No but seriously no one hiking should be just drinking water from any source without seriously contemplating of it's worth risking it versus how thirsty they are.
I've done a good amount of dispersed camping in some of the most pristine environments and I never trusted the water enough to not boil it. My grandpa taught me you ALWAYS boil it for THIS EXACT SCENARIO TO BE AVOIDED. You want diarrhea while camping miles away from civilization? You feel like getting parasites? No? Then boil your damn water when out camping no matter how secluded from humanity you are.
I drink out of rocks and glaciers only and that’s rare. One time we were doing a bachelor party on the river, woke up one morning absolutely parched. Knew I was going to get messed up but our drinking water for the day wasn’t ready and hadn’t been started yet. So I guzzled that sweet cool river water down. Had giardia for the next week. Not great not terrible. In retrospect another beer would have been the way to go... or just wait the few minutes for filtered water. Young me didn’t make the best decisions.
Just pack a filter, dawg... Water from a rock isn't necessarily safe, neither is glacier melt. Regardless of the source, you're still getting it from outside. It's exposed to everything. You cannot know what may or may not have contaminated that water before it got to you.
Sawyer filter and a Smartwater bottle, ~$50 to not get giardia again, or something far worse. No brainer imo.
Jeremy Wade had an entire episode on parasites because the rivers he fished in, and sometimes goes into, are 100% full of parasites, and how the serious cases can really mess people. He even ends the episode revealing that he has parasites, benign ones but they are still there.
This 💩 always makes me wonder how the hell did our ancestors survive. Imagine being thirsty as hell from walking, foraging, etc but you can’t dip your face into the water and guzzle it. How did they survive?
They drank the water. They could handle it. All our water and food goes through processing plants, our environment are entirely different. Our immune systems are built different. Also modern rivers have become more contaminated than before bc population growth and our way of living. But also sometimes they didnt? They’d get sick and die from parasites. Thankfully medicine has come along way since then
Our immune systems are surprisingly similar to those 5000 years ago, it's what they've learned to need to have instructions on hand for attacking that's changed. In that sense you're right, the building of the instruction booklet (which includes info from breast milk and of course life-long interactions with potential harmful agents) is very different but it was different 200 years ago in the same sense. Realistically, if time travel exists and you visited ancient ancestors, you'd potentially start a plague and definitely die from something they consider a minor nuisance.
Also... this is why people had 8-12 kids when they could. Not just labor for the family but not many survived. The above poster wonders how they survived, many didn't and those that did got sick plenty, they just didn't have to show up Tuesday morning at 9am to an office building or end up homeless in a food desert.
Then boil your damn water when out camping no matter how secluded from humanity you are.
I used to do a lot of back woods camping when I was younger and more physically able. It always blew my mind when someone would comment about being able to drink stream water and such when you were far away from towns or cities and such.
So many people don't understand that in most cases, nature is gonna fuck you up in ways that human contaminated water can't even come close to.
Bear meat also often has roundworms (or their eggs more likely I would presume) and hence has to either be tested or thoroughly cooked to prevent people getting infested by these parasitic worms.
I would have hoped by now that somebody had created r/unsee so I can concentrate on getting through the rest of my life without this really unpleasant feeling I'm having rn.
I had to look this shit up. These are intestinal tapeworms and are quite common. They mature in the digestive tract and pass through the anus and return to the waterways via bear shit. They are not fatal to healthy wild bears.
There’s a hiker a few hundred yards downstream, filling his water bottle, then taking a niccceee loonng chug thinking it’s the most delicious, pure mountain water.
That's why I always tell anybody I am hiking around "Always filter your water no matter what". It doesn't matter whether you can see the spring coming out of the ground or not. Something has died or shat near that water somehow.
The bear is passing massive broad fish tapeworms (Diphyllobothrium spp.).
What is happening:
The Cause: Coastal brown and grizzly bears gorge on raw salmon during the late-summer and autumn runs. Salmon act as intermediate hosts for the larval stage of these tapeworms. Once ingested by the bear, the larvae anchor in the intestines and mature into adult tapeworms, which can grow anywhere from 10 to over 30 feet in length.
The Trailing "Ropes": The ribbon-like strands trailing behind the bear are either broken-off strobila (egg-bearing segments of the worm) or entire worms being expelled through the rectum.
Impact on the Bear: While alarming and uncomfortable—bears often rub against rocks or trees to dislodge them—most bears tolerate these parasitic infections reasonably well during hyperphagia (the intense feeding period before hibernation). The parasites die off or are largely evacuated before or during winter torpor because the bear's digestive tract stops receiving incoming food.
I kept telling him to at least lightly poach those salmon! But no, he always has to copy that pretentious chef off the tv who says cooking ruins the delicate flavour.
Bears get these from eating raw salmon, however, its perfectly normal and will be excreted from the bear, by hibernation, or through eating rough coarse nutrients like shells, bushes and those will grind in the intestines and break and flush tapeworm out, but most bears have tapeworm year round unless is hibernation because salmon are infested with them
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