166 Video Views·Oct 16, 2022
In an extended primitive survival situation or wilderness living, one of the most reliable and efficient ways to procure safe water in large quantities is simply to dig a primitive well or coyote well. People have been using hand dug wells for thousands of years and, if done right, they're a fantastic source of pure, clean water. The earth itself acts as a primitive water filter. To dig a proper well is a lot of work. But, for a long term wilderness living where potable water isn’t readily available, it’s well worth it. Humans lived for a hundred thousand years without processing water. It’s only in the last few decades or so that we’ve come to believe that raw water is unsafe.
In the mountains I regularly drink straight from the steams and alpine lakes without filtering or boiling the water. I feel very safe doing that because human and livestock inputs to those water bodies are minimal. At lower elevations where cattle and people might impact the water, or aquatic and semi aquatic mammals like beaver, raccoon, muskrat, etc. exist, I ALWAYS filter or boil the water. If there’s any doubt, and you have the capabilities to process your water, do it. I’ve had giardia once and that was enough. How I contracted it is rather ironic. Let me explain…
It happened years ago while elk hunting in the mountains not far from my home in north Idaho. I’d run out of water but I did have one of the cheaper straw type emergency water filters. I happened to be walking a closed logging road bordered by a ditch of stagnant, algae filled water. Since I had the filter straw I leaned over and sucked up a few gulps. Three days later I was doubled over puking my guts out. I had a pounding headache, severe abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever, chills, body aches, and so on. That lasted almost 3 weeks and I lost nearly 10 lbs. In a survival situation it could have killed me. That was the first and last time I ever used a filter like that. I let the thing give me a false sense of confidence and I drank from a pool of water I never would have otherwise. Although I've drank unfiltered water from hundreds of mountain streams, lakes, and primitive wells, I've never been sick from any of them.
In a natural system, where man’s activities haven’t altered the environment, waterborne pathogens that can make us sick are rare. But today, those places are becoming difficult to find. We impact our environment in a number of ways that contribute to the presence of pathogens like giardia, cryptosporidium, and coliforms (bacteria). Fortunately most of these impacts are associated with human settlement and agriculture. Septic systems seep into nearby steams and livestock poop in or near the water, which not only adds fecal material directly to water, but also causes high nutrient loading. Another big contributor to excess nutrients in water is fertilizer runoff from lawns and agricultural fields. Nitrogen in particular can cause algal blooms and high concentrations of bacteria. Point is, stay away from areas where there may be inputs from human activities. And if you can't, always filter or boil your water.
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All right guys in this video we are going to be taking this muddy potentially disease ridden
water from this creek and with primitive methods only we're going to make it crystal clear tastes
great safe to drink with no boiling required let's take a look. All right so this looks like a
pretty good place so i've got a stream that's fairly muddy kind of silty so the banks on this
creek are fairly steep but i've got a place here where it's kind of sloped back a little bit so
i'm just going to come off of this i don't know foot and a half two feet or so and try to find
a place where there's not a lot of big roots coming off trees should be able to get away to
it with it right here that i'm probably going to run into some roots but we'll uh we'll give it a
try um but i'm just going to dig a hole straight down and let the earth filter that water. So i
know i'm going to get flack for this video because what i'm going to present here goes contrary to
what our modern society has conditioned us to believe and that's that every source of wild water
out there is a seething pool of cryptosporidium giardia bacteria and other nasties that can make
us sick but people have been drinking water straight from the creeks or from the ground for
tens of thousands of years it's only in the last couple decades or so that we've been taught that
any raw water that's not filtered or treated is unsafe to drink personally i think that's just
flat out ridiculous i spend a lot of time in the mountains at relatively high elevations
and very rarely do i carry water with me water's heavy and at those places in those high elevations
i can find crystal clear spring fed or glacial melt creeks and i feel very comfortable just
dipping right out of those creeks and drinking straight from the creek or sometimes we'll go
to high elevation alpine lakes and drinking from those lakes where the glacial melt is filtering
through the rocks into that lake those things are very very safe but in a situation like this
we've got a creek that's flowing through here it's flowing through the lowlands it's relatively muddy
it's definitely not something that i want to drink straight out of the creek and there's a couple of
things that you want to absolutely avoid one of them is anywhere that people are living along the
creek because oftentimes there can be seepage from septic systems that gets into the the water bodies
anywhere that there's livestock grazing so i know that there are cattle up there and anywhere that
there are aquatic or semi-aquatic mammals that living they're living in the water there's some
raccoon tracks right up here and those are one of the species that can harbor and spread things like
giardia and cryptosporidium so this in this type of situation i definitely want to either boil
or somehow filter or treat this water to make it safe to drink now one of the best ways that i know
to do that without boiling is to dig a coyote well all right so i'm down probably 16 inches or so
and i can see that there's water seeping into the bottom i'm well below the water table right here
so one last thing i'm going to do is just kind of i'm going to smooth out these sides
so that there's not so much loose pieces of mud and dirt get some of that sludge out of the bottom
pack down this stuff on the side so it's not falling in there all right so water is already
seeping into the hole it's already starting to fill up probably take i don't know maybe an hour
or two hours or so to fill up and then we're going to come back i'll dip some water out of here
pour it into a clear glass so that you can see the clarity of the water then we're going to bail
all the water out let it fill up again and then we're going to compare the clarity of the first
dip versus the second we'll do it again and then each time we bail this thing out let it fill up
again that water is just going to get more and more clear all right so while we're waiting on
this original well to fill up i want to talk a little bit about what i've got going on here
this is an experimental thing i've never tried this before but it's a lined well i had some
cedar bark lying around and so i went ahead and just dug my well as usual just like i did this
and then i took this hole and i lined it with cedar bark and then i took some saplings that i
that are growing nearby made rings out of them put those rings in there which then expanded
and are holding the cedar bark in place so i think that lining the well like this is just
going to help keep the water cleaner because the only place that the water is contacting any mud
is at the bottom and so i think that as we're dipping water out of this thing
any kind of agitation that we get in the water it's not going to stir up as much silt as it would
in an open hole like this but like i said this is experimental we're just gonna have to see how it
works all right so it's been about two hours or so since we dug this hole and the water level is
almost to the stream level over here it's probably maybe two inches or so below so what we're going
to do is bail all this water out and we're going to let this hole refill before we get our drinking
water out of there but before we do that i want to pull a little bit of water out of this hole
and pour it into this glass so that we can see how the clarity changes each time we bail this
water out and let it refill all right so we've got our first draw out of this well we've got a
little glass it's really not too bad it's definitely off cover colored there's there's
definitely some floaties in there but it's it's really not as bad as i thought it would be so
we're going to go ahead and bail this out and the next time that we draw water out of this well
it should be much clearer than what we've got right here just going to go ahead and bail this
bail all this out all right so we've got it all bailed out now we just wait a couple more hours
let it fill back up we'll come back we'll draw a little bit more water out of there and see how
it's changed all right so it's been another couple hours our well is full again and again we have
kind of a little bit of a a scum line on top so i'm just going to very gently
ease this can down in there and try to lift out some of that stuff and then we'll take a second
drawing off of this all right so i've got the majority of that stuff off that that was floating
off the top so i'm just going to ease this down in there start drawing off the top of this water
so this is the first one this is the second one i think i'd rather drink this one all right so
before going back out there and checking on our wells i wanted to show you a slightly more refined
version so i'm right here behind my house i wanted to just show you where we get all of our drinking
water and here you go it's basically a hole in the ground this is a surface well it was dug in the in
the 50s it's about 20 feet deep and this is it this is where we get all of our drinking water
there's no uh there's no filtration there's no um any kind of treatment at all it's just straight
water straight from the ground and so i could open this thing up if i needed to and dip you know
perfectly good drinkable water right out of the ground here now you can see that there's some
there's some actually some tree roots in here from these balsam poplar uh that kind of infiltrate
through the bricks and i'll come in here every now and then and just break those off so that they
don't get uh get too big and break the bricks apart but people have been using hand dug surface
wells like this for thousands of years and they work just as good today as they did way back then
let's go check on our wells back in the woods lock this thing up so a little cheering doesn't
fall in there all right it's like we've got plenty of water in these things it's got just
the slightest off color you can see the difference between this is the first draw before it uh when
it first filled up and this is after i think i i bailed it out uh three times and then let it set
overnight this is the fourth time it's filled up so just a very slight tinge but not not bad at all
tastes like creek water doesn't taste bad at all there's a there's a slight off flavor to it
but not bad at all uh nothing like it would be if you were to dip it straight out of that thing
which i would never do i'd never drink out of that that uh that creek right there
is this 100 safe no but neither is your tap water in fact roughly a million people a year
get sick from drinking just that all right let's uh let's take a look at at the well that we
did with the liner in it see if that if there's any difference there again i'm just gonna dip some
of the stuff off the top that looks like tap water right there man that's that's good looking water
so i don't i don't know if you can see the difference between so this is our open mud-sided
well and this is the lined well and there's a big difference between even these two but then
massive massive difference between the open well first draw and this so i mean holding this up
this water that came out of the lined well here i mean i i don't know that i could tell
any difference between this and tap water just because water is clear does not mean that it's
safe now personally i have zero reservations about drinking water filtered in this way
but of course if you want to be 100 risk-free boiling is always your safest bet so let's give
it a try very very clean flavor i can definitely taste the cedar bark but i don't taste any kind
of muddy creek flavor or anything like that i've just got kind of that that very mild cedar bark
taste but this thing actually worked really really well i'm happy that i tried it all right so let's
talk about how these two wells performed the one over here that's just simply a hole in the ground
worked pretty good it's uh i feel very confident that it's filtering out all the pathogens
but the water does still have kind of an off muddy flavor to it it's very easy to build it's
quick to build and it works fast now the one that i've got right here is basically the exact same
thing but instead of leaving the sides open i lined it with bark and the water that i'm getting
out of this is absolutely crystal clear i can't tell any difference between the water that i'm
getting here and the water that comes out of my tap at the house and so in a long-term wilderness
living or survival situation where you don't have access to those high elevation springs or
creeks or alpine lakes where you have to produce your own potable drinking water this right here
is going to be a great way to do that because you can do this pretty much anywhere even in areas
where you're working with sandy soils where oftentimes when you dig a hole the sides will
cave in but if you line that with something even if it's a simple basket with some grass on the
outside you're going to be able to keep that sand on the outside from falling in you're going to let
that water seep into your well it's probably going to be a good idea to bail it out a couple of times
get rid of any of that silt or anything that you've stirred up during the construction of the
well let it sit overnight come back the next day and you're going to be drawing perfectly good
safe great tasting crystal clear water so there's one last thing i want to mention about these wells
and that is it's very important to protect these things from surface contamination and so if you're
going to be relying on this for your water you're definitely going to want to cover it with something
tight enough so that things like mice can't get in there and poop in your water because
nobody likes to drink mouse poop very nice cheers
