Water is very essential during trekking, and neglecting that can cause serious dehydration. For short treks, you can carry most of the water you need for the entire journey in bottles. But for extended treks, this becomes more difficult, especially if camping or cooking is involved. Water is heavy, since a litre of it weighs a kilogram, it quickly overwhelms the carrier.
Water from natural sources like streams or by melting snow can be used for drinking and cooking purposes, however a few precautions are mandatory, to prevent unwanted diseases from drinking contaminated water.
The most effective of all these is to boil the water. The water need not actually boil for an extended period, just getting it to boil should suffice. This will render the water safe to drink. But this is also a complicated and time consuming procedure.
The other method is to buy Iodine beforehand at your local medical store. For a recent 3 day trek I bought BetaDine(R) iodine bottle for about Rs 113 at the local medical store. You can buy Tincture of Iodine also, but it has less concentration. It was a normal 100ml bottle, and can potentially clean hundreds of liters of water. Just add 8 drops of it to a liter of clear water, and wait for 30 mins for the iodine to kill most of the microorganisms. Iodine is not poisonous in higher doses, so you can safely increase the dosage without any side-effects. double the dosage, if you see visible contamination or if you want quicker response time. After 30 mins, there will be a slight after-taste to water due to iodine. I personally did not mind the taste, but for those of you who do, you can carry Vitamin C tablets. You must add them AFTER the 30 mins, otherwise iodine will not be effective (since the Vitamin C tablets convert iodine to iodide, removing the taste). I would suggest using iodine in normal water once before the trek to know clearly how you feel about the taste of it, and see if you need Vitamin C or not.
WARNING: Do NOT EXPOSE IODINE TO SUNLIGHT! It renders it ineffective!
Iodine tablets are also available I suppose, although I havent tried them.
I also suggest having a backup scheme to purify water, to prevent any unexpected incidents like the bottle accidentally getting exposed to sunlight or breaking.
Check out this link for more details on other water purification methods. Remember, by not carrying a lot of bottles, you are also not polluting the environment with plastic!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Extremely useful when i go to trekking. Thanks bhanu for the post.
No Problem. BTW you might want to consider buying Iodine tablets, instead of Iodine solution. They are much convenient to carry and use. One tablet to a liter of water will do the trick!
Post a Comment