Hiking is one of my favourite pastimes. I particularly like long hikes, as that is the only real way to get away from civilization, these days. On long hikes I always find water to be a problem. On a trail it is just not worth drinking dodgy water. If you get diarrhea that far from help, you can get dehydrated quickly and then you are in real trouble. Fortunately there are some lightweight items that you can carry with to you to fix this problem.

There are 2 types of products to treat water, purification products and filtration products. Purification products are cheaper, but they won’t remove anything from the water. They only kill bacteria, viruses and parasites in the water. Filtration products will remove these organism from the water as well as any dirt, so if the only water available on your hike will be muddy, you need a filter.

Water purification products

Chlorine tablets vs. iodine tablets: The price of both tablets are low. The difference is that iodine is a much stronger chemical. This means that iodine kills more organisms better, but it is not for long term use. Specifically Giardia parasites are killed by Iodine so you need to check, before you hike in an area.

Chlorine Tablets: Chlorine is the same stuff they use to disinfect tap water. This little bottle contains 75 tablets each tablet can disinfect 1 liter of water. For the price it is a very cheap solution.

Iodine Tablets: This bottle has 75 tablets which purifies 50 litres of water.

Water filtration products:

Sweetwater Microfilter: This is a high quality filter. It works with a hand pump to help you get water from small sources like puddles. It weighs just 320g. You can filter 750 liters of water with one filtration cartridge.

Recently they also started selling steripens for water purification. These pens run on batteries and they use UV light to sterilize the water. They aren’t cheap, but they are very good at killing bacteria and they don’t use any chemicals to do so. I recommend the SteriPEN Journey LCD this comes with a filtration bottle, so you can filter and sterilize the water.