carrying water
It was slightly cooler today due to overcast (77F instead of 81F) so I thought I might carry some water up from the creek. Unless I am forgetting something, this is my first attempt to harvest surface water.
going down
I took two Homer buckets with me so I’d be balanced on the way back. I didn’t bring a dipper of any kind so I figured I might get a couple gallons in each one. 2+2=4. Turns out I could get a bit more than 2.5 gallons on a dip, so 2.5 gal + 2.5 gal = 5.
As I approached the creekside I realized I did have a dipper; one of the buckets could fill the other.
- use 1st bucket to fill 2nd to full (5 gallons)
- dip 1st bucket again (2.5)
- equalize water levels by pouring from #2 into #1
The gross haul creekside was about 7.75 gallons.
heading back up to camp
Carrying the water back up a steep and rocky trail at 10k’ was intense. I stopped many times to let my heart rate settle and swat at mosquitos.
filtering
I tried to pre-filter with coffee filters but they quickly clogged. So I pre-pre-filtered by running the water through paper towels in a colander to catch the “bigger” silt particles and bugs. That worked well; I could then get about a gallon of water through a coffee filter before it clogged from silt too small to see.
treating
I doped the filtered water with a teaspoon of laundry bleach. I carry
unscented bleach so it can have this dual use. EPA
guidelines
say ~.75 teaspoon for this volume of water, so I’m a little over but I’m not
going to be drinking it so flavor is not an issue. I measured it with a repurposed shotglass thingy
I found in a thrift store; it is graduated in ml, oz, TBS, and tsp. It lives
in my laundry kit.
If I were going to drink this water I’d also run it through the ceramic filter as mentioned earlier.
storing
I wanted to keep this water in a container with a spigot, so I decanted water in one of the aquatainers into the main freshwater tank then labeled it WASHING ONLY. I transferred the quasi-filtered and treated water into the 7-gallon container. It was very near full, so I will call the net haul a scant 7 gallons.
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