Say for a moment that I was going to take you with me on a 6 day hike. Sounds like fun at first, and then the fear creeps in. For me, it was wild animals, food, and water. Perhaps there was a bit of wondering who would save me if I got really hurt, but hiking itself doesn't sound too dangerous, and it was never a big worry for me at first anyway. Most people think that the solution to the first fear is to carry a gun or a big knife like I did, while the experienced hikers are trying to whittle down their pack weight. You get a lot of ridicule, and then slowly realize that the most dangerous parts of the whole hike are walking through parking lots of the towns you pass through. You are way more likely to get whacked by a car than a bear. You don't even need national statistics to make you understand that.
But...the fear of running out of food and water is a real thing. It is something most of us never worry about in our everyday lives, which should make us stop and think a bit. After my over 100 miles of being a newbie backpacker, I can safely say that the fear of not being able to get good, clean water is the number one item on my list. For a hiker, this is a tough thing because water is one of the heavier things that you can carry on your back, but running out of water will get you before just about anything else. You'd think food would be the top of the list, but I actually came home with food I didn't eat. You know how it is at the beach? You drink a lot, but tend to eat less? It's like that with hiking, and the hotter it is, the more you drink. The bad feeling is when you suck on the straw on your camelback, and get air bubbles instead of water and see on the map that the next water source is 5 miles away....straight uphill.
The worry about water sounds silly to a city-slicker, but I, like you figured that a water source on a map meant that there was a spigot with good clean mountain water, better than the best bottled water you can buy! Not so fast, buddy. Sometimes it was a nice big stream, sometimes it was a dried-up mud puddle, sometimes it was a rusty pipe coming out of the ground, but it was always water that had to be treated. I suppose you could take your chances, like my brother told me, "As long as it looks like no animal could have pooped in it, you're good." I'm still not sure how he could tell that stuff. Me? I always made sure my water got purified. Sometimes it was easy to get to the water, and sometimes it cost me dearly. One of my first trips to a water source, I had to go through some nice green vegetation that turned out to be thorn bushes that ripped my legs to pieces and while I stood there bleeding out, Paul decided to have a cigarette and stop to consider what we should do first: get the rest of the water and go back for the first aid kit, or have me give him all of the water just in case I didn't make it back to the campsite. All I know is that next time, I'm taking a really big first-aid kit.
There are many ways to purify water, and I was so worried about water that we each took a different device and that turned out to not be enough. Paul's device was this fancy thing that had a special kind of light that you stick in a bottle of untreated water for about 40 seconds and the water was magically cleansed...sorta. It wouldn't do anything for stuff floating in the water, it just killed microscopic bugs, so if you're really pulling water from a mud puddle, you'd end up drinking purified muddy water. It was quick though, and it turned out that the real major issue was that it used some special battery that you can't find anywhere. Paul had figured on that part and bought extra batteries...and he griped about the weight of those batteries almost all day long every day. The day we figured out that all of the batteries that he had brought along were bad and his gizmo was useless...well that was a bad day. Every time I'd starting talking about how great that banana I had before was, Paul would reply about how heavy his pack was because he was carrying dead batteries and a worthless purifier.
The good news was that I was carrying a mechanical toothpaste tube filter by Sawyer, that was small, light, and needed no batteries. It was basically like a tiny version of those Brita filters we use at home....only one problem: mine stopped working after 3 uses. I don't mean that it didn't filter the water properly, I mean you put water in and nothing came out. Almost all of the hikers had this thing and nobody ever had a problem. They backwashed mine, tried every trick in the book and eventually, I even ended up at a Outfitter store that could not resolve the issue. Bottom line: I got a lemon. That is not much of a deal, but when both of your water purifiers break and you are 20 miles away from the nearest water faucet, you start getting a sinking feeling that you are not going to make it. Fortunately, our hiker friends helped us out, but anybody that ever made a joke about the Perkins men having to have a backup for everything, understand now why we are this way.
We finally realized that we could still boil water and were able to fully enjoy the times when we found the streams. We knew we were going to get to town, get our purifiers working, and Paul was looking forward to a garbage can where he could dump all of those batteries. We were cheerful again, as we realized that sometime the next day there would be a store with water, food, and maybe even a shower. By now, you're probably wondering why we just didn't go jump in the streams and take a bath. Well, as hot as we were, that water was about the coldest water you can imagine. I don't mean like a cold shower in the summer, I mean like you fell through the ice in the winter. My wash cloth was like a good buddy and I used that thing almost as much as I used my fork. I cleaned up frequently, but still wondered just how bad I was going to smell when I finally got to that store. At this point I still didn't know that everybody smelled, including the girls and there were just levels of how bad you smelled. Paul didn't smell that bad, but I did try to make sure I kept my distance. I just kept my eyes on the prize, I was going to that store and load up with every goodie I could find and I was damn sure I was going to get a brownie.
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