Chris Townsend

by The Backpacker's Handbook - 3rd Ed

  Bears are attracted to food by smell as well as sight. Double-bagging smelly foods and not carrying really stinky ones in bear country is a good idea. Ursack makes odor-resistant plastic bags that they say are thousands of times more odorproof than standard bags. They weigh 1 ounce, measure 12.5 by 16 inches, and will fit inside an Ursack. Watchful Eye Designs makes a similar product called the O.P. Sak, which they say is odorproof. It comes in two sizes—6 by 9 and 12.5 by 15.5 inches. Bags like this sound sensible for all food storage.

  Bears view smelly items such as toothpaste, soap, insect repellent, and sunscreen as food, so store them with your food. Food-stained clothing and dirty pots are best stored away from where you sleep, too.

  A good way to keep bears out of your camp is by avoiding popular backcountry sites. Bears frequent those places where there is a regular supply of food. By camping away from such sites on one eleven-day trip in Yosemite National Park, I didn’t even see a bear.

  If a bear does get your food don’t try to get it back. The bear will almost certainly defend it. (For more on bears, see pages 394–96.)

  “Wild” Food

  I’m often asked why I don’t “live off the land” during long wilderness hikes. The phrase conjures up the carefree image of a hiker ambling along, munching on nuts and fruits plucked from trailside bushes and scooping tasty trout from every stream.

  In fact, unless you hunt or fish, finding enough to eat in the wilderness is very difficult for most people and does not allow time for walking all day. Then too, wild lands are limited and fragile; we should take no more from them than we absolutely must, which means going in with all the food we need. If every wilderness traveler relied on foraging for food, popular areas would soon be stripped bare.

  Fishing, perhaps, is an exception. Mountain lakes and streams often seem full of fish (some are restocked regularly, a highly dubious practice environmentally). Anglers often carry light fishing gear (and licenses) in suitable country and thereby supplement their diets with some fresh food. For some, hiking is a means to fish remote waters.

  WATER

  While you can manage without food for a surprisingly long time, this isn’t so for water. Dehydration can kill you in a matter of days—and long before you’re in real danger, you’ll cease to enjoy what you’re doing as your mind dulls and your perceptions numb.

  On any walk, you need to know where water sources are and what the condition of the water is likely to be. In many places water is not a problem—unless there’s too much of it—but in others, especially desert or semidesert areas, the location of water sources can determine your route. Water supply is one of the first things I want to know about a region new to me.

  Taking water from a hole cut through the ice of a snow-covered lake.

  Fishing water out of a creek with a bottle attached to the end of a pole. Make sure you’re standing on secure snow.

  How much water you need per day varies from person to person and depends on the weather conditions, the amount of energy you expend, and the type of food you carry. I can walk all day without a drink in cool, damp conditions, though I don’t recommend this. But I may drink a quart an hour on a very hot day in an area where there’s no shade. Estimating needs for camp is easier. With the dried foods I eat, I can get by on 2 quarts a night, but I prefer to have 4 or more—and that’s just for cooking and drinking, not for washing utensils or myself. It also assumes I’ve had enough to drink during the day and either am camping near water or expect to find a source fairly early the next day.

  When you have to carry water, these calculations become important, because water weighs more than 2 pounds per quart. In desert areas of the Southwest, I’ve carried 3 gallons of water—a horrendous 25 pounds. Luckily, it’s rare to have to carry that much, at least for a whole day. “Dry” camps (ones away from water sources) may require you to carry 3 or 4 quarts of water, but often this can be picked up late in the day so you only have to carry it for a few hours. Remember that you need enough water to get you to the next reliable source as well as for use in camp.

  Snow-covered country is odd—everything is shrouded in solid water, but it’s effectively a desert. Walking in snow can dehydrate you as quickly as desert walking, because the dry air sucks moisture out of your body. The thirstiest I’ve ever felt was when I skied all day in hot sunshine with no shade and not enough liquid. Eating snow cools your mouth but provides little real relief. The answer, easily given but not so easily carried out, is to melt enough snow in camp to keep you well supplied during the day.

  Ideally, you should never allow yourself to become even slightly dehydrated. The best way to avoid this is to drink regularly, whether you feel thirsty or not. If you’re not careful, though, dehydration may creep up on you, and only when your mouth starts to feel sticky and your tongue swollen do you realize how thirsty you are. Warning signs of dehydration are a reduction in urine output and a change in the color of your urine—the paler, the better. If it’s dark, you need to drink a fair amount of water quickly. In order to avoid heat exhaustion, you should eat something as well or add fruit crystals or sports drink powder to the water to ensure that you replace essential electrolytes (sodium and potassium) that are also lost when you become dehydrated.

  Sources

  Streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds are obvious sources of water, easily identified on a map. In areas with plenty of these features, you won’t need to carry much or to worry about running out. Check contour lines carefully, however, to see exactly where the water is. Often the high ridges that make for superb walking are far above any water. In such places it’s better to carry full bottles than to make long descents and reascents when you need a drink. Remember, too, that dotted blue lines on the map usually indicate seasonal water sources; the rushing stream of June, heavy with snowmelt, may have vanished completely by late September.

  Getting water can be as simple as dipping your water bottle into a fast-running river.

  Piped springs can provide clean, fresh water if you take it from the inlet.

  If water sources are scarce, you may have to hunt out tiny trickles and seeps. To find these, look for areas of richer, denser vegetation and for depressions and gullies where water may gather or run. Pause and listen, too. You can often hear water trickling even when you can’t see it.

  In deserts, locating water is critical to survival. “Think water” is a valuable mantra. Check guidebooks for information on water sources and, more important, ask rangers and other local people for current information. Sources can dry up quickly, so it’s wise to always carry enough water to get to the next reliable source or out to a trailhead if a source isn’t guaranteed. In places it may be necessary to place water caches. I did this on the Arizona Trail where there was a 60-mile waterless section across hot Sonoran Desert. My companion and I put out two caches of 9 gallons in gallon jugs and set off with 2 gallons each for the hike of three and a bit days. We simply hid the caches under bushes near the jeep trail we drove in on to place them, then marked them on the map. All were still there when we collected them over the next few days, but plastic jugs aren’t the most reliable containers, since animals can bite into them. If you place caches, it’s important to carry out all the water containers. We ended that hike with our packs festooned with squashed empty water jugs.

  For those who are intending more serious desert ventures and want to know about natural water sources, solar stills, and other possibilities, I recommend a look at The Ultimate Desert Handbook by Mark Johnson.

  Safety

  A real problem with water is deciding whether what you find is safe to drink. Water clarity is not necessarily an indication of either purity or contamination. Even the most sparkling, crystal-clear mountain stream may not be safe to drink from.

  The invisible potential contaminants include a wide variety of microorganisms—protozoans, bacteria, and viruses—that cause intestinal disorders, some mild, some severe. The potential nasties include Cryptosporidium, a protozo
an, that has gotten much attention recently. This causes unpleasant watery diarrhea, but once you’ve had the disorder you should be immune.

  Water collection methods.

  Viruses are the most dangerous waterborne organisms—they can cause fatal diseases like polio and hepatitis. But viruses aren’t a problem in most of North America. If you visit some other countries, however, they’re a real threat. When I went hiking in Nepal, all vegetables and fruit had to be washed in iodine-treated water, and I used iodine to purify all water. Filters, the trekking company told me, were ineffective. If you’re going abroad, check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about water there.

  The protozoan Giardia lamblia, which causes a virulent gut disorder, giardiasis, is the bug that has received most attention. While Giardia is indeed found in some wilderness streams and lakes—though not, it seems, in the quantities people think—too many people are far too concerned about it. Giardiasis isn’t fatal, and you’re unlikely to be incapacitated. Although it makes some people feel quite ill, most don’t even have any symptoms and become immune after being exposed to it.

  Giardia lamblia lives in the intestines of humans and animals. It gets into water as cysts excreted in feces, which is one reason for always siting toilets well away from water. The symptoms of giardiasis appear a few weeks after ingestion and include diarrhea, stomachache, a bloated feeling, nausea, and foul-smelling feces. However, these symptoms occur in other stomach disorders as well, and only a stool analysis can confirm infection. The chances of catching giardiasis or other illness from water aren’t high, despite media coverage to the contrary. To cover themselves, land managers generally advise people that all water needs treating, which adds to concern. People who get a gut disorder then tend to blame Giardia in the water because they’ve been warned about it, even though the cause is probably not either Giardia or the water.

  Research published in 1995 in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine suggests that giardiasis and other gut disorders are spread “by oral-fecal or food-borne transmission not by contaminated drinking water.” Out of 34,348 cases of giardiasis reported to the study’s authors, Thomas R. Welch and Timothy P. Welch, by forty-eight state health departments, a mere nineteen were associated with drinking contaminated water, and just two of them were known to be campers and backpackers. The authors compare the likelihood of catching giardiasis from drinking water to the risk of a shark attack and say that it’s “an extraordinarily rare event to which the public and press have seemingly devoted inappropriate attention.” In a separate study published in the online journal of the Yosemite Association, Robert L. Rockwell comes to a similar conclusion with regard to the Sierra Nevada: “You can indeed contract giardiasis on visits to the Sierra Nevada, but it won’t be from the water. So drink freely and confidently.” (In the summer of 2002 I did just this on a five-week hike in the High Sierra, never treating any water.)

  According to both the Rockwell and Welch studies, it’s far more important to wash your hands thoroughly and keep your cooking pots clean than to treat your water. Sharing mugs and bowls and bags of gorp is unwise too. Share food by pouring it into people’s hands or their own utensils to minimize the chance of contamination.

  The most recent study was done by Backpacker magazine in the spring and summer of 2003 (reported in the December 2003 issue). Seven backcountry water sources were tested three separate times for Giardia and Cryptosporidium by a California laboratory specializing in these protozoans. The sources ranged from the Neversink River East Branch in the Catskills in New York State to the Merced River in Yosemite National Park in California. Only one source had a high enough concentration of cysts (1.5 per liter) for Backpacker to advise treating it, though it was still too low to make most people ill. Two had none at all. The other four had no viable cysts. Out of the twenty-one total samples, only six tested positive for Giardia and only one for Cryptosporidium. Other research also shows such low concentrations of protozoans, when any are found at all, that infection is very unlikely. The Backpacker article quotes Robert W. Derlet, a hiker and a professor of medicine who is researching the water sources in the Sierra, as saying that “the warnings about backcountry water quality are vastly exaggerated. Most of them are based on rumor and hearsay, nothing more. The chances of picking up a bug are very slim, and the chances of getting sick are much, much slimmer. If you averaged every drop of water from every lake in the Sierra and put it in a reservoir, you’d have to drink 250 gallons to get enough giardia to make you sick.” The evidence suggests most backcountry water is safe, and you are very unlikely to catch anything from drinking it untreated. There are far greater risks in the wilderness. If you’re really worried about intestinal illness, you could ease your concerns by treating all water, but the most important thing is to take great care with hand washing and keeping your cooking utensils clean. Even if you treat all your water, it’s wise to be careful about sources. No treatment method is foolproof. I treat water only if it’s below habitations, including backcountry shelters and popular campsites, and popular trails; if there are cattle or signs of cattle in the area; or if it looks or smells unpleasant. When seeking drinking water I look for springs and fast-flowing streams and take the water from above trails, campsites, and bridges. With lakes I take water from the inlet or the outlet if I can. I love being able to drink deeply from a mountain stream, and I’m very reluctant to give up this wilderness pleasure.

  If you do get a bad digestive upset that doesn’t clear up in a few days, it’s wise to see a doctor just in case it’s something serious. In the meantime drink plenty, since diarrhea is dehydrating, and eat plain low-fat foods such as rice and pasta. An upset gut can be debilitating and extremely unpleasant. I once had a very severe bout of diarrhea and vomiting in Nepal (probably contracted in Katmandu) that lasted several days. The cause was undiagnosed.

  Treating all water can pose its own dangers. In the Montana Rockies during my Continental Divide walk, I regularly met members of a large party doing the same hike. Most of them were very worried about giardiasis, and they filtered or boiled all water before drinking it. While restocking and resting in the town of Butte after several weeks of very hot weather, I met one of this party walking down the street looking pale and thin. He told me he’d staggered out of the mountains feeling weak and sick. He didn’t have giardiasis though—he was suffering from severe dehydration. He wouldn’t drink unfiltered water and hadn’t filtered the amount he should have been drinking. Dehydration is a serious enough threat, far greater than giardiasis, that drinking enough water is essential whether it’s been treated or not.

  Treatment

  Water can be treated by boiling it, adding chemicals, and filtering. Boiling and chemicals disinfect the water—that is, they kill bugs in it. Filters remove anything too large to pass through the pores, but they don’t disinfect water or remove viruses unless they have a chemical component as well, in which case they’re described as purifiers. Visibly dirty water can be filtered through a bandanna or a coffee filter, as can glacier meltwater, but this doesn’t remove microorganisms.

  BOILING Boiling is the surest way to kill dangerous organisms, but it’s impractical for all water needs because it uses fuel and takes time. However, it isn’t necessary to boil water for the five to fifteen minutes often advised. Just bringing it to a boil will do—harmful organisms, including Giardia cysts, are killed at temperatures below the boiling point even at high altitude, where it’s lower than at sea level. Boiled water tastes flat. To restore the sparkle, shake it up or pour it from one container into another and back again a few times to aerate it.

  CHEMICAL TREATMENT The traditional forms of chemical treatment, iodine and chlorine tablets, are lightweight and simple to use; iodine treatment is regarded as the most effective against Giardia, but neither is proven against Cryptosporidium. Both chemicals make the water taste foul. Despite what is often stated, iodine isn’t highly toxic. Apparently, if you do ingest too much you�
��ll probably vomit, getting rid of most of the iodine. Normal doses of iodine won’t harm you. Wilkerson’s Medicine for Mountaineering and Other Wilderness Activities reports that inmates of three Florida prisons have drunk water disinfected with iodine over a fifteen-year period with no ill effects. Only those with known thyroid problems or goiters need to be careful.

  Water-cleaning methods.

  Using a coffee filter to strain sediment from pond water.

  The most common brand of iodine tablets, Potable Aqua, comes in 3.5-ounce bottles containing fifty tablets that will treat twenty-five quarts. You can get neutralizing tablets that remove the aftertaste. These are made of vitamin C (ascorbic acid), so any soluble vitamin C tablets will have the same effect. But don’t add them or anything else like fruit crystals until the iodine has had time to work (thirty minutes). I used chlorine tablets on the Pacific Crest Trail and Potable Aqua on the Continental Divide. I drank from filthy stockponds on both walks and never became ill, so presumably both treatments worked. Tablets have a limited life; you should buy a fresh supply at least annually. Once a bottle is opened, it should be used within a few weeks or else discarded.