How to Use a Water Filter

"Hi. I'm Mike Meyers with Zion Wilderness Survival School for Expert Village. And, we're going to talk a little bit about a water filter. You may recall in one of the other episodes, we looked down a hill into some cottonwood trees and we said that's a sure sign of water. Well, here we are, and here's the water. However, I wouldn't drink this for anything unless it was filtered. You have no idea where this water is coming from. And, frankly, in the United States, I would go so far as to say that there is virtually no place that one should consider safe to drink water without filtering it other than maybe in your kitchen. There are two tubes associated here. This is the filter. Inside is a cartridge that contains the cleansing mechanism. This tube goes into the creek, goes into the water, has a little float. This tube which should never come in contact with that other tube fits over the top of the filter, the outlets of the filter, and goes into your drinking container or directly into your mouth if you want to just drink right out of the stream. But, we'll put it in here just to be more couth about it. I'm going to pick this us so that you can see the water flowing out of it. See the water flowing out? So, that's going through the filter. That water's drinkable. When I'm all done, I remove this tube. Blow all the excess water out of it. This I will put in this bag up here. It's dirty now, so I'm just going to toss it up here. Dirty because I let it touch the stream. This tube, I want to cleanse the filter of water. So, I will pump this. Now, I could also still have the other tube on there. I normally do. And, I drink all the water that's in the filter before I fold it up. Why not take advantage of that water and drink it? But, this time since I got the tube in the water, I'm not going to drink out of it. I'm going to take it home and clean it first, make sure there's no giardia or other contaminants on it."