Hello! Welcome back to SurThrival Thursday from Cheat Mountain. This week I’m going to talk a bit about finding water; we are very lucky to be able to find clean, drinkable water here in Appalachia. Usually, this means that you don’t have to hike with more than a small water bottle, because water is everywhere here! Often I carry some sort of water purification system, whether its a small filter, UV pen, purification tablets, iodine, etc., but you can always boil your water as well.
In order to find the cleanest water around, you have to go up! Gathering water from as close to the original source as possible cuts out many possibilities of contamination. Large streams often have many sources and its difficult to ascertain exactly where the water is coming from and whether or not there is a pollutant nearby: this could mean a road used by vehicles, houses, farms, coal mines, or industrial sites. I’ve often hiked up to find a spring only to realize that there is an old dump site off of a road that’s no longer used right next to the spring! Yuck! So whenever possible, try to hike up to the highest spring that you can find to collect your water. When you do find your source, scout around a bit to make sure there aren’t any feces or carcasses nearby that might be affecting your water.
Instead of writing a long blog post this week, I made a video documenting Griffin and I hiking up to find a spring. You can view it on on our Facebook page here: watch the video!
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