Water in the wilderness
Let’s take this water right here for example. It’s got a sandy bottom to it. It’s running water. It’s got tress growing all around it. There’s herb and all kind of stuff in the stream.
Is this water safe to drink? Well, no. It is not. Not entirely safe to drink. The reason being, something that I know that you do not, is upstream there are three or four houses.
This is a very rural area. There is no city sewer system. People here use septic tanks. Sometimes their septic tanks overflow whenever there’s a heavy rain. We had a heavy rain here last week. This water could be contaminated by human waste from those septic tanks over running and get into this creek. With human waste comes polio, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis.
Besides there being three or houses up stream there’s also some horses. People here have horse range. Horses drink out of the stream. Unless, that horses drinking on stream, that’s no big deal. What is big deal, remember the rain I told that we had a few days ago? Well, the water ran out also washed the horse feces from the fields into the stream. With horse feces comes cryptosporidium. So at this point in time, no, this water is not entirely safe to drink.
So whenever you’re out in the wilderness, you come across the stream say this looks like some good running water and in fact it is. It is nice water, but just because it meets all the criteria of it running, its sandy bottom, it’s clear, there are animals living in it, there are vegetation growing out of it does not mean that is 100% safe to drink.
Thank you for your time.
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