How to Manage Water while Hiking

Video Transcript

Hi this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village, and I am here to talk to you about water in the Appalachian Mountains. Now water is extremely important, you can actually live much longer without food than you can without water. So you need to stay hydrated constantly. And when you are in the mountains, you are much more susceptible to heat and to sunlight, which means that you are going to get dehydrated more quickly. Plus you never know where you are going to have a ready source of water. So there are a couple of things you need to do. The first one is to make sure you keep a good-sized water bottle with you at all times, and every opportunity that you get to fill it up, you should take advantage of it and fill up that water bottle. If you are going along the Appalachian Trail, you are going to find huts on just about every other mountain or so, so once you get to a hut you are going to be able to get access to the water. Know where those huts are and make sure that you are always filling up your water bottle. Now sometimes you are not going to have access to good drinking water. If that is the case what you should do is get water from a stream, and just listen, you can hear a stream, particularly as you get lower down on a mountain. If you do not have a water purifier, what you can do is actually boil the water in a pot and that will kill off any kind of microbes that you have to worry about. Now if you do not have a way to kill off the germs in the water, either you do not have a purifier or you cannot get a fire started, or you do not have a pot to boil water in, what you should do is seek running water. You do not want still water that is more likely to have nasty stuff in it. So seek running water, it makes a sound, and there is more of it as you go downhill. The wisest thing to do though is to always make sure that you are filling up your water bottle so that way you do not have to take your chances with risky water.

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