Date: 2016-05-06
From: Fontana Village

To: Fontana Village
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

After 14 days in a row of hiking on the AT, I took my first zero today at Fontana Dam. I did my laundry, had lunch with Nathan, Blood Man and Clay, made some phone calls, took a bath, and generally rested and relaxed.With little happening trail-wise, I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about hydration: how much I'm drinking, how one gets clean water, and the systems and strategy I employ. Thus far, I am drinking about 4.5 liters of water a day. (A liter is just about the same amount as a quart.) I start off each morning, before I begin to hike, by drinking one liter at breakfast: I drink a cup mixed with my whey protein powder, a cup with my granola and dehydrated milk, and then drink two additional cups. Once on the trail, I drink a liter in the morning, a liter at lunch, and a liter in the afternoon. I try to limit my water intake after 4:00 pm to just what I need to cook with (usually two cups to rehydrate my dinner), the desired result being that I get up only a couple of times during the night. That means I'm quite thirsty when I wake up, but it makes it easy to get down my allocated liter of water in the morning. Even though the streams and springs are fairly pristine and flow quickly, the twin impacts of animal and human waste make it inadvisable to drink untreated or unfiltered water. As a result, every thru-hiker carries some sort of water treatment. There are two basic kinds: a filter-based method, and a chemical additive method. My water system consists of two one-liter Smart Water bottles, a 2 liter Platypus collapsible water bottle, a 0.10 micron Sawyer filter, and the Aqua Mira chemical treatment system. Thus, I carry both a filter and chemical treatment system to ensure clean water, the only area in which I can be accused of carrying duplicative systems. When I reach camp in the late afternoon, both of my Smart Water bottles are usually dry or close to dry. At that point, I fill up my 2 liter Platy bottle (my "dirty water" bottle), screw on my Sawyer water filter, and fill each of my Smart Water bottles with clean water. It takes the dirty water about 5 minutes to pass through the filter and fill up a one liter bottle. After both liter bottles are full, I refill the Platy bottle with untreated water, and add Aqua Mira to it. Aqua Mira is a chemical system that takes about 20 minutes to purify the water. So, I now have two Smart Water bottles of clean, Sawyer-filtered water, and I have the 2 liter Platy water in process of being cleaned with Aqua Mira. I rehydrate my dinner with a half liter, and am careful not to drink much at all. In the morning, I drink my allocated liter. Then, with the water in the Platy bottle now clean because of the Aqua Mira I added the night before, I fill up the Smart Water bottles to the top, and am ready to go hike. The beauty of using Aqua Mira in addition to my Sawyer filter is that I don't have to take the time to filter any water in the morning -- only refill my water bottles with the Aqua Mira-ed Platy water. This gets me on the trail with less morning hassle. Since I leave for the trail each morning with two full Smart water bottles' worth of water, and plan on drinking three liters during the day, I only need to stop once and filter a Smart Water bottle's worth of water from a stream or spring using my Sawyer filter. Then, as I mentioned before, I typically get to a campsite with Smart Water bottles either newly dry, or with just a little water left. Because I use Smart Water bottles that sit in elastic sleeves on the outside of my pack, I can easily tell how much water I have left. A hiker who uses a bladder that sits inside his pack to hold clean water has to open that pack to see what's left, and bladders have known to periodically leak. But, the benefit to using a bladder system is that you can suck water through a tube from the bladder and do so while you hike without stopping. Acknowledging this advantage over water bottles (which you typically have to stop and pull out of the external sleeves on your pack to drink), I have rigged up a tube system that screws onto my Smart Water bottles. Thus, I get the benefit of being able to drink water through a tube on the go and monitor how much water I have remaining without having to open my pack. So, with my hydration system, I can drink continuously, not waste time filtering in the morning, have a backup system with me in case something did go wrong, and not have, in my opinion, the complicating factor of a hydration bladder in my backpack. You now know more than you probably ever wanted to about drinking water on the trail. With a second zero scheduled tomorrow at Fontana Dam, I will take the time then to write a post on the food and supplements that I carry. Tomorrow, I also meet Barbara for lunch. Now living in Tennessee, she and I worked closely together for a number of years, and I haven't seen her since we moved to Providence in 2007. It should be a wonderful lunch!