Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Filtering water?

I have read a lot of the posts on this forum, seems as though most dont filter water early in the season when the snow fields allow, however, we are going up over 3 days over July 4th, do we need filters?

First off, I'd suggest searching the board as there are plenty of discussions of this topic.

That said, what it boils down to (you should pardon the pun) is what you consider the level of risk, based on the heavy use that the Whitney trail gets. In the back country and especially above 12,000', you're more than likely safe with water straight out of a stream. However, given the number of people on the MMWT and the wide range of consciousness about the need to keep the water clean, I would filter or treat any water along the trail during prime time, and July 4 is well into that period.

Others will disagree with me, but I would rather err on the side of caution.

It may come down to a matter of personal preference that has to do with the amount of risk that one is willing to accept to avoid the incovenience of carrying and using a filter.

I recall reading here that even some of the most staunch advocates of drinking unfiltered water along the Whitney trail have said that the unfiltered water is fine but "drink smart" which suggests to me that they think you might run into some bad water if you aren't "smart". According to the Wikipedia only 1/3 of the people who are infected with Giardia have symptoms so you may not even know if you have the bug inside you. So, for example, someone could drink unfiltered Whitney water over and over again, and on rare occasions with giardia in it, and not ever know it and think that the water is OK all the time for everyone because they never got sick.
Alan, I'm not one of them. I agree with you.

I have read all of the posts on filtering water. A lot of smart folks on this forum don't filter their water. But it's like Russian roulette. How much risk do you want to take? I plan on hiking the MWT in July, and I am taking a Steripen. If you are like me, you just don't want to take the risk of getting sick.

I took my steripen and it malfunctioned @ 12,000' (trail camp) It gave a blinking red light followed by no light. We ended up boiling our water. When I researched it later, I found that I was not the only person that had this problem.

TJ311 writes,
I took my steripen and it malfunctioned @ 12,000' (trail camp) It gave a blinking red light followed by no light. We ended up boiling our water. When I researched it later, I found that I was not the only person that had this problem.


Is that an elevation problem?

There are two main reasons for leaving a filter behind: time and weight.

The first I always have thought of as a non-issue. To filter water takes but a few minutes. Unless you're a speed racer, you'll want to stop for a breather anyway, so using a filter won't add any time to your hike.

The second reason is the good one. Even a filter that weighs only 14 ounces can be a burden when you're huffing and puffing at 11,000 feet.

My recommendation is to leave the filter at home and take Aqua Mira (either the drops or the new tablets). The liquid version can be transferred to small dropper bottles. The total weight will be less than an ounce and the space consumption not measurable. If you use the liquid form you will need five minutes for the process; the tablets are plop-and-go.

I haven't used AquaMira but Philmont now supplies Katadyn's "Micropur" brand of purification tablets that are chemically similar (chlorine dioxide being the active ingredient).

As far as I know, any of these chemical means require a modest to significant amount of time to be effective. At Philmont, they tell you to let the tablet dissolve (it's like an old "Fizzie" that bubbles, so you can tell when it has completely dissolved), bleed the bottle threads and then wait 15 minutes.

With really cold mountain stream water (like Whitney), the time can be even longer.

This throws yet another tradeoff into the mix. While I acknowledge that my First Need filter weighs about a pound, it pumps a liter a minute, so I can pump enough water for several people to drink (immediately after pumping) in the time it takes for the Micropur to take effect.

Not a big deal if you're preparing water at camp for the next morning's hike but if you get back to camp dry and want something to drink right away, that 15-minute wait can seem like f-o-r-e-v-e-r...

On the good side, the Micropur (and I assume also the AquaMira) doesn't impart much, if any, taste to the water, unlike the old iodine preparations that positively wrecked the joy of drinking fresh mountain stream water.

As with many things, there are tradeoffs...time versus weight in this case...

I read that it's a cold weather problem. I have not had the opportunity to test that out though.

KodiakBoy, many of us who've been climbing Whitney and the Sierras drink the water straight and smart. My first drink was more than 50 years ago, and I have never been made sick from the water in the Sierras, although other areas in California have sickened me: once on Mt. Tamalpais and once in the San Gabriels, and both incidents were caused by me NOT drinking smart. The San Gabriel incident hurt me for two years! Not good.

The waters on Mt. Whitney have never been proven to be polluted, and the Giardia scare years ago has since turned out to be totally unproven, if not a bad hoax.

Alan has been casting aspersions on Whitney's waters ever since he first posted on the subject of water years ago. I like Alan as a person, and I think he is a terrific dad, a fine Scout leader and long-time high-pointer, and has made lots of great comments on this board, but his persistent remarks concerning Whitney's waters are bothersome. I do not think he has ever drunk Whitney waters without filtering, and that is his choice, of course, and everyone else's. However, he is from Missouri where, apparently, water flowing through cow pastures or whatever is polluted and does need filtering. This is not the case on Mt. Whitney's east side above Whitney Portal.

BobR, our resident scientist, as it were, has posted many, many times on the subject, and has proven the purity of Whitney's source waters. I say sources, because it is always possible for a hiker to wash hands and utensils with soap and pollute the water in a particular spot. That's where we have to drink smart when we should observe the likelihood of any contamination, such as obvious soap suds.

Mt. Whitney's source waters are pure all year long, and have never been proven otherwise. Obviously, the more people using the trail, the more chance that some spots are going to be polluted by soap or worse. Drinking smart would be avoiding the likely places, such as up at Trail Camp on the camping side of the pond.

As always said, filtering is a personal choice, but many of us choose not to, and we have as yet to see a definitive report about anyone contracting Giardia in the Whitney zone.

You might want to check out this article on the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club and then make your decision.

http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/pcs/articles/giardia.asp

WOW, excellent article, cloudrippr, confirmed many of my beliefs and suspicions about the giardia hype. I will continue to treat but am now more confident in my decisions about where I get my water.

Excellent article, cloudrippr!! Thanks for posting it.

Wayne, we will have to agree to disagree on the subject of water treatment. Please note that I have been careful to comment (several times) that Giardia is not the only organism about which I have concerns, whether here in the Midwest (elevations between 500' and 1700') or in the mountains of CO, UT, CA, etc.

I think the most telling sentences in the article referenced by cloudrippr were:

"Avoid water that likely could have passed through an area subject to heavy human or animal use."

and:

"Untreated Sierra Nevada water is, almost everywhere, safe to drink—if you “drink smart.” If you don’t “drink smart” you may ingest diarrhea-causing organisms. But they almost certainly won’t be Giardia."

Where would I be particularly paranoid? Well, places like Mt. Ritter where the horse packers are numerous and the trails frequently parallel the creeks; places like Mt. Whitney, especially the pond at Trail Camp where there are tons of people (and no longer even the solar latrines) and, certainly, Yosemite Valley. (We don't even need to talk about most of the streams here in MO...agricultural runoff is ubiquitous in all but the most isolated "wilderness" areas of the state.)

The comments about "drinking smart" in the article about the Sierra will reduce the risk to tolerable (vanishingly-small?) levels, but depending on where you hike and camp, there may or may not be "smart" sources nearby.

Here on the Whitney board, we discuss topics with people of widely-varying levels of experience and expertise. Those of us who spend lots of time meandering about the woods and mountains have a far different sense of what water sources we would consider safe and what we wouldn't. When addressing a broader audience, I'll still bias my comments to the conservative side of what I might practice myself.

Am I overly cautious? Perhaps. Could I lose a pound of packed weight by leaving the filter at home? Certainly. Am I likely to change my habits? Doubtful.

Very well stated Alan. I am in total agreement with you.My Steripen weighs only ounces and I don't mind swiping my water with it at all.

I agree. It is all about choosing your water source wisely. Some of the tributaries feeding into Outpost or Trail camp may be very clean, but I have this mental image of all of the fecal matter hidden under rocks all around Trail Camp feeding other pathogens into the main watercourse. When I had some scouts there last year, we stopped close to the pond at Trail Camp to rest on the way down from the summit. One of the scouts picked up a rock, and found a nice surprise underneath it. And he was literally five feet from the main trail. Who knows what lies hidden in that area. With no soil, all of that fecal load will be washed directly into the stream by rain or snowmelt.

One of the reasons that I started hiking up in the mountains was to be rewarded with a drink from a most pristine lake or stream. I used to like to go salt water fishing before, but these days you can't eat some of the fish you catch around the coastal cities anymore.

On one of the other forums, I came across an interesting PCT entry about some medical students who are testing the lakes along the JMT this summer for e coli, among other things:

"...we met a couple medical students who were doing research on the lakes to test for cyanobacteria and e-coli concentrations throughout the summer. they are making three trips on the jmt and are seeing how concentrations are different in lakes that are off trail, backpackers access only, and pack animal access."

I'll reiterate that Giardia isn't the only pathogen we're concerned about. If it's a creek that crosses/parallels a trail used by pack stock or one that is in a heavy human use area, I'll still be cautious.

Once I'm into a lightly-used area and away from the horse packers' usual haunts, I'll look for clear streams or fresh snowmelt and enjoy them straight up.

As a non-Whitney example of a lake where I absolutely did filter the water, we tried (and were stormed off) Kings Peak in Utah a couple of years ago. We camped next to Dollar Lake, in a lightly-used (by Sierra standards) area. However, the area has a significant moose population (the four-hoofed variety, not our favorite contributor Laura) and they were browsing out in the lake each morning when we got up. Would I drink that lake water straight? Don't think so...the moose weren't wearing diapers...

(But then that would fit into my category of "drinking smart" and treating water from a suspect source. Point is, you need to know the area and observe appropriate precautions.)

That's a false and irresponsible remark. That's easy to write on a message board when you have no responsibility. It's a different matter when you are responsible for the well being of children that parents have entrusted to your care.

As I mentioned before, most people who are infected with giardia have no symptoms. It looks like that's the case for cryptosporidium too. An infection by a water borne pathogen is even more insidious if a child doesn't experience any overt symptoms, it is undetected, and it goes untreated and affects a child's growth.

Anecdotal evidence from people who drink Sierra water over and over again and don't get symptoms doesn't mean much as far as determining the amount of pathogens in the water because most people can get infected without showing any symptoms. It seems like a way to study whether there is any benefit in filtering and whether there is giardia or any other pathogen in Whitney water is to test the feces of people who frequent the Whitney Zone and compare those who filter with those who don't. It's not as inconvenient a test as one might at first think because people routinely take fecal smears at home for annual colon cancer screening and mail them into a lab. Probably a larger sample would be needed to test for parasites but that shouldn't be a problem.

However, even this test may not give a conclusive answer regarding the water because those who frequent Whitney may be knowledgeable enough to successfully avoid water sources that might have pathogens. For the average person, they may not be aware of possible problems with some sources.

The problem is that there has not been a definitive study of Whitney water. It is made more difficult because water quality changes. For example, after a rain, pathogens from excrement near a water source can be washed into the water and be a problem for awhile and then awhile later the water is OK. The changing state of the safety of drinking water is why municipal water sources are probably regularly tested.

mountainboy11, If you want to drink unfiltered water, by all means do. That's your business. I think it is safe most of the time. But is it safe enough of the time to have negligible risk, especially for children? That's uncertain.

it's simple and a DUH! ––take a filter and use it. no need to theorize or anything and in the process, along the way, you can use the filter to teach the scouts a lesson about what we are doing to our water, our planet . . . then, when you get them up high and find that spring trickle, you can invite them all to experience a taste of heaven. Tip: try the spring just past the Rae Lakes Ranger Station. good stuff . . . and you probably won't have an angry pack of scout parents.