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

Your Steri-Pen wasn't working because the batteries were low. If you had normal alkaline batteries they could have been affected by the cold. Also, Steri-Pens suck the juice out of alkaline batteries pretty quickly. Use lithium batteries and you'll get more longevity out of each set and they won't be affected by cold. This page on their web site shows the battery life of various types: http://www.steripen.com/batterytesting.html

I have guided 3 climbs to Kilimanjaro this year and the SteriPen was our primary water treatment method. If I have a group of 10 and each of them are drinking 3-4 liters of water per day I'll go through a couple sets of batteries over a 7 day climb.

The issue of whether or not to treat your water in the Sierra is going to keep being debated forever. In defense of the Forest Service who always will tell you to treat your water they need to say that to cover themselves. There is a chance of getting sick. Whether it be from human sources or a dead animal in the creek above and out of view of you. The chances are not high but they are there. Also, people have different tolerances to the flora that's in the water.

I don't treat my water in the Sierra except for the Main Whitney Trail. The risk is still low there too but the amount of traffic that trail gets and the number of unschooled novices who go there I don't want to take a chance. I got sick once after a trip up the Main Whitney Trail and although I have nothing scientific to back it up I attribute it to rotten luck on that trip. If I get sick from water there and have to guide another trip a couple days later it'll make that trip a lot less comfortable.

At this point in my life I've probably drank thousands of gallons of Sierra water and never treated any of it. Aside from that one experience I've never got sick. I'm on track to catch up to Bob R one of these days and he never treats his water and to my knowledge he's never gotten sick.

At the end of the day though it just doesn't matter what anybody else does but you. You need to make the decisions for yourself. That's the beauty of being out in the mountains. You aren't governed by a set of man made laws telling you when to cross a creek, whether or not to traverse that ridgeline with exposure below. You get to make your own decisions and that's part of the lure of being out there.

Through it all lets just try not to contaminate the water so it stays as clean as possible.

Amen brother!

if one person in your troop or just a pal who wants to drink all he or she can of the icy mountain water gets sick, your all in for a shorter trip.
dress properly, hike the same and filter your water

OldBob: Trouble with that argument is that water-borne intestinal problems don't show up for one to two weeks. The troup would already be home.

This is a valid point. I think I'd been home for about 3 weeks when the symptoms of my giardia infection started showing.

Please tell us about that infection: Where did you drink the water? And did you test positive for Giardia?

I contracted the infection on a family vacation to Zion National Park in Utah. We had hiked inside the park for a week and never directly drank from unfiltered water supplies. However, we ate lunch on more the one occassion in the cooling mist of waterfalls and we went swimming in the Upper Emerald Pool (many years ago before they closed the pools to swimming).

About three weeks after returning home I went to use the restroom... instead of having a bowel movement the toilet was filled with blood. I don't remember any pain being associated with it... maybe some mild stomach cramping. But I do remember the blood. The doctors diagnosed giardia, I had to take home some of those stool sample swab card things and drop them off at the lab after I'd done them (and wasn't -that- fun?)...

I was given a prescription of some sort (I don't remember now what it was) and after several days the symptoms cleared up and all was good in my world again. However... it definitely gave me a new perspective on drinking all that "fresh" water...

So.. thats my story....
~Chris

Ah yes! Zion N.P. I hiked the Narrows down into the park a few years ago. The hike starts with about four miles of hiking along and through working pasture irrigated with Virgin River water, which then drains off and down the river.

That would be a classic situation for Robert Derlet to find Giardia and other beasts -- downstream from livestock.

Glad you got the infection cleared up so effectively. The usual drug is Flagyl (metronidazole) -- tastes awful.

I would -love- to do the Narrows... one of these days I guess.

Flagyl sounds familiar. However... it's been more then 15 years.. and I was maybe... 15 at the time... so the names weren't so interesting just so long as it went away!

How did you find the Narrows? What was the hike like?

> How did you find the Narrows?
Used a map and compass. ...well, actually, I hired a shuttle service to take me there.

> What was the hike like?
Don't really want to hijack this valuable thread/topic but briefly, six of us had planned on an overnight, but we were also in Utah mountain biking, and several in our party did not want to leave our bikes someplace unattended for an overnight. So it turned into a dayhike. Got our permits first thing the prior morning; we had already lined up the shuttle. (Call Zion NP for details.) We chose September since it appeared least likely time for flash flooding possibilities. Caught the shuttle at 6 AM for the 1.5 hour ride. Hike took all day, maybe 8 hours. It was just outstanding! Pretty fall colors before the slot canyon. Some places, you are in a slot hundreds of feet deep and maybe 20 feet wide. You look up to see a narrow slot of daylight. I wore old hiking boots, retired them after that hike. Another wore low-top trail runners. Hiking poles are a big help--you wade the river a third of the distance. You learn to feel your way over the bigger rocks with your boots. It is a journey of a lifetime. NOT to be missed!

Keeping this thread alive...

I have re-posted Bob R's "60,000 liters of Sierra water consumed — Untreated" message in the Mt-Whitney.info forum. It is the only part of the long discussion I was able to recover.

OK, I read this thread & decided to just use chemical tabs for my water. I can save weight by not using a filter on my JMT thru-hike.

Deciding between iodine and taste neutralizer and chlorine dioxide. Any opinions on which are better/safer? The chlorine dioxide bottle says wait 4 hours after throwing the tablet in. Seems awfully inconvenient. I think with iodine you only have to wait a half hr.

Also, I heard chlorine dioxide might not be safe for women of reproductive age? I don't think it's proven, but just wondering what anyone else knows?

Thanks!

99% of the treatment I've used has been iodine (and that has not been much.

The neutralizer is Vitamin C, by the way. If you use most flavorings, they contain it, so will also neutralize it iodine.

Also, though, if you add the flavoring right away, the iodine cannot work.

Good to know - thanks!

Thank You, Steve C.

Your comments in that thread on the reasons not to filter were thoughtful and eloquent. I was distressed to see the thread disappear. I track many authors religiously and have taken to frantic copy-paste in fear they, or the gods of the board, will remove their posts.

Maybe I should get a T-shirt that says...