. Glacial ice, on the other hand, has been so compressed that, depending on the presence of trapped air bubbles, can be 95% or more water. 7Seriously. I miss it. I got my first subscription as a gift from my mother, when I was about 11 years old. I maintained that subscription until the magazine stopped producing a paper hard copy. I hate the Internet. 8While I have contracted Giardisis in the past, presumably more than once, I’ve only been symptomatic once, although that once lasted a long time. This was also after several decades of drinking untreated creek water as a youth and young adult. 9Alkaline water is that with a pH above 7.5, and is generally found in lakes or ponds with limestone or dolomite bedrock, and in many—most–desert “sinks” that have no outlet. 10I used chlorine drops for years with no ill effect. On the other hand, the one time I displayed symptoms of Giardia, was after spending a couple weeks in the Utah desert, where my primary water sources were cattle tanks put out and maintained by local ranchers. I treated that water with a pre-filter through a shemagh scarf, and then with chlorine drops. 115% sodium hypochlorite 12Vitamin C 13Ongerth, J.E.; “Backcountry Water Treatment to Prevent Giardisis” 1450F https://www.patreon.com/posts/water...paign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link Continue reading...
