with options as cheap and light as gravity works, steripen, sawyer squeeze, and just bleach, its silly not to. just be extra careful. no one wants to ahve to leave the trail for something stupid like that.
with options as cheap and light as gravity works, steripen, sawyer squeeze, and just bleach, its silly not to. just be extra careful. no one wants to ahve to leave the trail for something stupid like that.
My wife and I hiked the JMT back in '11. We brought Aqua Mira but ran out at VVR. I didn't know you couldn't buy it in CA and didn't want to use the tablets they sold there. I found some MSR sweet water in the hiker box and took it. It made the water taste horrid and only used it a couple times when I pulled from lakes. The rest of the time from VVR south we did not filter and we both were fine. Best tasting water I've ever had! We had no problem finding running water from streams, though it was late Aug/earl Sept. 2011 which was a high snow year, YMMV.
Schnikel
Clearly it works for you I am allergic and it makes me sick on the trail - a well known allergy.
I love this - yep its one pound - but when kayaking or canoe its awesome!
My son saw a bubble up coming up from the deep ground on a hill, clearly a spring... he asked permission and still got the trots the next day.. deep in Pa woods.
Dogs are excellent judges of character, this fact goes a long way toward explaining why some people don't like being around them.
Woo
I used a Steripen last year. Water along the JMT is probably the most refreshing on the planet, and the Steripen didn't affect the taste at all. One of my son's brought a Sawyer inline filter which we sometimes used, but the Steripen was our preferred method.
We probably could have drank the water straight from the stream the whole way with no problems, I used to drink untreated water in the Sierras for years with no issues. But as Bencape4 said, there's really no reason to risk it with the options available today.
Does anyone have a problem with the aquamira bottles leaking, cracking, being hard to squeeze,etc?
Leaking? Yes, by personal experience. I'm not sure about the others. If I dug out my old bottles, they'd probably crack and be hard to open. It's probably time for both of us to throw our Aqua Mira away.
I am an Aqua Mira fan, but yes to all of the above. I've found that in some AM bottles the hole in the dropper cap is too small. I open it up slightly and that makes the bottle easier to squeeze and seemingly less likely to crack from being squashed trying to force out the liquid through a too-small hole.
I didn't treat much of my water in the Sierra based on advice that it was safe, and I got Giardia for the third time. You can't tell if the water is safe by looking at it.
When my daughter was a toddler, she insisted on tasting one of the mineral springs in Saratoga. She loved anything fizzy at the time, and pronounced it yummy and downed a cupful. Ooooh-boy. That particular spring was high in magnesium, and we were dealing with diaper overflow for the next day-and-a-half. We learnt afterward that the guidebook for the springs called that one 'vigorously cathartic.'
Pennsylvania has some limestone springs, too - could your son's symptoms be simply that he was drinking mineral water with a laxative effect?
I always know where I am. I'm right here.