Dry Wash

This is also called a sandwash (think about it). Anyway, it's a streambed that carries water only during and maybe immediately after rain storms. Intermittently. Every now and then. Often over-enthusiastically. "We camped in the dry wash to get out of the wind but had to move to avoid the flood."

Right.

Also one way to wash your car. If you don't especially like the paint. And, given that a wash is the dry bed of an intermittent stream, a dry wash must be on the severely scary end of dehydrated, right? But life turns out that way sometimes.

At least sandwash is a nice smooth word. You can do something with a word like that, given a tad of imagination. Could be a rodent bath, maybe? They like sand. A cozy rodent bath, in a protected nook, warm but shady, at least until the flash flood hits. Then it's all outwash. Flush time. Bye-bye.

Outwash.

Outwash, rat wash, applesauce, balderdash, baloney, bilge, blague, blah, blather, blatherskite, bosh, bull, bunk, bunkum, bushwa, claptrap, cobblers, codswallop, crock, double-talk, drip, drivel, drool, eyewash, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, flapdoodle, flimflam, flummadiddle, fudge, gas, gook, guff, hogwash, hokum, hooey, horsefeathers, hot air, humbug, jazz, jiggery-pokery, malarkey, meshuggaas, moonshine, piffle, pishposh, poppycock, punk, rot, rubbish, slipslop, tomfoolery, tommyrot, tosh, trash, trumpery, twaddle, whangdoodle, and windbagger. They all work. Stuff that goes through your head while you're still wrapped in your sleeping bag, being swept downstream to your doom.

And the moon laughs, silently as always.

 

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Have anything add? Then try sosayseff+ul@nullabigmail.com
Me? Trying to take it in only small sips.

Definitions: Convection

(1) Being carried away.

May be confused with the word "conviction", which means about the same thing, but in a less peace, love, and free will sort of way. One which often entails the deliberate and forceful application of handcuffs.

So, different, 'K?

(2) Being carried away in the other sense.

To be wafted along, gently, perhaps almost imperceptibly, lovingly, to a pleasant conclusion, as might be experienced by a sip of wine as it is taken up between the lips, slides over the tongue and down the throat, to find a warm welcome in the stomach, where it can reside in peace and comfort.

But only for a while.

Everything is only for a while.

Eventually even the finest wine is converted to a sort of irritable sleepy grumpiness and is squirted back out as urine and then forgotten. This happens with so many things.

Like rain. Or hail, which is the end product of rain with an anger management problem.

But before rain is ejected from the clouds and falls onto your head, possibly accompanied by high winds and lightning strikes, some of which may kill or stun your companions, is convection, which tenderly raises dewy filaments of moisture heavenward on wisps of warmness. And not just one or two filaments.

Millions.

Billions.

Trillions.

And more.

So many that they cannot even be comprehended, let alone counted, tallied, or given cute pet names.

And once in the sky these wisps swirl and twirl and spin and tumble and coalesce and combine into clouds that sail the skies without any cares at all until they meet more and stronger currents of convection, warm shafts of air soaring into the highest reaches of the sky where those uncountable myriads of moist hazy aerosols meet and conjoin to form mists and whorls of nearly weightless droplets, and then drops, and, flung even higher into the heavens they freeze into tiny ice crystals which rise and fall upon the currents, and thaw and freeze again, gaining layer upon layer of fresh, hard, crisp ice until the air no longer has the strength to support them and they begin to fall, and then are caught by fearsome downdrafts and are hurled toward the ground with supreme force, and this is what bonks you on the head and makes you swear like a sumbitch.

(3) The thing that happens in your cooking pot when the water gets hot.

After a while, after it gets just so hot, water can't stand it any more and begins jumping for the top of the pot, hoping to escape.

This is called boiling, and means that the water is hot enough to do some serious cooking, and it is powered by convection wherein the heat at the bottom of the pot makes the water excitable, peevish, pettish, petulant, testy, and generally disagreeable to the extent that the two of them just can't get along anymore and begin trying anything they can think of to put some distance between themselves.

Instant rice, couscous, bulghur wheat, and many other common hiker foodstuffs are extremely effective at smoothing things out, like a good arbitrator (meanwhile becoming cooked), and so now, during the boiling situation, is the right time to dump that food in there and get on with dinner.

And turn the heat down too.

Don't be a dumbass and burn supper, hear?

(4) There are other, more boring definitions of convection that center on meteorology, which sounds like it's this cool class you can take to find out about meteors and stuff, and maybe flying saucers and the real truth that is out there somewhere, and maybe ray guns and aliens are involved somehow, but then you have to sit in an old stinky chair that was made in some factory back when there were, like serfs and all they had was candles for light and rocks for tools and try to stay awake while some professor dude talks about vertical transport of heat and moisture and updrafts and downdrafts and atmospheric instabilities and weird boring kinds of clouds you have to memorize and identify by their shapes, but dry convection sounds like a little bit of fun since it happens without any clouds but then you realize you can't even see anything while at least with visible convection or moist convection as the professor dude calls it you get clouds, even if they are weird and have strange names and are tedious and basically annoying anyway.

Etc.

As always, Effort or Eff it. No sniveling.

Source: How to talk in the woods.

Definitions: Condensation

Like the inside of your nose, but all over your tent.

Here's what the National Park Service thinks: "The condensation of water vapor into clouds and precipitation is a vital link in the water cycle."

Picture throngs of gorgeous buzzing neon rainbows at sunset while butterflies flutter by gently and birds sing their last glorious notes of the day in perfect harmony among amazing, delicately-leafed trees, and the skin of your weenie puffs out as it roasts over a crackling fire.

Meanwhile, next morning, in his tent on an actual trail, so far from civilization that he can't see a parking lot or even hear traffic anymore, in a place where animals snuffle and snort around without proper supervision and eat each other when they meet, Harold Hiker awakes from sleep.

Harold has been hiking in the rain that fell from the Park Service's condensation. Harold knows what condensation really means. Most of the rain that was aimed at him hit the ground and bounced, and then ran straight into Harold's boots, and then climbed up his legs and really got to work.

When Harold set up camp he did it with a great sigh of relief. At least, at last, he thought — at last he could stop walking and get some relief from the damn rain. For a few hours anyway he would be someplace dry where the rain wouldn't be jackhammering his head and slithering up his legs in pursuit of his underwear.

Harold wanted a night of rest. He got out of his wet clothes and right into his sleeping bag and gratefully fell asleep. When Harold woke the next morning he found that the entire inside of his tent was full of condensation.

Condensation above him, condensation below him, condensation on every side of him. His sleeping bag was soaked with it. And now it was closing in for the kill. Condensation has no conscience or sense of humor, you see. Condensation will not mellow out and just be your pal. Condensation is dedicated to doing you in.

Condensation is the physical process that changes a gas to a liquid, and liquid is the stuff that makes you wet.

This is the mad dog of physics that was in the tent with Harold, and Harold had nowhere to go. Poor Harold. Some say that double-wall tents are a bad deal because they don't allow enough air circulation to prevent condensation. This may be true, but you haven't been to hell until you have spent the night closed up tight in a shiny-new single-wall tent.

Some say that tarps are better than either of the above because tarps allow more air circulation and thereby defeat condensation buildup.

This may be true, but you haven't been to hell until you have spent the night under (under is used loosely here) an open tarp, exposed to exactly every single puff of freezing, incessantly probing, rain-saturated air in the known and unknown universes.

In other words condensation is an immutable force of nature that will always be with us. Like every other form of liquid water and all known immutable forces of nature, condensation slithers and creeps around, over, into, and through everything, anything, and usually the place it wants to go most is the very last place you want ever to find it.

Nasty. It is nasty. That is the only way to say it.

The only sure way to avoid condensation is to stay home and watch TV with a big bowl of chips and a few beers handy, in front of a hot fire.

You can roast your weenie in comfort there. Dry, condensation-free roasting, in comfort, of your weenie.

And you can have pets there too. Which are also warm and dry and soft and fuzzy. Unless you are into lizards.

Definitions: Bayou

(1) Your point of view, as imagined by someone else: "Is that OK bayou, then?" Never meant sincerely.

(2) A small but hurtful piece of water. More correctly but less colorfully pronounced as "bay ow". The hurt may be caused by a large number of biting amphibious mud-suckers, over-aggressive mosquitoes, or simply by falling out of a boat onto sharp, pointy sticks, which happen to be quite common in these waters.

(3) Water that is wet but not really happy about it.

This form of water never raises its voice in song, doesn't burble or prance gaily, splashingly, or otherwise, down a sunshine-dappled mountainside covered with mossy boulders and speckled with brilliantly-colored flowers.

This water does not roar mightily or make giant sucking sounds, though some of the things that live in it might. In fact most of them do. Often. During the hours of darkness.

Pretty generally speaking, this is water that is severely, clinically depressed.

Dark, sluggish, barely moving, bayous are as one expert has said "usually located in low-lying areas" unlike your hilltop-dwelling lakes or your cliff-hugging rivers or your artesian wells that just squirt up right out of nowhere and go zooming around all over, making happy cackling sounds.

No, folks, the Choctaw Indians had it right. For them the word was "bayuk", meaning either "a small, sluggish stream" or alternately, as we more highly educated individuals might put it now, a bay of yuk, a pit of muck, a miasma of regret.

Your average bayou is clogged with creepy soft wet plants that you're afraid might follow you home, and is a natural habitat for lots of semi-conscious angry things with strange evil desires and too many legs. Things you might have dreamed of once, but were relieved to find, in the light of day, didn't really exist.

Well, they do exist after all, and lurk in bayous, and they're waiting for you to come for a visit some day, and then they'll show you what "depressed" is all about. Yessir, they just may.

Your education will commence when you hear that sucking sound right behind you, coming your way.

Source: How to talk in the woods.

Definitions: Boulder Hopping

(1) Hiking from rock to rock without touching the ground in between.

Dangerous. Tricky. And small rocks don't count.

They should be too big to step over. Boulders. Got it?

(2) Somewhere in the deepest wilds of ancient, uncharted Scandinavia there was once a large stone. A very large stone.

There are many there still, the stones, and there are stones in other places as well. Stones are common, but this stone was not. This stone was completely different. This stone had a voice.

It used its voice to sing.

It sang not well as the short, evanescent lives of humans tend to judge these things, but you know what they say about talking dogs. Anyway, the stone sang.

People came from every farthest corner of the known world to wonder at this stone, as it sat centered in a small, vigorous stream. A stream that any man could throw his sword over (and some children as well), but yet too fiercely, aggressively vigorous to cross.

So there sat the stone. Solid. Unmoving. Endlessly singing to itself in one warbling roaring bass note.

The "Bullra Sten", the "Noisy Stone" it was named. So it was called. So they called it. And it sat for ages, just there, unmoving, in that one solitary place.

For ages. And ages untold.

And whenever a few gathered and drew near, or even one alone it seems, the stone sang directly to them, or to that one person, in its profound deep voice. It sang of the day and it sang of the night. Of the seasons, and of the snow, and of the rain. Of the light and of the darkness. Of eternity.

The stone sang of loneliness and of lost love and war and of the peace that follows death.

The stone sang to no one, but yet it sang to all — to itself, by itself, and all who came and heard the stone were certain that it sang for them alone, to them only.

And when these people returned to their homes, many returned not always buoyant, not always cheerful, not always smiling, not always feeling awash in sunshine and light, but reassured somehow. Always reassured that no matter their fate, no matter what the stone had told them, still it was ultimately for the best, and that all would be set right during the final tally at life's end.

Tales of the stone, the Bullra Sten, the Boulder Rock, the Singing Earthstone, the Fate-stone, the Divider of life and of death, these tales spread far and wide.

Many wished to visit the great stone but few could manage the difficult journey to such a remote location, or even could manage to learn where it lay. In any case the stone seemed to take notice of none. It did not care who came and who went, many or few, or when. The stone sat, through the ages, and only sang its song.

And then one day, one day seemingly like all the others, the stone was there no more. No one had seen it go. It had not rolled. It certainly had not walked. It was too massively great to have been carried off, and no one would have dared try.

But it was gone, and its voice as well was gone. The stone's massive throbbing voice filled the valley no longer, leaving a great empty void.

The voice of the stone was now silence itself, if there can be a sound emanating from a thing not there, and perhaps there can, for the silence itself became a great looming presence.

But people still came.

People came to the very same spot that they had always come to, and they stood, reverently, and gazed at the place in the stream's bed where the stone had sat. Where it had sat since before the forefathers of their forefathers or the mothers of their greatest great-grandmothers had walked the earth.

The people came, and stood in reverence, and it seems, at whiles, that some, the quietest and most reverent, could still make out the distant echoes of the stone's now silent song. So they honored the stone, even in its absence. They celebrated.

At midsummer, in the farthest reach of the coldest wasteland where once had stood the singing stone, a few gathered and celebrated even in the midst of their sadness for the missing stone.

And on the very peak of the arching forehead of a nearby stone, a stone almost - very nearly - a sibling of the original but yet some distance from the stream, they hung garlands of hops, and bathed that stone with flagons of ale, in worshipful memory of their lost singing stone. This then, this ceremony came to be called Boulder Hopping.

In recent years, boulder hopping has become a major party-time blowout and Trans-Euro televised sporting event.

Hot babes in bikinis, motocross races, championship soccer, and scores of food stands fill the valley for two crazy, fun-filled midsummer weeks every June. Get two of anything on a stick for the price of one, and any tattoo imaginable While-U-Wait. No problemo, come one come all. Bring cash.

Come early, stay late. Day and night, 24 hours without end. All partying all the time.

Toke up on local herbs and chill out in the neon green fiberglass pagoda (fully climate controlled) built exactly on the spot where the original Big Mutha Rock used to sit, and wait for word from the Other Side, thru your own ear buds. (And there's an app for that too. Great!)

Buy your admission by the day or get a two-week Full-On Full-Throat Event Pass and save big. BIG!

You won't live forever so Don't Miss It Again This Year!

Even bigger, even better than ever before!

More babes!

More food on more sticks!

More of everything!

Don't miss the greatest next, greatest ever EuroVent! You Will Not Regret It!

Definitions: Confluence

Remember what you do if you find a fork in the road? The same thing you do if you find a box full of hundred-dollar bills: You take it.

Likewise, you might be hiking along, happy as a fly on a tuna-salad sandwich, and there you are, face to face with a stream. Worse, a confluence of streams. Even worse yet, a confluence of two equal-sized streams. This is a fork, and if you are a dummy, then you are "forked". Officially-speaking.

So then what?

Time for lunch!

Sit down, shoo the flies off your food, eat, think about it and see if things get better while you wait. In case they don't, remember that no matter what else happens, you're still going to die, and that maybe today is your day. You know? Maybe today. It could be worse.

At least you're out in the woods where everything is all clean and pure and where there's no sound except the flowing water some fly buzzing and a little faint whimpering. (From you, of course.) Hey — not completely terrible. We all snivel from time to time, and at least no one can hear you, or see that funny face you make when you cry. So there's that.

And if you don't die right now, right away, you can kill time (literally, for once) by thinking. By thinking about what a confluence is, by remembering that a confluence is a meeting of streams — usually two streams, but maybe more — that a confluence is a meeting of streams at the place where they flow into each other, which is how streams do it.

So if you're still not dead yet, then try walking some more. That might be enough. Or try to get across these here streams. To do that? To cross? Go detouring upstream and take them one at a time, since each stream is smaller by itself than the combined flow after the streams have joined together. Maybe.

Unless this is the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, in which case a larger detour is in order. Unless you want to die right away, but there's no hurry for that. Death will get you when it wants you, no rush. This isn't so bad then, the detour thing. In case you were hiking in the Rockies or the Cascades, you're probably several hundred miles off course by now anyway, so enjoy it, enjoy your detour. See the country.

Stop for supper somewhere nice. Then float downstream and maybe take in Mardi Gras, and continue, and see what happens after that. Sluice. Just sluice it, sluice along, get nice and sluicy. Flow together with the waters as the waters do flow. Even a dummy can do that so it should be easy for you.

Definitions: Canoe Trail

Wanna learn sompin?

I got four definitions of this.

(1) A canoe trail is a designated route for aqua blazing, though no such route holds paint especially well.

(2) A canoe trail is one reserved for canoe use.Unfortunately, though canoes have good lateral and longitudinal stiffness and superb structural integrity they have no feet, muscles, or brains, and so these trails go unused.Canoes don't even know about them for crying out loud, because canoes are only empty, water-tight shells, yet thousands of trail-deprived hikers have to mill around in parking lots kicking gravel, waiting for their numbers to be called while all these so-called canoe trails sit idle and unused, quietly becoming overgrown and smothered by unlicensed shrubbery.A shame. Such a shame.

(3) A canoe trail is a continuous meandering groove left in squishy mud, resembling the keel mark of a canoe that was dragged along, but look closer and you'll see giant three-toed tracks there as well, say one every 10 or 20 feet (3 to 7 m), on alternating sides of that groove.So that isn't where someone dragged a canoe for the heck of it, really, it's a (fresh) dinosaur track and the groove is where its meaty tail left a mark.Hey Bub, you've wandered way too far off the space-time continuum. Time to get back home before something weird happens. Something with teeth, standing there, looking at you. Thinking about lunch.Use a map next time, dope.

(4) Canoe trails involve gloppy wet areas called lakes, connected by thinner, shallower gloppy wet areas called streams, which are used by guys named Pierre (who all have huge shoulders, bulging arm muscles, and wear berets) to paddle around by water, collecting the furry hides of innocent animals who never hurt anybody except at mealtimes when they eat each other.Real hikers call this cheating, this here kind of travel, but these Pierre guys can be a bunch of fun to watch when they run out of water and have to stand up on their tiny atrophied hind legs and wear their canoes on their heads and stagger between lakes, because that's when the animals close in, nibble them to death, and skin them for their hides in turn.Nuff said on that topic.

Bagging Your Water Ration

Essentials for Wilderness Survival, Part 4: Drink and pass it on.

The story so far: Water is essential. Urination is more than just an obscure country. You need water for drinking and you need urination to make hiking bearable.

Without urination, you would have no excuse to stop your constant hiking motion and take a break every now and then. You'd be stuck doing nothing but walking. Take it from me — you don't really want to try that.

If you need an iron-clad excuse for screeching to a halt, bleeding your lizard is a sure bet. Then, once stopped, you can catch your breath and cool dem feets. This is important. It maintains an even strain and keeps a satisfied smile on your mug.

Because I want to keep hydrated and get in my full quota of breaks, I recently bought a camel back. I've heard that this is the way to go, but I found out that this item is really hard to get, and way expensive.

I had to mail order mine from a place called Sammy's Saheli Deli in East Armpit, NY. They specialize in Camel Humps, Lumps, & Bumps, (according to their ad anyway), and their prices are lower than any of the other exotic meat shops, but still sky-high. Don't even ask me about freight charges.

Then when my camel back finally did arrive, the ice had all melted out, and the whole thing had gone bad. All of it. And it weighed almost 200 kg. (440 pounds), which is a lot more than I expected. Needless to say, this is not the kind of item that an ultralight backpacker can use in most circumstances.

They don't mention that in their ads. Not even once.

There were no instructions either, so I couldn't even figure out how to put the water into it, as if that mattered, since it was already too heavy to move without a forklift. And there was more. Flies.

Lots of flies. Lots and lots of flies — black clouds of flies. They wouldn't go away either, even after I went out that night and heaved the whole dripping mess over the fence into the next yard. My neighbor's dog was out there arfing like crazy at the smell, so let him eat it, I thought, but when the thing thudded to the ground on his side of the fence, well he just screamed off somewhere like his butt was on fire, and howled for the rest of the night. Like demons were all over him. Maybe they were, though it might have been the flies.

Then the police came. My neighbor must have called them. Somebody did — it wasn't the dog. He was off wailing about doom and destruction when the police showed up. Just. Would. Not. Quit. I think they had to send him away because it's been two months now and there's been no trace of him at all since that night.

At least it's quiet again.

Well, the short version is I have to appear in court next week for the trial, so overall, I'd say Don't. If you're leaning toward buying one of these camel backs, think about it first. Really think about it. Ask around. Your best bet is check with someone you know. Someone who already bought one. Don't rush in like I did. It could be an expensive, fly-blown mistake.

Pisser.

No More Crystal-I, Bub

Feds smell something old. Might be him.

Soon after the recent destruction of eighty-eight year old retired metallurgist Bob Wallace's business, the Feds have decided to get tough on anyone old and harmless, especially if they could be hikers.

Wallace, and his main squeeze (and reputed moll) Marjorie Ottenberg (85), have been packaging and selling crystalline iodine for 30 years, touting it as a drinking water disinfectant for hikers and backpackers.

They call it "Polar Pure".

The authorities beg to differ, having heard a rumor someone passed on that this stuff might possibly be used by methamphetamine lab operators, somehow or other, every now and then. To maybe do some kind of stuff.

That was good enough.

Although Wallace and Ottenberg (a chemist by trade) have repeatedly eluded authorities by the fiendishly devious ruse of staying home and minding their own business (which is manufacturing Polar Pure), the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency finally caught up with them last week, after looking up Wallace's name in the phone book and driving over to his house.

Once there the Feds were at first flummoxed by Wallace's security system -- his dog Buddy asleep on the front porch. But, faithful to their oath to "Look Real Busy!", the Feds eventually overcame their fear and sidled around to the garage where they nabbed Wallace, busily filling orders for his customers.

Wallace, a Stanford University-educated engineer, greeted the Men in Blue with a cheery "This old couple, barely surviving old farts, and we're supposed to be meth dealers? This is just plain stupid," before he was stuffed into a gunny sack and beaten with rubber hoses to relieve boredom for the agents, who also needed to work up an appetite for their mid-morning donut break.

DEA spokeswoman Bethany-Anne Cramphole said later, primarily through hand gestures and grimaces in addition to a few rudimentary grunts, that if Mr. Wallace hadn't wanted to get hurt then he shouldn't have been standing around looking old.

Special Agent Tracy Dickhead, a Narcotics Special Task Force Commandante-Enforcer, said he was currently on the lookout for "Beavis and Butt-Head" types, the kind of people who might just go off into the mountains and do unsupervised things out there.

"Cops are the most humorless knotheads on the planet," Wallace said, after which they surrounded him and pulled out all his nose hairs to prove it wasn't so.

After taking out Wallace and Ottenberg, the DEA agents swarmed the Gentle Acres Home for the Aged, and confiscated anything that looked suspicious.

Since they didn't understand what was going on out there, they took everything.

Federal agents say 88-year-old Saratoga man's invention is being used by meth labs.

Definitions: Water Bottle

Glug? 

Water Bottle: Vessel to carry clean water in.

Water Bottle: As a "raw water" bottle, it is a vessel to carry untreated water in. This can serve as a reservoir of water to treat later, when making a dry camp, or can be used as-is for bathing.

Water Bottle: Either of the above, but you'd better keep track of which is which.

Originally, a water bottle was an appurtenance of the effete, but later became accepted as mandatory equipment, replacing metal canteens, mason jars, and lapping directly from streams at the time when hikers came to think of "bottle" and "Nalgene container" as synonyms, and began to fear untreated water.

Currently most backpackers will not recognize anything as a water bottle unless it weighs at least four ounces, costs at least $8, and comes in designer colors.

Soft drink bottles are equivalent, except that soft drink bottles weigh only about an ounce, cost a dollar or two, and come with free sugary, fizzy drinks inside.

Those who don't want to pay anything at all can scrounge soft drink bottles from friends or trash bins (and give them a good wash before first use).

So Dis Is Weightless Water Treatment?

Traditionally backpackers carried iodine tablets to treat back country water. Some used ordinary chlorine bleach, even though it's less effective. Some claim they never treat their water, but during the last couple of decades expensive and heavy water filters have become the standard solution. These days hardly anyone blinks an eye at spending a hundred dollars or more for a water filter, or bothers to think about carrying an extra pound or two of dead weight.

Instead of having a pocketable green glass bottle containing a few brown iodine pills, which take a while to render water reasonably safe, backpackers these days normally tote a gizmo the size of an espresso maker, complete with hoses and pump. Waiting 15 or 20 minutes is too long. People would rather squat by a stream, hook up the filter, and work up a sweat horsing a reluctant trickle into bottle after bottle, saving no time, and carry several pounds of water as they resume hiking.

Go figure.

There are several side effects to carrying a filter. One is weight, of course. Another is bulk. Expense. We already mentioned that one too. Complexity. Check. One thing people seldom talk about though is risk. It's easy to screw up while using a filter.

A filter relies on two things. One is the filter's designed ability to remove critters, gunk, and yucky chemicals. The other is cleanliness. User responsibility there. You have to keep the filter clean, folks.

Obviously, but few people think enough about this. After all, a water filter for backpacking use is helpful, healthful, and is cleanliness itself. It seems to generate spotlessness just by being there. Only it ain't so.

A filter is a tool. A machine, and is simply ordinary matter inhabiting a particular form. There is nothing magical about a water filter. It is not perennially pure. It does not create goodness. It can become contaminated, and can then pass that contamination on to you. Tricky.

Every filter has a dirty end and a clean end. I have very little experience with filters, but I have tried a couple of gravity-powered ones that I rigged up, and even based on my vanishingly small range of experience I feel absolutely confident in saying that it's hard, hard, hard to keep the dirty end and the clean end apart. Every day. All day. Without fail.

I can't imagine a perfect way to do this, but I can remember the times I've seen people filter water, then wind everything back into a nice tight package and stuff the whole shebang back into the pack. Wet. Where the contaminated end of the apparatus can work its magic on the clean end. Out of sight, out of mind. Until the diarrhea hits.

And I've seen someone use a communal filter, first pumping water then dragging the outlet hose through dirt, ashes, and finally horse manure before hanging it from a tree where it would stay safe and clean (too late!) for the rest of the party to use later.

Personally, I've settled on a small water bottle with a built in filter, with chlorine dioxide to back it up. I can stop, scoop up water, and drink it immediately, use the bottle with filter removed as a bath bucket, or carry raw water in the bottle, with the filter in place, for later sipping. The chemical treatment is handy to treat a bunch of water overnight, or simply as a backup.

That's all pretty good.

But something interesting came along recently. A way to treat water without a filter, and without chemicals. Practically speaking, without anything.

Let's first take one step back and praise Ray Jardine.

If he didn't invent light backpacking, then he at least reminded the world that it was possible. I'm easy with saying that he reinvented it. In some circles these days he's denigrated for various reasons, one of which seems to be that though he either invented a lot of techniques, or at least popularized and promoted them to a skeptical world, in some ways his techniques seem stuck in the middle 1980s. Be that as it may (or may not) be, one of his ideas in the water world is really cool.

And that is carrying plastic soft drink bottles instead of huge aluminum canteens or those thick, bulky, ponderous Nalgene bottles that seem to be required kit for backpackers. Sure, I'm dated myself. Things have changed again. Nalgene is now out. Today, if you want to be a cool backpacker, you have to carry the equally expensive, bulky, and heavy Lexan bottles. But you now have designer colors. Aerodynamic shapes. Coming soon: tail fins.

Tail fins, I miss. Not that I ever liked them, but they were big once, during a time I remember well. And you could be sure that if you saw tail fins, a car was attached. In the tail fin era cars were ugly, a situation that the fins did not tend to ameliorate. At all. Not even a little. But in those days cars were big, had shiny bumpers the size of sofas, and were slow to maneuver. And easier to avoid. Life was simpler. But their day has passed, as has the era of Nalgene bottles, and as the era of Lexan bottles will too.

For bulk water, I avoid the above by using Platypus bladders. Get one as big as you can stand to think about and empty it, it folds flat, and never weighs more than an ounce or two. Jardine's idea was similar though slightly bulkier. He simply used garbage.

Buy a liter of any fizzy soft drink, and you get a free bottle. It doesn't fold flat when it's empty but it weighs next to nothing, and the price is always right. You can even scrounge them if you prefer not to pay. I've tried carrying them too, and they work, though I prefer another solution, as noted above.

Still.

Jardine applied some original thinking and reached an elegant solution. So did Aftim Acra, a professor at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, who began experimenting in 1979 with three elements: clear bottles, water, and sunlight. As odd as it sounds he and his co-researchers developed the simplest and cheapest form of water purification possible. Using the same kind of bottle that Ray Jardine came to favor.

Here's what you need to do.

Put water into clear plastic bottles. Lay the bottles in the sunshine for six hours. Drink.

Bright sunshine, ultraviolet radiation, and heat do the work. The water should be clear (not turbid), and it needs to get enough sunlight, but the process works even on days that are half cloudy. If the sky is overcast the process works, but needs two days to complete. This is called "SODIS", solar disinfection. It uses plastic bottles, the same sort that Jardine has been touting. The material they are made from is PET, polyethylene terephthalate. It is light, tough, available everywhere (these days, as ready made bottles), and mostly transparent to ultraviolet light.

Professor Acra's results were first widely published in a booklet put out by UNICEF in 1984, but I bet you haven't heard of them before, or him. Since 1991 The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology has been testing this process, which is easy for almost everyone to use, though it's practical only on small scales (so far).

Sounds too good to be true? Here's what SODIS has been proven to kill:

• Bacteria: Escherichia coli (E.coli), Vibrio cholerae, Streptococcus faecalis, Pseudomonas aerugenosa, Shigella flexneri, Salmonella typhii, Salmonella enteriditis, Salmonella paratyphi
• Viruses: bacteriophage f2, rotavirus, encephalomyocarditis virus
• Yeast and Mold: Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Candida, Geotrichum
• Protozoa: Giardia, Cryptosporidium

As long as the water is clear, the bottles aren't damaged or opaqued by scratches, the sun shines, and the water inside the bottles can warm up a moderate amount, the process works. PET plastic leaches almost no stray chemicals or heavy metals into the water, and the process imparts no strange tastes or smells.

Well, sounds perfect if you have six hours every day to sit around and let your water purify. True, this is not going to be used on many backpacking trips, but it is an option, another trick to keep in your pack for those times when you just might need another option. I'm guessing that a Platypus bladder might work even better than a round soft drink bottle, which does not have an ideal shape, so a stray lightweight backpacker laid up for a few days might find this viable.

One that requires no mechanical skills or pumping. A self-sterilizing miracle.

 

More info.

The Sodis Reference Center

SODIS at Wikipedia