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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote is not data, but ok, here is an anecdote: When I was a boy scout growing up in the Bay Area we would camp in the mountains for a weekend or even as long as a week. We filled our canteens in any clean looking fast running stream. Everybody did that and they were fine. Sure it is possible this has gotten more dangerous but I am inclined to believe the paranoia has increased faster than the danger.

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Another anecdote:

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.

Meanwhile, my longtime hiking partner (of over 20 years now) thru-hiked a big chunk of the PCT and ended his trip with giardia, which caused him significant digestive issues for quite a while afterward (over a year altogether).

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!"

This seems weirdly inverted to my boy scouting experience (in San Diego). Our training put a huge emphasis on filtering our water before we drank it, it was considered fool-hearty to drink water from a river or stream before filtering. Anything from garbage to a rotting deer carcass could be up stream.

I think the issue is that it's hard to know which sources are actually safe and part of the reason people are so serious about disinfecting water is that it's generally just so easy

Easy, inexpensive, lightweight and effective. With many things, you'd have to choose only between two or three of these attributes, but with water filtration, there are — practically speaking — no drawbacks.

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 my anecdote as a scout was exactly opposite: we were trained to not drink from a natural water source except as a very last resort, and then, to prefer moving water over stagnant water. But as the motto says, you were supposed to Be Prepared, and that included bringing water.

The risk is somewhat correlated with elevation, since higher elevation water is less likely to have been contaminated by humans or animals. But it is no guarantee and not something you should rely on.

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 notice marmot droppings and various birds and smaller rodents everywhere I've been in the Sierra Nevada, right up to the peak of Mt. Whitney at 14k feet even far about the tree-line. Those are all potential sources of pathogens even if there isn't human waste involved.

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.

I would treat anecdotes like this being equivalent to anecdotes about not wearing a seatbelt.

Seat belts protect us from fast travelling vehicles, drinking water from streams is something humans have done forever and evolved to deal with.

Evolution isn’t a magic bullet. Humans have been dying from pathogens since the species arose.

Huh I am surprised that the boy scouts taught you to do that. Sawyer filters are cheap and boiling with a fire can be free. I view filtering/boiling water like wearing a seatbelt, it's not particularly expensive of inconvenient and it will seriously improve your health in situations where it turned out to be important.

Anecdata like this is also a prime candidate for survivor bias. :)

In general, my understanding is that the danger has increased in Boy Scouts in the seventies we basically just filled up from a stream. That said, even if the danger has objectively increased in many areas due to population growth etc., like seat belts, we’ve also moved toward trying to mitigate more a$more risks where we can.

When I was a Boy Scout, we filled canteens in any clean looking stream. But we also added iodine. And then we generally added Kool-Aid, because the iodine tasted terrible.

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