Where to Find Clean Water | Survival Skills
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We talked about going up high to find water. When we were standing on top of the little nob we could see that there was all sorts of water down below us. About a hundred meters from where we were standing there’s another water source. And one of the nice things about going up high to find water is you find water close to its source which is a spring. This particular stream is running really, really high right now, and that’s because it’s been raining for a few days and the water table is really up.
So, if you think about a spring as being the very top of a jar of water, and the water table underneath being the main part of the jar of water, when you fill it up it starts to run out. And right now this spring is pouring out of the top of this mountain. It’s really close to its source meaning that it’s probably the purest water we’re going to find. It’s a lot better drinking out of this than it would be drinking out of a lake, drinking out of anything like that.
So one of my rules as far as drinking water goes, if you’re not going to purify it, and you should purify all your water, so all the water you get you should purify, if you don’t have the means or the ability, and you’re becoming dehydrated and you need to drink water, the closer you can get to stepping over your water source the more likely you’re going to be able to drink it without having any ill effects.
So, if you’ve got to take ten steps to get across a creek that creek has got a lot of potential contaminants flowing into it. If you take five steps across your creek it’s probably better. Two steps across it’s probably better. This creek I can step across in one step, and that’s going to be the best water for me to drink.
So if you think about it in how many steps it takes to get across number one is going to be your best. This is a creek I can step across in one step. It’s probably going to be my purest water. It’s actually coming out of the ground just maybe twenty or thirty yards right up from us, and it’s a really nice water source. So, clean, clear, and just coming out of the ground.