Water Purification

The importance of clean drinking water cannot be emphasized enough. There are several methods of water purification that one can use to ensure that the water you are drinking is pure.

There are the little water purification tablets that you purchase in the camping section of WallyWorld or other camping supply outlets. One little tablet will purify one liter of water and make it drinkable. Unfortunately after about 50 days (the quantity of tablets available in one packet) you will run out of tablets and be face with how to purify your drinking water.

How about those handy little filter straws? After a little research I found one called LifeStraw that is being touted as the best thing for allowing a person to sip nasty water and actually ingest clean water. However, they are not for sale to the public (although you can donate to a third-world country) and they DO NOT remove parasites such as cryptosporidium and giaridia. Don’t despair there are survival straws that will purify the water.

What happens when you run out of little water purification tablets and you’ve used your last filter (whether in a straw or a Big Burkey)? You can do what we did in the mountains. We poured that water from the river into another bucket, filtering it by pouring it through a white man’s t-shirt. The t-shirt caught all the little bits and pieces of debris floating in the water, including sand and dirt.

We repeated the process a couple of times, using a clean t-shirt for each pour. We then boiled the water over the fire. We never had a problem with illness from drinking the water. So in a pinch, filter and boil.
If nothing else you can learn to distill water over the fire.