The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
He was from that area and told me that ranchers will let their cattle graze where ever they want, even on protected federal land, polluting pretty much every water source and everything downstream. They were very right. We saw cattle feces everywhere. It was very unsettling.
Edit: I also got giardia at Smith Rock one time and it wasn't fucking pleasant.
I filter or boil my water even at 11,000 feet in altitude where the cattle do not roam.
BTW: like patio11's standing invitation, if you're ever in Bend, say hi and we'll have a beer.
There's always poop in the woods, even in remote, untamed areas.
http://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/Factsheets/pdfs/giardiasis.pdf
All bets are off for other protozoans and bacterii.
US natural water sources are actually relatively very clean. We don’t have any issues with viruses or chemicals, which means we can safely use ~0.2 micron filters while some regions require more expensive ~0.02 micron filters.
Having grown up backpacking the Wallowas, it really depends on where you are as to the safety of the water. Down in the Minam where the cows are grazing everywhere? Yes, definitely filter. Way up in the high country, running water? Not a problem.
But, I don't blame you for filtering wherever you are. The risks in general aren't worth it.
I've always been taught to filter/treat water regardless of location.
Giardia used to be very rare in some places like Europe, but I think that may have changed over time.
Maybe this is an ignorant thing to say, but before cattle, there were massive herds of buffalo everywhere doing the same thing, right?
Where we have good data, people lived to about the same age as today - or even longer.[1]
See, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
[1] Obvious caveat that particularly awful periods of history in some locations had bad life expectancies - wars that killed a third of the population, the Black Plague, genocide, etc. The idea that human life expectancy has improved over time is a myth - unless you start counting in 1900. It's gone up and down throughout history, but ours is nothing special.
Let's all get back to the Earth and live the way many of our ancestors did: dying off in our youth or dealing with either preventable and crippling diseases or even just wandering around with weird diseases that just make life far less enjoyable.
On the one hand, if we were to take this approach, it would speed up natural selection for us and whatever germs develop to kill us. But for chemicals and things we do for purification of water supplies, we can at least control the chemicals and how often we use them, and I have yet heard of a any really serious bugs that can survive chlorine or just pure heat.
I guess I just can't grok the way people claim to wish to live in the past, but what they're really describing often is similar to how we would describe living in a third world. Unless you really believe our feces is cleaner than most, that unfiltered water your drinking could very well contain the feces of someone ignorant enough (or a pranking trollish person) to drop a deuce into the local stream.
And I have a great appreciation for just how blunder headed we can be, so it wouldn't shock me if and when that'd happen.
And ultimately, what's the real goal of the original article? Is it to make sure people increase their risk? Or to provide some confirmation bias to those who will do it either way?
prions. not sure if you consider them "bugs" though.
Nope. Protein generally denatures at lower than 100C / boiling point.
That's the principle of Sous Vide, not that you should use Sous Vide to sterilise anything, but the protein in egg white denatures at 60-80C.
http://www.scienceofcooking.com/eggs/eggs_sous_vide.htm
And in meat it's similar, 50-70C http://www.mpip-mainz.mpg.de/Sous_vide_cooking
If you doubt it, stick your hand in water at 80C and see what happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Ganges#Huma...
He then throws in salacious and irrelevant intimations about race and class ("Because the outdoor recreation community is far whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the U.S. population at large, it’s an interesting case study in how misinformation propagates through privileged communities.")
It's clickbait, exactly the sort of garbage published on the front page of every newsprint weekly - taxi drivers without medallions: scandalous! Boat owners profit from people fishing: another scandal! The real scandal is how any of this passes as journalism.
There is some misconception that “old ways” were healthier and they weren’t.
Burning wood is bad bad for you not having access to clean water is bad for you etc.
The fact that it’s natural means nothing nature is a cunt.
- eating fresh foods instead of processed starches
- no factories and industrial agriculture producing greenhouse gasses
- social organization based on communal resources and personal autonomy (hunter-gatherers) instead of authoritarianism and hierarchy (settled agricultural governments)
You can walk today, and it’s likely much safer.
You can eat fresh food and the food today is overall much safer even the processed food. People in the past didn’t had fresh food this didn’t last long they ate processed food which would be preserved. Fresh food was an occasional luxury and even then it would be much less safe than it is today.
Greenhouse gases have no direct impact on health, smoke and pollution does and even London’s historic smog wasn’t nearly as bad as the average cave lung.
Social organization... how exactly does this relates to health again?
Even the worse life style today (health wise) is better than anything you could do in antiquity.
An average life style is considerably healthier.
And if you selectively choose to live the healthiest life style possible in any period nothing in the past beats today.
- default lifestyle (for economic reasons) is living in the city / suburbs where walking is often aesthetically unpleasant; humans have an aesthetic response to being in nature.
- again for economic reasons, processed food like bread is the default choice; it's hard for some to afford (in time and money) to get all their calories from fresh vegetables and meats. Again the past is a model (I'm talking about humans' natural diet in the days before food preservation / grain agriculture).
- let's shoot for no smog and no cave lung
- social stratification led directly to mass starvation and poverty (poorest segment of society experiences stress-related declines in longevity)
If we assume that every change that's ever happened is for the better in every way, it blinds us as to how to make improvements.
Regardless of how far back you go life was harsh, miserable and unforgiving and the further you go the worse it gets.
Fresh food was never a staple diet, hunting wasn’t done on a daily basis it was seasonal meat would be smoked and salted to be preserved.
Fat would be fermented and preserved.
Plants as well would be fermented or dried to be preserved for later consumption.
Famine and starvation was abound whole populations were wiped out due to famine multiple times even before we started to live in large cities.
Living in caves and huts burning wood would result in lung damage even before counting things like cavers lung. The smallest of injuries could be fatal and it often was.
There was essentially no period in which we were healthier than we are today even if you are an alcoholic coal miner who’s living only on KFC.
Anything is safer today even walking.
Natural means, what a human body has been accustomed to, over the course of its evolution. That is what is natural. Not something coming directly from nature. Often both are same since most of the things that we were exposed to during the long course of evolution came directly from nature.
Also, from your other comments, you have a skewed definition of health. You seem to consider a human being healthy even if they can only survive with the help of medicines or modern health care..which is quite stupid...
For me, that's quite distinct from the naturalistic fallacy, which is really related to the is-ought distinction (often attributed to Hume). The fallacy consists of going from a descriptive statement (this is how things are) to a normative statement (thus, this is how things should be). A (fallacious) example would be that strong animals devour weaker animals, thus it's good and proper also in our society that the strong exploit the weak. For me, that's an illicit move from "is" to "ought", and quite distinct from the "untreated water is natural and thus must be healthy", "vaccines are chemical and unnatural and thus must be bad" fallacy.
However, from the Wikipedia page it seems that some people also use "naturalistic fallacy" in the former sense ("appeal to nature").
(Note that Sam Harris and others are arguing (convincingly, in my view) that ultimately, our "oughts" must be informed and even follow from "is", from descriptive statements, rejecting the whole strict is/ought distinction.)
For me, it tends to germinate with that one fallacy.
He's not totally wrong about those things (though I think it's class that matters orders of magnitude more than race). In enthusiast communities where the bar to entry is low (most outdoor recreation is cheap to do at a basic level) there's a class segregation effect. I can't quite put my finger on it or describe the details but there's definitely community/social pressure to make things needlessly expensive and develop an attitude of "if your wallet can't support going all out don't go at all" as a bar to entry.
I grew up in the mountains, around Apache, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people, who I have learned a great deal from, and they recognize the vast quality of life improvements modern science, medicine and technology have brough, and embrace it. The fact they understand that though doesn't stop them from admonishing us in how most Americans treat the land and live out of symbiosis. They aren't calling for a naive luddite-esque return to the old ways, they are calling on us to use our technology to augment the benefits the old ways have, and that is a huge distinction.
Of course there are some hippy groups that naively take that position, such as the Rainbows, and then after they've destroyed a section of forest during a party they still put on their suit and tie and drive their BMW back to California or wherever. Nobody from the forest has respect for them because their views are immature and superficial, but it is a large mistake to extrapolate that type of position to all those calling for a review of how we live in relationship to the land. There is a lot of good discussion and knowledge to be had if you can get past that.
I could ramble on with some stories that illustrate what I mean, but let me summarize the position most of the native American culture from my old stomping grounds take: value community, but also value self-sufficiency within that community, because those two things make a person and a people strong and able to weather storms.
Personally, when I think about thinks like space exploration, I think that approach has much wisdom in it, and given my experience of the Internet, I think decentralization is a key strength of that viewpoint as well.
You know, most of them pretty much expect us to destroy ourselves because we don't listen to their wisdom. They say stuff like "We were here before America and unless they change we will be here after America."
The Ancient Greeks were pretty much clueless on medicine still viewing things through the lens of miasma theory, yet go search for any name you're familiar with and you'll find the distribution of ages to not be as low as you'd expect. Granted there is a bias in that people that died earlier in adulthood might not have had a chance to make their mark to the point that you'd know their name today, but I don't think that's the predominant issue. The names we know we'd still know even had they died much earlier. Aristotle was an outlier living to be only 61, yet he certainly made his name even well before that. Socrates - 71 (death by execution), Plato - 80, Eratosthenes - 82, Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, etc, etc.
Modern medicine should certainly have enabled ancient civilizations to extend their lives substantially. What if it were possible to live the lifestyle of one such as the Ancient Greeks, yet given the availability of modern medicine in case of urgent need? And it's there that I completely agree with you. I think the goal should be to use modern medicine to supplement, not supplant, traditional life values.
There's certainly a concern of being a luddite, yet on the other hand I think people are at times too quick to forget that our level of understanding of things like human physiology is still quite superficial. We have no real causal understanding and while correlations can and do enable enormously beneficial breakthroughs, they are also subject to a never ending stream of unforeseen consequences. Decisions our species made for hundreds of thousands of years to survive were obviously not always optimal or ideal, but they did prove to be, if nothing else, sustainable and deterministic.
So I was targeting it towards the idiocy of the original author, not of those on every side that realize nuance and balance are just as important.
I think the general sentiments motivating and bolstering particular piece of BS are "I wish things were simpler", "I don't trust big organizations", "I want people to pay attention to me", "I don't care about the consequences of what I say."
On the other hand, I suppose there is a general populist trend which encourages a site like slate to give thoughtless immature authors a platform for their stupid ideas as long as they stroke populist themes.
Filtering water in the backcountry is extremely easy with products like the Sawyer Mini ($25), which you just screw to the top of a standard water bottle and drink through. It’s stupid to take the risk when the precautions are so easy and so cheap. And it’s unbelievable that people in civilization, with abundant access to clean water, would actually pay a premium for dirty water.
Yes, primitive people drank water straight from streams. They built up resistance to a lot of the pathogens, but they also had lots of parasites and diseases, and didn’t regularly live into their 80s, so I’m not sure why you’d model your food and water safety on theirs.
[1] Viruses are a problem in much of the world too. Thankfully, streams in the US don’t generally have viruses in them, and the most popular filters for hikers don’t filter out all viruses. But for the extra careful, chlorine dioxide drops and some pump filters do.
http://www.hormones.gr/211/article/article.html concerns Ancient Greece, so not primitive. But, I think you should be cautious about declaring primitive people as having their lives markedly shortened by waterborn pathogens; at least cautious enough to be able to cite some strong evidence?
I didn’t claim that people died in their 30s or that waterborne pathogens were a major cause of shortened life. The latter certainly seems plausible though. My point there was only that basing your water sanitation on the habits of primitive people is obviously misguided.
Typhoid fever is another really nasty disease, often contaminated water transmitted, that still kills hundreds of thousands of people per year (http://www.who.int/immunization/diseases/typhoid/en/). But in countries with clean water and good sanitation the infection rate is very little. As an exmaple: the US over time: https://www.wikidoc.org/images/3/30/Typhoid_stats.gif
I can't say how much this shortened the average lifespan overall, but these are some pretty significant diseases which are largely transmitted by contaminated water (or food), and which are largely eliminated by water and sanitation treatment systems. I'm sure there's some others, these are just the first two that came to mind.
Giardia by comparison is more of a "nuisance", but with treatment methods so cheap (I mean, iodine tablets are on the order .15 a tablet or so) I really don't see a reason to take the risk of that or other stomach-upsetting bugs getting in you.
Filter your backcountry water, people.
And their streamwater was a lot cleaner than ours. Unless you're high in the mountains, there's a good chance that any given waterway in the US has a farm or factory somewhere upstream.
... I bet every regular outdoor campers' head popped reading this article, just like mine. I can't conceive of anything stupider than drinking unfiltered stream water, anywhere (unless you were sure it was springhead, and even then, no).
We brought a sawyer 5L gravity bag that filters out viruses, and drank some flavorful water outta that thing.
Between pumping, backflushing and protecting filters from freezing I really don’t mind the reliance on batteries/electronics and the need to carry a lightweight backup. Plus I usually have a stove should it come to that.
For camping I much prefer my steripen, it's far more convenient especially with multiple people. But it does require batteries and it feels breakable to me (although mine has survived some abuse with no problems) so you have to be aware that you might need to boil as a plan B. The life straw requires no power and is somewhat more packable, making it ideal for true emergency situations where you want something with maximum reliability.
Still, I always bring unexpired tablets, their weight is essentially zero. I was taught to dissolve them, invert the water bottle, and unscrew the lid enough to let the solution flush out the water from the threads, as even that could be enough to get you. Not sure how this can work with a steripen.
Q: Do you have to use it with a nalgene-type container? Would it work with a flexible bag-like container? see less
Answer this question A: I would be careful. Plastic absorbs all ultraviolet (UV) light. If the plastic folds around the bulb (or at all), then the water is effectively shielded from the light. see less Amazon Customer | 4 months ago Leave a Comment A: Yes, the uv light MUST be under the surface of the water. Does not get hot so probably ok for the bag.. see less
MSR especially has a tremendous focus on user maintainability and repairability. All of their products are designed to be easy to strip down to base components and reassemble - critical for life-preserving hardware.
I keep their TrailShot filter in my bag whenever I go hiking. I also have one of those pen-style filters and never use it; the TrailShot is vastly more practical.
As a bonus, coke bottles (or any fizzy drink bottle) are ideal as a water container for hiking; lightweight, capable of holding pressure (so they can withstand being squashed in a pack), and surprisingly resilient when falling from a height (compared to purchased bottles). And they cost nothing.
Regarding boiling - why would you waste fuel if you don't need to?
Also, this is a _really_ good one to remember in emergency/unexpected situations. Stove broke? Run out or spilled your fuel? Steripen out of battery? As long as you have the right bottle and some sun, you can still clean your water.
1. Fuel is light, water is heavy.
A liter of water weighs roughly 2.2 pounds. That is not including the weight of the containers holding the water. Assuming a person is hiking from 8AM until 12PM, and drinking approximately 1 liter of water an hour, they will consume approximately 4 liters of water on their hike. Then, they will likely need at least 3 liters of water at camp for cooking, cleaning, and drinking (I use about 2 liters on average in camp for solo trips but I hike until sundown so I'm adding some extra drinking water for sitting in camp during the hottest part of the day). So, using a fairly conservative water estimate, a hiker like you described would need about 7 liters of water in a day, which would weight about 15.4 pounds plus the weight of containers.
Using the sunlight method you are advocating, the person will need to carry all of that weight during their hike. Even worse, the sun is unreliable. On cloudy days, it could take up to 48 hours to purify the water. So the hiker would want to carry 2 days worth of water (14 liters at 30.8 pounds plus container weight) to ensure a steady supply unless absolutely guaranteed a perfectly sunny weather window (which is rarely a guarantee that can be reasonably made). Adding in the last piece, container weight, makes the situation worse. An average empty 1 liter SmartWater bottle (a good analog for the coke bottles you mentioned and a commonly used option by the backpacker community) weighs 1.3 ounces. So to carry 14 liters of water, you will need 14 bottles, weighting 18.2 ounces or 1.13 pounds. The total weight of water carried for a leisurely backpacking trip using your proposed method would be a shade under 32 pounds.
Now to the boiling method. Using a modern backpacking canister stove, you can boil a liter of water with about 15-20 grams of fuel depending on elevation, temperature, and wind conditions. Lets say 20 grams to be conservative. So to boil that 2 day supply of 14 liters of water, you would need to carry 280 grams worth of fuel, which is about 0.6 pounds. This is not including the weight of the fuel container because I am assuming the hiker is already bringing a canister stove for other purposes, as most backpackers do. Other stove types such as alcohol and esbit weigh even less. By bringing this 0.6 pounds of fuel, you no longer need to carry most of the water during your hike. The majority of long distance hikes in the US and around the world have regular sources of water along the route. Most hikers will only carry 1-2 liters of water during the day, filling up and purifying along the route. Then they top off shortly before making camp for the night. So now, with a faster purification method, the hiker only needs to carry 2 liters of water, which weighs 4.6 pounds with containers. Add the fuel weight and the hiker will be carrying 5.2 pounds total for their water system, a weight savings of 26.4 pounds over your method. Even adding a few more liters of water for more water scarce routes (such as the southern portion of the Pacific Crest Trail) will result in double digit weight savings.
When most backpackers these days are aiming to keep their total pack weight under 30 pounds for most trips, this weight savings is a HUGE deal.
2. Boiling is reliable, sunlight is not.
When you boil water, you can be reasonable assured that your water has been properly purified. Sunlight purifying is not so simple. As you said in your first post, the sunlight method requires variable amounts of time based on weather conditions. This causes scheduling problems on a backpacking trip because you need to wait longer for your water to be drinkable in bad weather. As I mentioned above, this forces the hiker to carry more water to account for bad weather.
But even worse, there is no concrete sign with sunlight purifying that your water is ready to drink. Assuming you can figure out how to strap 14 liters of water to the outside of your pack while you are walking so that they all get equal sun exposure (which is probably not possible) and it is a sunny day, you could hope that the water would be ready to drink in 6 hours. And maybe it is. Or maybe you were walking through shadier paths than you realized, or your shadow from your hiking hat blocked some sunlight, or 1 of 100 other things happened to prevent your water from being exposed to the sun properly. Then the water is not ready in 6 hours, but you drink it thinking it is. Now you are vulnerable to all the same problems you would be if you didn't purify at all.
If you boil your water for 3 minutes, it is always pure. If you use sunlight purifying, you are playing a dangerous lottery while out in the wilderness far from medical assistance.
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Finally, a note about using sunlight purifying as an emergency method in the backcountry. You are right that it could potentially be used in such a way. However, this would very rarely be necessary or practical. Most backpackers brings 2-3 methods of water filtration with them. Usually those methods are a filter/steripen/etc, filtration tablets as a backup (because they weigh almost nothing and work in less than 30 minutes), and their stove to boil water as a last resort. The situation where you are in an emergency situation and all 3 of your purification methods are inaccessible would be extremely rare. The only instance I could think of would be if you lost your pack, maps, the trail, and had no idea where you were going but were otherwise uninjured (so you could handle trips to a water source and carry large amounts of water to sunny purifying locations) and had access to containers to hold large amounts of water. Then maybe, hunkering down and purifying water with sunlight would be the right move while waiting for rescue. However, the odds of this happening are extremely rare. I have hiked thousands (probably tens of thousands) of miles in my life in very remote places. I have never had such a situation happen to me or anyone else I know who is a backcountry enthusiast. You should absolutely be more prepared than that!
In most instances, an emergency situation involves you being lost of injured. If you are lost, hunker down, make yourself visible, activate your beacon (which you should have in particularly remote areas away from trafficked trails) and wait for help while you use your normal filtration methods (1 of 3 at least should work). Rescue should come within a day or 2. Same thing if you are slightly injured and don't think you can walk out under your own power. Or if you can walk, just get out as fast as you can. If you are severely injured and lost your pack (maybe from a severe fall or bear attack), make it to a water source if possible and just drink the water. If you don't get help within a day or 2, you are probably dead anyway from your injuries. The most important thing is to stay hydrated and make yourself visible, not sit around waiting for your water to purify for 6-48 hours. I'd rather be found alive and deal with Giardia for a month than be found dead with some nice clean water next to me.
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TLDR: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't rely on sunlight as a method of backcountry water purification. It is well suited for purifying water cheaply in water troubled villages, but uniquely unsuitable for backpacking. Always learn proper backpacking techniques for water filtration (along with first aid, navigation, camping, etc), know your physical limits, thoroughly research your route, and have the right gear before setting out into the backcountry. My mountain community buried 9 people last year who died in the backcountry. Most of those deaths were caused by inexperience and were completely preventable. Please don't add to that number.
That is a completely reasonable amount of water to drink on a camping trip...
You might be lucky and not be too affected by this stuff but it's not something to mess around with.
Personally I mostly use iodine and boiling though I do have a pump. I’d consider getting a steripen though.
Dying of dehydration is a whole lot faster than giardiasis. If you're in a survival situation and are reasonably sure of a rescue in less than 14 days, go ahead and drink that water! Otherwise, don't.
Right - and there isn't any evidence that wilderness waters are 100% safe either. I don't gamble in Vegas and I don't gamble with what I drink. Water can look fine, but is there a dead deer just upstream? No thanks.
Filtering is cheap and easy, a great insurance policy.
I know people who have been drinking unfiltered stream water for 20 years with no ill effects. The key is to make sure that the water doesn't pass through any human inhabited areas.
If I'm in an area where there aren't poison drops and where there is no human interference, I'll take the risk. Outdoor activities are inherently risky.
Driving is inherently risky - but I still wear a seatbelt.
Also, giardiasis is not that bad. Get some metronidazol and you'll feel better in no time.
There's something so perverse, so fucked up, about the elitism of the people drinking this (literally) shitty water.
Risk: Horrible diarrhea for possibly months (worse consequences for children)
Reward: Save 5 minutes of time and $1-$30 not filtering water and you get to act superior to people who filter
Seriously? Not filtering is just stupid.
The deer was not there the year before but anyone drink the water that year better treat the water first.
I did the same back in the `70-80s in the Sequoia NF. I was taught by old timers there when I was a kid to take your water where it was running clear over rock and sand, not from still pools, and take a good look upstream and around you for carcasses or other contaminants.
I've still never seen a carcass near where I decided to take a drink, but I always look.
I'm going to continue filtering my water.
A friend's grandfather never wore his seatbelt. He was in fine health. One day, they rear ended someone. He was in the back seat and died because he was essentially thrown underneath the driver's seat. Had he been wearing a seatbelt he may have been injured, and given his age it may have been severe, but he would have lived. No one else in the car was seriously hurt (all wearing seatbelts).
Two weeks ago a driver decided to do a U-turn from the right lane. I was in the left lane. I was spun around from the impact. While I am injured, because of the seatbelt it's just whiplash and other soft tissue injuries. If I hadn't been wearing my seatbelt I know I would've been tossed around inside the cabin, or I would have had to tense up more to maintain my position in the seat. Either would have resulted in more severe injuries.
These are relatively uncommon events. You cannot control the driver of your vehicle screwing up and hitting someone. And as a driver you cannot prevent others from hitting you in every case. Seatbelts may be uncomfortable (though after 35+ years I don't notice anymore), but 20 minutes or a few hours of discomfort are worth it to prevent life changing or life ending injuries.
Once out of the car we could tell it was quite a wreck: the engine was pushed in and the whole front end crumpled. The front wheels were destroyed. Both sides of the back were rounded off. The doors opened with some difficulty. The smell of airbag propellant makes me think it must be similar to model rocket propellant.
I've been rear-ended 3 times in the last 8 years by people on their cellphones! Two were at 40+mph (blithely drove into my rear at full speed) and totaled both cars.
I'm OK, but I can't take a lot more of this!
Cost of wearing a seatbelt: ???
Easiest analysis ever.
If I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, my head most certainly would've connected with the windscreen or the steering wheel, likely giving me a broken nose or jaw.
Which brings me to another safety tip, don't have unsecured items sitting in the back of your car. Because if you crash, they literally become missiles.
I, of course, think it's imperative to wear your seatbelt, but our anecdotes don't really do much to tell that story.
Source: Binge watching 7 seasons of Naked and Afraid.
Cheaply: Indoor water feature and ultrasonic fogging with electrochemically activated "acid" cleaning water.
Wait, so you're telling me I can loose weight by drinking unfiltered water?
It's generally considered that the harms outweigh the benefits though, like giardiasis.
When I was in scouts, two separate groups of us went to Philmont, on different trails. Both crews had a variety of purification methods but ended up using a specific model of filter the most because it filtered really quickly and didn't taste off. Halfway through the trip one crew became seriously ill. That was when we realized that the 'fast' filters were fast because they were assembled incorrectly and weren't filtering at all.
So yeah, backcountry streams can be totally fine. If you want to play the parasite lottery, be my guest, but know that it is a lottery.
Filtering water is extremely easy with products like the Sawyer Mini ($25), which you just screw to the top of a standard water bottle and drink through. It’s stupid to take the risk when the precautions are so easy and so cheap.
It is unfathomably irresponsible to let other people’s children, in your care, drink straight from the stream.
I am in my forties now, and I would conservatively observe that at least 20% of hikers and backpackers will choose "pure" and "pristine" streams or bodies of water as a great place to take a swim and wash the trail gunk off their feet or nethers. And I'd guess that at least 10% will casually ignore rules about where to relieve themselves and often do it far too close to trails, streams, and lakes.
People can get caught up in the romance of the wilderness and forget that countless other people enjoy those same spaces before and after your visit, even if you manage to find some place remote enough to actually be alone for a few hours or days. They assume the environment is more pristine than it actually is, and also underestimate their impact on it.
Given this, it's a total no-brainer to err reasonably on the safe side when it comes to natural water sources, in my opinion.
And I've occasionally taken unfiltered freshwater from streams over the years but have generally been picky about where/when/why and have accepted each time that I was foolishly rolling the dice.
And and, a popular recreational "lake" in the area was recently found to have a major problem with e. coli after it hospitalized a young child with complete renal failure.
Cattle are grazed all over the backcountry, people poop out there (and it lasts a -lot- longer in the wilderness than you'd guess, especially when people use TP and leave it out for the squirrels to gather for nesting material), and people do the same on snow which melts into streams at high elevation.
If there's a 1 in 20 chance of picking up a parasite from drinking unfiltered water in a backcountry area (minimum 20 miles to civilization), then the average person will be lucky enough to get away with it their entire life and then tell other people, "but I did it and I'm fine!"