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Years ago my friends and I took a trip to the Wallowas in Oregon near the Idaho border. We were mostly camping backcountry with a few nights at campgrounds. I filtered my water at the campgrounds, but when we went backcountry, I was about to just put my bottle in the stream and one of my friends stopped me and told me to filter it and to never just drink out of a stream regardless of where you are in the US.

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.

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Many ranchers have (scandalously low-priced, but that is another story) leases to run their cattle on specific federal lands. Cattle drop poop pretty much everywhere they go. (Weirdly, donkeys apparently collect theirs into big piles. Oddest thing I've ever seen.) If cow manure is unsettling, you may want to be careful what parts of the outdoors you visit.

That's BLM and National Forest lands. Anything beyond that is illegal but you should still protect yourself from unscrupulous ranchers just as you should look both ways on a one-way street.

Which is the vast majority of public recreation land in the U.S.

Yep, and always filter your water there.

I filter or boil my water even at 11,000 feet in altitude where the cattle do not roam.

In many parts of the world you should be wary of drinking from a stream if you don't know the area well, but unfortunately a filter won't help: the water may have been contaminated by a mine upstream, but filters can’t remove mining byproducts.

Or, in many areas, downstream of a paper mill.

If it's that far downstream, it's probably not much of a wilderness.

First rule of the Wallowas: Don't tell anyone else how awesome it is there, we don't want an influx of people. ;-)

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.

The Crooked River near Smith Rock is downstream of a lot of land, including the city of Prineville, a couple of reservoirs and a whole lot of rangeland.

BTW: like patio11's standing invitation, if you're ever in Bend, say hi and we'll have a beer.

Giardia is carried by deer, as well, so you'd get it even without the cattle.

There's always poop in the woods, even in remote, untamed areas.

While giardiasis is considered potentially zoonotic, human origin is considered to be the overwhelmingly predominant source based on genotyping.

http://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/Factsheets/pdfs/giardiasis.pdf

All bets are off for other protozoans and bacterii.

Ignoring cattle for a moment, doesn't every other living creature crap in the wilderness?

I've always been taught to filter/treat water regardless of location.

The primary reason to always filter in the United States is that giardia is everywhere. You can drink from the clearest mountain stream far above any cattle and still get it.

Giardia used to be very rare in some places like Europe, but I think that may have changed over time.

Bears, deer, and other animals make this an issue even in the absence of cattle.

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.

> 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.

Maybe this is an ignorant thing to say, but before cattle, there were massive herds of buffalo everywhere doing the same thing, right?

And the average human lifespan was like 50 years, so maybe they were dying of contaminated waters.

Average human lifespan was dragged down by infant mortality.

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.

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