> It's the reason I wouldn't drink wanter in the backcountry unless it's directly from high snowpack.
If you are at a certain elevation, and it is known that there are no villages above you or mining going on, any flow coming down the slopes is likely safe to drink, regardless of whether you know for sure that it comes from a snowpack. It has been argued that filtering water in the backcountry is often unnecessary, in spite of what companies like MSR suggest with their marketing.[0] Certainly, if you visit mountain ranges like the Carpathians, the Chilean side of the Andes, or the Pamirs, you can see that travelers and locals alike fill their bottles from the waterfalls without incident.
Yeah, that's what I've read. I was mostly handling water in well-travelled wilderness in the Appalachians and Rockies, though. And from what I understand there's enough of a disease load in say, the deer population in the Sierras, that you might not want to be doing it even if you don't think there's humans upstream. shrug Wasn't a huge amount of trouble, my brother has a pretty high-end pump filter.
If you are at a certain elevation, and it is known that there are no villages above you or mining going on, any flow coming down the slopes is likely safe to drink, regardless of whether you know for sure that it comes from a snowpack. It has been argued that filtering water in the backcountry is often unnecessary, in spite of what companies like MSR suggest with their marketing.[0] Certainly, if you visit mountain ranges like the Carpathians, the Chilean side of the Andes, or the Pamirs, you can see that travelers and locals alike fill their bottles from the waterfalls without incident.
[0]https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/filtering-stream-water-...