[jeffwass]

Regarding drinking from streams, back in the mid-90’s I did a camping/hiking excursion with Outward Bound in the Appalachians of North Carolina.

We sourced all our drinking water from streams, using concentrated iodine to make the water drinkable (I think we had to wait 30 mins for it to take effect).

There was one part of the journey where we ran out of water and couldn’t drink from a nearby small river because it was downstream of a paper processing factory. And we had to go out of our way using old school topographical maps (which we used for all our navigation) to find another water source and hope it was available and flowing.

[wirrbel]

My comment of course was primarily about the swimming part (you involuntarily swallow some water).

Youtube is full of methods for making water safe on hiking trips / camping etc. Boiling can also be a honking great idea of course.

[hn_acker]

Boiling helps with bacteria, but not with toxic chemicals from factories. You need to capture evaporated water (or steam from boiling the water).