Catching water

[AK Granola]

As I’m preparing for upcoming garden season, and looking at my water catchment system, I wondered if anyone has tried a small water catchment system for obtaining drinking water on a hike. If it’s raining surely one could rig up some lightweight system to get enough water in an overnight downpour. I guess you can tell that where I hike it almost always rains at least part of the trip. You couldn’t count on it necessarily but it would be a great pure source under the right circumstances. Anyone ever tried this?

[Ken Thompson]

Hammockers might be familiar with these,

https://hennessyhammock.com/products/hh2o-automagic-water-collector-rainfly-tensioner-system

[Jerry Adams]

Caching water?

No, catching water : )

I try to avoid periods when it rains a lot.

A gallon is about 1/8 cubic feet.  4 x 4 feet for 0.1 inch of rain.  4 foot square of plastic doesn’t weigh much.

[David Thomas]

It doesn’t necessarily have to rain.  If you’ve got clear nights during which dew or frost form, you could run around swabbing off the tents and bushes of dew with a micro-fiber towel and wringing it out to recover the water.  Nothing I’d want to count on and it would take more surface than is often around, but something to keep in mind in a pinch.

I’d think the easiest way to rig something to capture rain water would be off an existing structure – an outhouse or trail register shelter retrofitted with gutters to a small downspout that kept a container full.  Gallon water jugs are cheap.  Gallon windshield washer fluid containers are sturdier (rinse thoroughly, duh).  Kitty litter containers are sturdy and larger – 2 to 5 gallons.

Various schemes are common on Hawaii, where some people live “off the grid” (which is a bit easier in that climate than my friends who live off-the-grid here in Alaska).  It rains most days so a water catchment system provides reliable washing and bathing water.

[Jerry Adams]

dig a hole, put water container in the hole, plastic over the hole, rock in the middle of plastic to weigh it down to make low point directly above the water container, water will condense on plastic and run down to container.

[Kevin Babione]

I had a tarp set up in a downpour once over the entrance to our tent (it was back before I saw the “light” and carried an extra 8×10 tarp to use to cover our kitchen).  Because it was set up in a hurry, water was pooling in one of the corners.  I thought it would be a great idea to simply pinch the edge of the tarp and let the “pure” water run into my open Nalgene.

The Nalgene filled up quickly and without a fuss (and I stayed dry).  The water inside the Nalgene, however, was NASTY!  It was filled with a bunch of pollen (it was spring) and who knows what else.  At least going to a stream you can dip below the surface and bypass most of the floaties.

If you’re looking at doing something like that I’ll strongly suggest that you have a way to filter it that you know will work before you go.

[Buck Nelson]

I did a 70 day trip in SE Alaska where I used almost exclusively water that I collected as it ran off a tarp. Of course, I had a backup plan if it didn’t rain, but the risk of that was pretty low in SE Alaska! That was not a backpacking trip, more of a series of camps, so in a good (bad?) day I could collect and store gallons of water. http://bucktrack.com/Alaska_Survival_Journal.html

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