Last weekend Weasel, Kenzie and I joined up with Ken and Sam Snyder at the 3D shoot for the upper course portion of the shoot.  The shoot was very fun and those two made it even funner.  They are relatively new to archery, as I am, and it was fun to know not everyone on the course wanted to hit 12’s….hitting foam was what it was all about for us.  Anyway, during the course Sam commented on the fact that he was thirsty.  Weasel and I both had on our backpacks with hydration bladders and we both offered up a drink from the straw.  We were declined, but the fact remained, Sam was thirsty.  During the course, we crossed a stream of clear, cold water a couple of times and Sam looked like he might just lay down next to the water and take a big old drink!  I’m glad he didn’t.

Well, we talked about some of the small, packable filtration units that are on the market and how you can suck water right out of a dirty pond or stream and it will filter out any bad stuff that might be in there.  That got me thinking.  Why would an outdoors person be without something like that?  We were on a hike near Tony’s Grove a few years back and we ran out of water but continued to hike to the next lake instead of turning back.  That was not a very bright thing for us to do.  Had we had one of the filtration units on us, we would have been fine.

Well, yesterday, I had to stop in at Smith and Edwards to pick up some stuff Sherry had purchased and she showed me a small devise called  a “Sawyer Mini”.  It is a compact little water filtration unit that will filter up to 100,000 gallons of water before you have to discard it.

This little thing fits in the palm of your hand!  Comes with a small, 2 cup size bladder, a straw and a plunger to clean out any moss or junk that might tend to plug it up.  You can screw the bladder onto the “input” end of the filter, or you can screw on a common plastic water bottle.  BUT, you don’t need the bladder or a water bottle to make it work.  Just lay down next to a stream or lake, put the end into the water and suck through the straw.  They claim it will filter 99.999999999% of any E-coli, giardia, salmonella, cholera and an assortment of other bad for you stuff that might be in the water source.  AND it will filter up to 100,000 gallons of water.  Think about it!  100,000 gallons of water!  If you drank one gallon of water a day and used this filter to drink it, you could use it for 274 years!  100,000/365 = 274!  Or in other words, you and 273 friends could all use it every day for one year before you needed another one.

I put mine in my backpack!

Smith and Edwards (The Ikea for Rednecks store)

sells these little units for about $20!  Twenty bucks!  But after talking to the guy in charge of making sure the store has a supply of them they will sell out fast once the word gets out about them!

I suggest you hurry your little butt right down there and pick one up….Tell them Bears Butt sent you!  It won’t get you any discount, but it will make them smile!  And then you can enjoy 100,000 gallons of worry free stream and/or lake mountain water drinking!

May 25, 2016

Bears Butt