Whether you’ve forgotten your water bottle, or worse, you are trying to survive when you’ve become lost in nature, seeking water and making sure it’s safe for consumption is a handy skill to learn.
While you might think it’s as easy as finding water and drinking it, it remains crucial to ensure that the water is clean.
If you are unsure how to make water drinkable, take a look at a few methods and tactics to ensure the water you’ve found outdoors is safe.
Where to find water
While making sure water is safe to drink, you’ll first need to locate it. To find water that is relatively clean, it is important to consider the following:
- Make sure you collect water from a running source, such as a river. Still water in nature is a breeding ground for harmful viruses and bacteria.
- If you’re in a bind, you can tie a plastic bag to plant limbs to trap condensation and collect a few water droplets.
- When you are searching for water, be sure to set up container-like structures when leaving your ‘homebase’. You never know when rainy weather will strike, so this is a great way to capture rainwater when you’re away.
Boiling water
It can be hard to determine whether water is safe to drink, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
To kill bacteria and sanitise, you’ll need to gather the water and boil it for a minimum of three minutes to ensure you kill harmful microbes.
What makes this method so great, is the fact that it can effectively clean water that’s muddy or cloudy, so that it’s transformed into a drinkable and safe substance to consume.
Be sure to let the water cool off for an appropriate amount of time.
Filter water
While you might think that simply placing a cloth over your bottle when you collect water to separate the dirt from water is enough, this is not always the case.
There are still tiny harmful particles in the substance that can be hazardous to consume.
By using items, such as sand and stones to store in a container, you’ll be able to remove a large amount of harmful bacteria from the water.
You can watch an easy tutorial to make this water filter on YouTube.
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Picture: Dan Carlson / Unsplash
