How much water to carry in a hike?

Hiking in the Smokies - Photo: Still Gravity.
 Our bike bottles work fine for short hikes - License our images here.

No simple answer because there are many factors: terrain, climate, availability of water, time of the day, intensity of the effort, hiker age, and sweating rate. 

The consensus on good hydration goes for drinking ~2 cups of water per hour. Using this number, we need half liter per hour for moderate hikes and up to one for the strenuous ones. 

The recommendation for desert hikes is to carry one gallon per person per day. We also add a water filter in the pack in case need a refill from natural sources.  

Also helps to add some additive to the water. We use Gatorade Thirst Quencher Powder - the link is affiliate to Amazon. This product contains salt, sodium, and calcium, among other ingredients. If we don't have it, we mix some liquid Gatorade. 

Useful conversions:

1 liter = ~4.2 cups or ~33 ounces. 

1 gallon = ~3.78 liters or ~128 ounces.

Remember that:

Water is the driving force in nature.

          Leonardo da Vinci

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chekika: Forgotten spot of Everglades National Park

Image
During our last visit to Chekika ( map ), we found closed roads and dilapidated buildings. This was our fourth time here. Little by little, nature is coming back. Wilderness taking over what was always its property.           The closed entrance to the Grossman Hammock -  License our images here .  Everglades National Park closed indefinitely the Chekika Day Use Area in 2013. They claimed budget constraints. One year later, Chekika was on the news when a juvenile Nile crocodile was removed from the area - the animal was captured in a canal north from the Grossman Hammock. Two others were caught in 2009 and 2012 further to the east. You know the script with invasive species: they escaped or someone released them.  The Everglades already have the mighty Pythons running wild. I don’t want to imagine the River of Grass ruled by “man-eaters” crocodiles that can reach up to 17 feet. That would be madness. 
»

Google search and the little blog

Image
Many small websites are going dark like the sands of the desert at nightfall -  License our images here .   Little blogs are dying. They are jailed in a dark and remote dungeon of Google organic search, the non-index dungeon. The mighty gatekeeper, like Saturn , is devouring its children. Betrayed for money, the good old-fashioned blogs are the collateral damage of their "helpful" content update. Long gone is that 2004 when Loren Baker wrote: Google likes Blogs. Blogs do well in Search Results Listings on Google. This is because Blogs contain fresh content and are richly interlinked, despite their relatively small audiences. Some would go so far as to say that Google over-represents Blogs. (Source:  What if Google didn't like blogs? ") That's ancient history. A jump to 2022 shows a different picture. According to Sandy Maguire: The Internet is dominated by a few big websites. Out of social, the amateur opinion is vanished. (Source: " Why Is the Web So Monoto
»

The last hike before the accident

Image
Cheaha Falls: A tiny waterfall in the mountains of Alabama -  License our images here .    After an easy mile of hiking through the Chinnabee trail, we reached the little waterfall.  The water was pretty low for a summer. We expected something bigger. A real waterfall, not a shower. But anyway, it's a cute waterfall with a tranquil pool at its base. We didn't swim, but it's said that many locals do.  Last picture of C before the accident.  The best part was that we were the only ones there. C seated on a big flat rock and grabbed a snack from her blue backpack.  She loves these quiet places. Immediately, she got lost into herself surrounded by the sounds of nature and the smooth hammering of falling water over ancient rocks. Who knows what she was thinking. I didn't.   We left for another day the hike down to Devil's Den Falls and Lake Chinnabee. There was time for them. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. We had some days to spend camping in this forest .  How coul
»