Date: 2008-10-12
To: About my hike 3
Miles today: 0.0

Time for more rambling.Water: At least for NOBOs, water should be plentiful. EVERY shelter I visited that was supposed to have water did. I know that is defninetly not the case later in the year, but when I went through, water was pretty much a non-issue. There are quite a few high springs and streams along the way, and I know some hikers have gotten away with not even treating their water, but I only didn't treat about 5 times, and that was out of necessity from high springs. The only place you may go a little while without water is some of the long ridge runs. Not much water up top, but even then you should find water within 10 miles.On average, I would guess there is good or good enough water every 3 miles or so along the trail. For the last 2/3 of the trail I ONLY carried a liter of water, never more and I was fine. I did drink plenty of water, just guzzled in the morning and at night.Treatment: Everyone has their own opinions on this, so I will just explain what I used and why. I started out with a filter and Polar Pure, but ditched the filter because I was often in below freezing temperatures which could easily damage the ceramic filament without me knowing. Also easy to cross-contaminate.Polar Pure works great, or at least as well as Iodine can. Cheap, can be recharged for months on end, and it doesn't taste much like iodine or stain your bladder like the tabs do. Don't know what its freezing point was, so I slept with it. A major downside I found was the glass bottle. Remember those times I mentioned drinking untreated water above....Used the iodine tabs for a resupply because thats all there was. Strong flavor, theyre not that great and you go through them pretty quick.Used Aqua Mira for a little bit too. A bit more expensive, but I think the main downfall is you have to wait 5 minutes for the chemicals to react before mixing it with your water. Sometimes its nice to dip and run, especially when a cloud of black flies is on your tail...So I come to my preferred treatment: chlorine bleach. Just regular Chlorox. NO SCENTS, JUST PLAIN BLEACH. Pick up the smallest dropper bottle you can find and that will probably last you and yoru friends the entire trip. 2 drops per liter and wait 30 minutes. If your water doesn't smell faintly of bleach after that, hit it again (I never had to). It is cheap and you hardly use any, so every time I hit camp I filled up everything I had in one trip to the water. If I wasted some, who cared? I could discern the taste, but it didn't bother me any.Some dipping tips: BE SURE TO WASH YOUR THREADS. Otherwise treating is pretty much useless. This means after you have added your chemical of choice and shaken it up, flip your bottle and unscrew the top so some water runs out. Then the water on your bottle's threads is also treated.A small section of PVC pipe can come in handy to make your own piped spring out of any water source. A folded leaf also works.Communication: I used a Verizon PocketPC with a small fold up bluetooth keyboard for all my communication on the trail. I never used the phone on the trail because it kills the battery faster. I only communicated by email. Write up your emails and then sync it. I could have went more than a month on one charge using my phone with its two supplied batteries like that.The touchscreen phones are a ton easier to use.Verizon is the most reliable service for the trail. You can actually get signal a good amount of the time, though it is usually weak. A friend had ATT/Cingular and twice the entire trail he had signal when I didn't. Most of the time he didn't have signal.Take your battery out of the phone when you aren't using it. Even when your phone is off, it is still doing stuff and using power, how does it know when you press the power button?