[pct-l] Water Quality in the Sierra - LA Times article

[Slyatpct at aol.com (Slyatpct@aol.com)]

In a message dated 7/26/2005 3:38:57 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
mazdagal@hotmail.com writes:

> There's an article in today's Los Angeles Times about water quality in the 
> Sierra.  I can't paste the link here for some reason, but the article can be 
> 
> found at www.latimes.com, in the Outdoors section.
> 

Good article, here's the gist...

Going below the surface

It's been a rule in the backcountry for decades: Unfiltered water is unsafe. 
Now, research of remote Sierra sites shifts the blame for illnesses.

By Linda Marsa 

Bob DERLET drinks his water straight ? without fancy filters or chemical 
treatments. He leans face down into Delaney Creek, which flows directly down into 
Tuolumne Meadows from the Sierra Crest, taking healthy gulps from the rushing 
stream, and then fills his water bottle. It's nearly noon on an early summer 
day, and temperatures are hovering in the mid-80s. 

<snip>
    
But are the dangers of Giardia lamblia, E. coli, Cryptosporidium and other 
bugs that wreak intestinal havoc grossly exaggerated?

Derlet thinks so, and his research reveals that the water is much cleaner 
than most people believe. His findings thrust him into the middle of a 
long-simmering controversy that's blatantly at odds with what many state biologists 
preach and what wilderness classes teach: Purify water before drinking. But is 
that really necessary? Do those high-priced pumps, chemical disinfectants and 
elaborate filtration gadgets truly merit a place in the backpack?

"It's a huge debate," says Ryan Jordan, a biofilm engineer at Montana State 
University in Bozeman who has studied pollution in wilderness areas.

The available scientific evidence, which is admittedly limited because of the 
scarcity of funding for testing wilderness water quality, confirms Derlet's 
findings. The threat is comparable to the chances of beachgoers being attacked 
by a shark, according to University of Cincinnati researchers who studied the 
danger giardia poses to backpackers, namely "an extraordinarily rare event to 
which the public and the press have seemingly devoted inappropriate 
attention."