I’ve been through several different types of water bottles and water filter systems over the years. The water bottle can be somewhat of a debate to those in the survival community. Some prefer stainless steel over plastic for the sole purpose of being able to boil your water. For a while I carried a 32oz stainless steel bottle for that purpose, but I honestly never found myself needing to boil my water. This would obviously be a benefit in more of a long term survival situation where a personal water filter may become compromised after too many uses.
Although I do still own a stainless steel water bottle I more often than not carry my trusty 32 ounce Nalgene water bottle with a nesting cup.
The Olicamp stainless steel nesting cup provides me with a means of boiling questionable water if I don’t want to use my water filter, melt snow to create drinkable water, or to just enjoy that hot cup of coffee in the field.
As for being able to filter questionable water I have settled on a simple, robust, easy to use personal water filter. The specific one I chose is the Sawyer Mini Squeeze Water Filter. This system contains no moving parts and is able to filter 100,000 gallons of water! Because of those two facts, this system will last you a very long time.
The kit comes with the water filter, drinking straw, and 16 ounce reusable squeeze pouch. You can also get additional squeeze pouches of varying sizes. I opted to purchase two additional 32 ounce squeeze pouches. Not only can you fill these with questionable water to process through the filter, but since they come with a screw on cap, you can carry them over distance back to camp without worrying about spilling the water.
I don’t mess around with filters that require changing our pre-filters, have some type of pumping mechanism, or having enough water purification tablets. You can eventually run our of the pre-filters and the pump mechanism is a point of failure out in the field. In general 1 person will require 1 gallon of water a day. With the Sawyer Mini Squeeze filter system that equates to 100,00 days! Pretty damn impressive if you ask me. There are plenty of other water filter systems to choose from depending on how many people you need to filter water for and what you want to filter. A lot of this stuff comes down to personal preference as well. The combination of the proven Nalgene water bottle and the very robust Sawyer Mini Squeeze water filter give me a no bullshit easy to use hydration system for day hikes, multi day backpack trips and natural disaster preparation.
What hydration setup do you use?
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