Drinking Water

Have you already hiked the PCT or the AT? Then you'll need to change your expectations about drinking water sources on the Florida Trail. On the PCT, we have seen hikers grimace at the water pooling in troughs from piped springs — filled as they were with wriggling mosquito larva, algae, dead leaves, et cetera. Rather than scoop and filter this water, they filled bottles directly from the trickling pipe embedded in the rock. On the AT we have seen a lot of hikers drink directly from springs without filtering or treating the water first, convinced it was safe because it flowed directly from the living rock.

No water source on the Florida Trail will resemble the clear mountain springs and springs found along the PCT and AT. The "dirty" water that disgusts some hikers on the PCT is the norm on the FT. Acceptance of this fact will be important to enjoying your thru-hike.

So here's the bad news:  Since there are no mountains, the Florida Trail cannot isolate hikers from pollutants that accumulate in valleys by keeping them high along ridgelines and so forth, and due to Florida's flat topography, few bodies of water are safe from exposure to agricultural and other runoff. The Florida Trail passes many bodies of water that are polluted, and hikers need to be able to assess whether a water source is safe or not. Our guidelines to help you do that are below.

The general rule of thumb:

• good — swamps, marshes, cypress domes, springs, sinkholes, small ponds, small streams and creeks, man-made wells
  
• bad — lakes, rivers, canals, ditches, retention ponds, anything near a road, creeks influenced by tides
  

Citrus groves and cattle pastures dump pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers into creeks and rivers. Rain washes oil and other petrochemicals from highways into watersheds. Over-fertilized suburban lawns pour tons of fertilizers into waterways, causing persistently high levels of algae, which smothers aquatic plants and causes water to have a milky-green color.

Water filtration systems for backpackers cannot remove these chemicals. Assume that all lakes, large ponds, rivers, and canals are heavily polluted and thus off limits as drinking water sources. In our opinion, the most polluted waters on-trail are:

• canals within the Everglades Agricultural Area (lands between the Seminole reservation and Clewiston)
• Lake Okeechobee
• the Kissimmee River

All that aside, let's keep it 100. Will drinking water contaminated with fertilizers, pesticides, and more kill you? Not instantly, of course. Because we were in a pinch, we have drank from ditches and agricultural canals in the past. We're still alive. But nitrates from nitrogen fertilizers may cause cancer. The long term effects of drinking this kind of contaminated water are not known, since so few people drink such bad water. The NIH article cited above discusses ground  water contamination, which is much less concentrated than surface water. Don't risk it.

An interesting article from Slate in 2005 asked whether people in post-Katrina New Orleans should drink the brackish floodwater to prevent death from dehydration. It claims salt at concentrations of around 5000mg/L (5 parts per thousand) or less are safe to drink and even help the body retain water and prevent dehydration, while salt concentrations of 8000mg/L cause dehydration.

If true, that's interesting. But the window of safety there is pretty small, and we doubt anyone could taste the difference between 5000mg/L and 8000mg/L.

The trouble with drinking saltwater was stated most succinctly by NOAA: "Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier."

The bottom line is, you have to carry in all your fresh water for the stretch through St. Marks, beginning at mile JR's Aucilla River Store and ending at the town of St. Marks.

Swamp Water — You'll Like the Taste

There are two kinds of swamps: clear and black. To the surprise of many, the water in Big Cypress Swamp is crystal clear. It defies every expectation of what a swamp should be — dark, mysterious, foreboding. The other great swamp tromp of the FT, Bradwell Bay Wilderness, conforms to our imagination with its dense walls of titi bush and black water.

Swamps are great natural filters and purifiers of water contaminated with artificial chemicals and other pollutants. Whether in Big Cypress, the Green Swamp (on the western spur), the Bradwell Bay, or the prairies of Ocala NF, swamp water is safe to drink once it has been filtered. 

The dark water of Bradwell Bay, as well as most Florida rivers and lakes, is caused by tannins from tree leaves, the same tanic acids that give coffee and tea their brown color. Even after filtering, these tannins remain dissolved in the water, tinting it a range of colors from golden to dark brown. This tannin-tinted water is safe to drink. Sometimes it even tastes like tea and has a slight sweetness.

There are lots of places people might call "swampy" that aren't real swamps, however. Mucky pools, drainage ditches, retention ponds collecting stormwater runoff, et cetera. Never drink water from these places.

Always Filter! After seeing thick clouds of algae, leaf litter, and dirt floating in your water, we doubt you will want to drink it without filtering first. However, weight savings tempts people to do foolish things — like all the hikers on the AT and PCT not treating their water at all, despite the risk of giardia.

Water on the Florida Trail must  be filtered. We strongly discourage you from relying upon chemicals like iodine or Aqua Mira to treat drinking water, as well as the ultra-violet light of a SteriPEN. We are not confident that these treatments effectively kill all the parasites, amoebas, protozoa, bacteria, et cetera in Florida's water. Why? Because with very, very few exceptions, all water sources on the FT are heavily filled with particulates like algae, clay, dirt, and plant matter that can shield bugs. It is easy to imagine a parasite safely encased within a clump of clay invisible to the naked eye. "Pre-filtering" by pouring dirty water through a handkerchief (etc) is not sufficient because the gaps between fibers are enormous relative to microbial life. Water filtered through a handkerchief doesn't even appear clean to the naked eye (we've tried).

The bottom line is, weight is no longer an excuse not to filter. The Aqua Mira set weighs 3 ounces. The Sawyer mini weighs half that at just 1.4 ounces, and it's only $25! There is just no excuse.

Filter Options

In our gear section we go into detail about the different filters out there, and give our recommendations for which ones best solve the problems of the Florida Trail.

Water surrounds Florida on three sides, and yet the state faces a politically intractable water crisis. In one sense, this is a new phenomenon caused by a massive population explosion, but in another sense it is a problem as old as Florida itself. At Florida's heart lies a paradox: there is both too much water, and not enough.

In the eyes of European settlers swamps, marshes, and even the Everglades were seen as "worthless" lands that needed to be "reclaimed" for productive use. Draining and destruction of Florida swamps and marshes continues today under the failed policy of "no net loss", even as the state faces a drinking water shortage. And when the first Europeans attempted to farm the lands that weren't swampy, they discovered that despite regular heavy rains, the sandy soil did not retain much water and wasn't much good for crops.

Florida Trail thru-hikers experience this paradox first hand. They hike through huge swamps, cross numerous streams, and skirt the edges of wetlands, and yet at the same time finding a good source of drinking water can be tough. The trail has both too much and too little water.