Microfilters solve hydration issues

When camping, backpacking, fishing and multi-day hunting trips, keeping sufficient supplies of potable water is challenging but essential.

Bottled water is our most popular and most economical method. With that, you get a plastic flavor caused by tiny bits of ingested, free-floating plastic. According to one study, one liter of bottled water contains an average of 10.4 plastic particles. It is a health risk as well as an environmental pollutant. In addition, empty plastic bottles end up in landfills or worse, in our lakes and rivers or on roadsides.

There are better, more environmentally friendly ways to ensure healthy water for drinking.

For decades I have used portable filters and even purifiers for my outdoors adventures. They are especially useful for float fishing because they enable me to safely drink water filtered from the stream I am canoeing, including significantly degraded or polluted streams.

A good microfilter strains out particles as small as 0.1 microns. My longtime mainstay is a MSR Waterworks. It's a manual pump that forces water through a ceramic filter which prevents particles as small as .02 microns. It screws onto the lid of a Nalgene bottle or any other bottle with a similar size threaded lid.

Read the full article by Bryan Hendricks on Arkansas Online's website here.