A friend was recently telling me of adventures he had snowmobiling in remote areas of Alaska many years ago. I asked him, “What did you do to provide fresh water if you ran out?” He replied, “That depended on where we were.”
He went on to describe several places they could count of providing drinking or cooking water for them in the wilderness. “At forty to sixty below zero, it was too cold to melt snow. It took too much snow and too much of our precious fire to melt enough to be practical. We would walk out onto a pristine lake and add an extension on our auger to drill through the ice since it could be six feet thick. Once we struck water, we would get what we needed. Then we would clear around the hole, place a two inch thick piece of dense, insulating Styrofoam over it, and cover it with snow to slow its freezing over.”
Though few people had ever been to these remote lakes, this did not guarantee the water was pure. After all, though people weren’t there, plenty of animals were, and they didn’t mind using the lake all summer as their latrine. One danger was something they called ‘beaver fever.” According to WIKI, beaver fever is more officially known as Giardiasis. It is a diarrheal infection of the small intestine by a single-celled organism called Giardia lamblia. About two million are affected annually, mainly in areas where standing water can be contaminated.
To rid the questionable water of the danger of beaver fever, these Alaskan adventurers would do one of three things. First, they could boil the water for twenty minutes. This killed most pathogens that were living. It also left the water tasteless. Second, they could treat all water with halogenated tablets or solutions (water purification tablets). Both of these methods were fast but neither removed anything from the water. They just killed what was living and dangerous.
The third method was to filter the water. This does not mean to run the water through a coffee filter but rather to run it through something designed to filter water. An activated carbon filter would be ideal. No matter what is in the water that is dangerous, the adsorbing properties of activated carbon is able to remove it from the water and make it safe to drink.
Filtering not only removes the pathogens such as e. coli that is transmitted through fecal matter, but it also removes other substances that may be in the water but unknown to the drinker. For example, heavy metals or radioactive substances may be present in the water from some unknown source. Carbon filters have the amazing ability to remove these without removing the flavor and needed minerals.
If you are an adventurer, be sure to take some type of gravity operated activated charcoal water filter with you. Your life and health may depend on it!
Possibly related articles:
- City Water Purity Report
- Carbon Filters More Effectively For Cleaner Drinking Water
- E. Coli Contamination of Drinking Water
Tags: survival water
