Do you ever not filter or treat your water?

I sometimes drink untreated water if I can see the source. I've gone from the Steripen opti, to the sawyer filter, and now to the steripen ultra. These water treatment systems are easy enough to use, and I really didn't enjoy my experience with waterborne illness, that I just do it even though the chances of getting sick in some of these pristine mountain streams is pretty low.

Years ago, in the Wind River Range, I didn't treat when up high, and that worked out. In the East, pretty much treat everything.

I rarely treat my water here on Kodiak Island. I will if I am getting water out of a lake or river or beaver pond at lower elevations, but up in the alpine I basically never ever treat it. My wife runs a commercial salmon fishing operation in the summers and most folks along the coast where she fishes (at sea level, obviously) drink untreated surface runoff all summer, every summer.

I do know of people in Kodiak who have gotten beaver fever, but it seems pretty rare. I'd be more careful on the Alaska mainland.

I rarely treat my water. I spend most of my time above 10k in CO, and often am off-trail. At lower elevations, I probably would treat water, but I start the trip with water, and usually get to 10k pretty quickly. These sources are mainly small alpine streams or springs. I'm a little wary of alpine lakes in popular areas.

I almost always treat my water.

One of my hiking friends grew up in India. He tells me that the village well water was greenish in color. He never treats his water.

in 1975 I and two friends did a traverse of the Pickett Range in the N. Cascades. You have to hike for 3 days before you can see the Picketts. We camped high on the shoulder of Mt. Challenger, about 50' from the Challenger Glacier. Water trickled off the glacier into small pools in the rock, and from there into small trickles of streams. There was no camp above ours, there was no dirt above our camp. In those days we didn't filter. My partner got giardia, I didn't. He lost a lot of weight, and didn't get his health back for a year. It was a scary experience. The picture below is the pool he drank out of. I drank out of the stream that flowed out of the pool.

There were no beavers above us, no campers, no dead animals in the water. There were marmots and possibly goats in the area.

Another time in the late 1960s, southern Sierra, there was foam along the stream banks where we camped. We drank the water, no filtering, no problem. Next day we hiked upstream and found a dead cow in the stream. yuk!

i carry a sawyer mini and always filter unless im going to boil it.
why carry a water treatment if your not going to use it?