Bear Bums – Bear Hunting

On our first Petersburg, Alaska bear hunting experience we lived with our water purifier. It was an essential part of life.

We have some experience on the water purifiers and came up with what we like and recommend. It’s possible to have each person take a little personal purifier but we did well having a camp, bigger volume, unit and used the filtered water for everything.

Fuel up there is just too valuable to be boiling water. Plus, if it’s raining all the time it makes fires a nightmare at base camp. This Katadyn Base Camp Water Filter

(large for a group) is great and kept us ahead on water.

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This is a simple water filter that can be used at base camp.

It’s a one-gallon rubberized container with a filter at the bottom. You fill it with stream water and the water slowly (over 15 minutes) filters through the filter, down a plastic tube and into a cooking pot or your canteen.

It is a cake walk to assemble except for one part. The filter fits so tight that it might take you a couple of minutes to fit it correctly. Not a big deal though.

It will surprise you how slowly it filters but once we got ahead on water we did great for the 5 of us. On the last bear hunt to Alaska we took two of these filters because we didn’t understand them well. In the fall of 2007 we took just one of these filters on a killer bull elk hunt and it did great! We’ll just take one this trip.

It was easy to have enough to cook and eat. We treated the island water as if it was contaminated and none of us got sick, and we just needed the one as I mentioned. Each morning we would fill our water bottles for the hunt and we did fine.

The water from all the streams off Kupreanof Island two years ago, on our spring bear hunt, was tan in color and the color did not filter out. The color did not seem to affect the taste. I’m interested to see if that’s true on this fall bear hunt on Prince of Wales Island.

As a little side note—one fine June afternoon several years ago I came down with the bad runs! After about one day of that I recalled I had just returned from Kodiak Island where I had been hunting Kodiak Brown bear. At that famous hunting camp we had been assured the water was great—famous last words. Giardia is very treatable but not fun.

Good luck, don’t risk drinking bad water…it’s not worth it!

I do trust this Katadyn filter for this and other gut bugs.