- Joined
- Jan 7, 2003
- Messages
- 2,373
Hydration is arguably one of the top survival priorities in every climate zone a survivor may encounter short of going overboard in the Great Lakes. We need water and if we don’t have it we suffer greatly.
Were I live in Brazil (Minas Gerais) every year groups of young people go off for day hikes, get lost and end up spending the night in the bush. I was able to personally interview several participants from one such incident and the lessons learned are worth noting. The group consisted of several adult leaders and about 20 teenage boys.
#1. Many of the people on the hike had taken a “comfort bottle” of water. By that I mean an easy to carry 500 ml plastic bottle. On a typical hike this represents about 25% of their body’s actual need for water. Many people did not carry any water at all, others only carried soft drinks. Almost universally as the liquid ran out the bottle was tossed aside. All the groups’ water supply was gone before the halfway point of the proposed hike.
#2. Nobody purposefully carried the means to collect, store, or treat water. The leadership was confident that a short four-hour hike would present little difficulty.
#3. As the short noontime “Hike” turned into an ordeal that lasted long into the night the number one misery factor was thirst.
#4. It was after dark before anyone started to look for water. A small run-off from a cattle pasture was found but nobody drank because they couldn’t even see the water let alone determine its condition. They had no means to purify the water and very little storage capacity considering the size of the group.
#5. This bad experience turned a great many of those city-bred kids off to further wilderness exploration.
I am now I the position to take large groups of teens in the wilderness on day hikes and we now have a few protocols in place. Everyone carries at least one liter of water, no bottles are to be discarded along the way. The group leaders always carry the means to collect and purify drinking water.
On a personal level I have a few rules that I follow whenever I go into the bush for a day or more.
1#. Always carry enough containers to hold a full 24-hour supply of water. You don’t have to carry them full but if you don’t have them along your range will be severely limited in dry terrain. Your route of travel will be determined by water sources. Platypus bags are a good choice for this.
#2. Always carry a low cost, disposable means to cache extra water. Large heavy-duty zip-lock bags are highly recommended. If you paid money for a canteen, camelback, or platypus bag you most likely won’t leave it full of water as a cache. If you do cache it somewhere you will end up returning for it even if you don’t need the water just to retrieve the container. I don’t advocate littering but the planet will forgive you if you leave a zip-lock full of water on a mountaintop somewhere.
#2. Always carry both a filter and chemical means to purify water. Double check to make sure you have enough chemical means to cover the entire trip. Chemical means alone limit the sources that your will use for drinking water. In actual practice nasty looking water sources get passed over in hopes of finding a better source. That is fine if the chances of finding water are good, if not you have to take what you can get and often it is unappetizing water if not filtered. If your water tastes bad or is suspect in any way you WILL NOT drink enough of it to keep yourself from getting dehydrated. You will only drink “bad water” (nasty looking, smelly, chemically treated water) once you are already dehydrated and your body will drink just about anything.
#3. Most field expedient survival techniques for extracting water from unlikely sources are dependant upon a minimum of gear.
Any plastic sheeting will collect rainwater, but only clear plastic can be used for transpiration bags or solar stills. While both of these methods are usually marginal performers neither of them is even possible with a black contractor bag common to survival kits.
Dew collection is a very good way to get a useful quantity of water. Any grimy T-shirt will soak up dew water but it is far more appealing to try this with a clean sponge or absorbent cloth. You also need a wide mouth container to wring the water into. The resulting water is often very dirty and needs to be filtered and treated.
I have found a 60 ml syringe and clear plastic tubing to be invaluable for collecting water from strange sources. Seeps and small pools often have fine silt at the bottom. When you find these sources they are normally settled and clear. They are also shallow and difficult to harvest. The syringe allows you to suck the water from the surface of very shallow pools without disturbing them.
The tube also allows you to get water out of places too tight to dip from or too deep to reach. A waking stick and three rubber bands allow you to form a probe that can reach down several feet into a crack or hole. Some types of tubing are too flexible for this and will collapse under the rubber bands.
On a hunch I once threaded about a 40cm of tube down a 1 cm hole in a boulder and extracted about 200 ml of water. In my experience that’s about four times what a transpiration bag will produce with a fraction of the effort. Sucking up 60ml of water at a time is a time consuming and tedious process but when you compare it to building a solar still or digging it ain’t that bad a deal. Mac
Were I live in Brazil (Minas Gerais) every year groups of young people go off for day hikes, get lost and end up spending the night in the bush. I was able to personally interview several participants from one such incident and the lessons learned are worth noting. The group consisted of several adult leaders and about 20 teenage boys.
#1. Many of the people on the hike had taken a “comfort bottle” of water. By that I mean an easy to carry 500 ml plastic bottle. On a typical hike this represents about 25% of their body’s actual need for water. Many people did not carry any water at all, others only carried soft drinks. Almost universally as the liquid ran out the bottle was tossed aside. All the groups’ water supply was gone before the halfway point of the proposed hike.
#2. Nobody purposefully carried the means to collect, store, or treat water. The leadership was confident that a short four-hour hike would present little difficulty.
#3. As the short noontime “Hike” turned into an ordeal that lasted long into the night the number one misery factor was thirst.
#4. It was after dark before anyone started to look for water. A small run-off from a cattle pasture was found but nobody drank because they couldn’t even see the water let alone determine its condition. They had no means to purify the water and very little storage capacity considering the size of the group.
#5. This bad experience turned a great many of those city-bred kids off to further wilderness exploration.
I am now I the position to take large groups of teens in the wilderness on day hikes and we now have a few protocols in place. Everyone carries at least one liter of water, no bottles are to be discarded along the way. The group leaders always carry the means to collect and purify drinking water.
On a personal level I have a few rules that I follow whenever I go into the bush for a day or more.
1#. Always carry enough containers to hold a full 24-hour supply of water. You don’t have to carry them full but if you don’t have them along your range will be severely limited in dry terrain. Your route of travel will be determined by water sources. Platypus bags are a good choice for this.
#2. Always carry a low cost, disposable means to cache extra water. Large heavy-duty zip-lock bags are highly recommended. If you paid money for a canteen, camelback, or platypus bag you most likely won’t leave it full of water as a cache. If you do cache it somewhere you will end up returning for it even if you don’t need the water just to retrieve the container. I don’t advocate littering but the planet will forgive you if you leave a zip-lock full of water on a mountaintop somewhere.
#2. Always carry both a filter and chemical means to purify water. Double check to make sure you have enough chemical means to cover the entire trip. Chemical means alone limit the sources that your will use for drinking water. In actual practice nasty looking water sources get passed over in hopes of finding a better source. That is fine if the chances of finding water are good, if not you have to take what you can get and often it is unappetizing water if not filtered. If your water tastes bad or is suspect in any way you WILL NOT drink enough of it to keep yourself from getting dehydrated. You will only drink “bad water” (nasty looking, smelly, chemically treated water) once you are already dehydrated and your body will drink just about anything.
#3. Most field expedient survival techniques for extracting water from unlikely sources are dependant upon a minimum of gear.
Any plastic sheeting will collect rainwater, but only clear plastic can be used for transpiration bags or solar stills. While both of these methods are usually marginal performers neither of them is even possible with a black contractor bag common to survival kits.
Dew collection is a very good way to get a useful quantity of water. Any grimy T-shirt will soak up dew water but it is far more appealing to try this with a clean sponge or absorbent cloth. You also need a wide mouth container to wring the water into. The resulting water is often very dirty and needs to be filtered and treated.
I have found a 60 ml syringe and clear plastic tubing to be invaluable for collecting water from strange sources. Seeps and small pools often have fine silt at the bottom. When you find these sources they are normally settled and clear. They are also shallow and difficult to harvest. The syringe allows you to suck the water from the surface of very shallow pools without disturbing them.
The tube also allows you to get water out of places too tight to dip from or too deep to reach. A waking stick and three rubber bands allow you to form a probe that can reach down several feet into a crack or hole. Some types of tubing are too flexible for this and will collapse under the rubber bands.
On a hunch I once threaded about a 40cm of tube down a 1 cm hole in a boulder and extracted about 200 ml of water. In my experience that’s about four times what a transpiration bag will produce with a fraction of the effort. Sucking up 60ml of water at a time is a time consuming and tedious process but when you compare it to building a solar still or digging it ain’t that bad a deal. Mac
