Hydration and Water Treatment

For most hikers, the Pacific Crest Trail begins in a blazing desert without encountering a sure water source for just over twenty miles. The trend continues – for the first 700 miles there is little shade, temperatures often reach over 100 degrees …

When selecting a place to camp at night, most backpackers like to choose a location close to water. At 2 pounds per liter, water is often the heaviest thing in your backpack and you don’t want to have to carry it very …

I have used hand-pump water filters like the First Need or the Katadyn for years, believing them to be the only “real” option for filtering out cryptosporidium, giardia and other bacteria from the water sources in the Pacific Northwest where I hike. But I’ve been …

I didn’t put two and two together when I was experiencing the symptoms of heat exhaustion during a high exertion hike last week, but after a friend pointed it out to me, I realized that I’d had a close call. While I’d taken …

When you’re out on a long day hike or a backpacking trip, you will eventually run out of water and need to resupply. When that happens, it helps to understand what’s a good water source and what’s an iffy one. Water Sources …

I have never been a fan of sports recovery drinks or powders like Gatorade and don’t normally use them for 3 season backpacking because I feel that frequent all day snacking with unprocessed foods provides me with adequate calories and sodium. However, I …

Do you see that red stain on the inside of my platypus hydration bladder  in the picture below? That’s mold, like the stuff that grows on our bathroom shower curtain. I only noticed it on my last backpacking trip, and since getting …

When I started using the Platypus hydration system (collapsible bladder and hose), I periodically had leaks where water would seep out of the system and get the contents of my pack wet. The source of these leaks was the connection between the …

Most of the water filters carried by backpackers and long distance hikers cannot remove organisms smaller than 3 microns in size. While protozoa such as Giardia (shown below) and Cryptosporidium are about 5 microns in size, water filters miss bacteria such as …