BowCast Blog

Gear Review-MSR Dromedary Hydration System

Gear Review- MSR Hyperflow

One of the reason Bowcast was started was to give honest and comprehensive products reviews.  If you pickup any magazine or watch any tv show you will see so called reviews.  The only problem is that many of the people reviewing the products are sponsored by the company.  When I see this I always question the review. 

I have been down the sponsorship or pro-staff road a few times and luckily I have been able to to stay independent.  This affords me the freedom to call it like I see it.  I don't have to help sell a product.

As many of you know I have been reviewing a BLACKHAWK! Blacktimber pack for a few months.  My goal was to really give it a workout.  I didn't want to do one of those reviews that you see in the magazine that just list the specs.  I wanted to be able to say that I really tested a pack and want to feel comfortable with the review that the pack EARNED.

We survived another 102 miles on the PCT.  A couple of the highlights; we covered about 50 miles through the desert—the other 50 through the mountains and snuck through about 30 miles of trail that was closed due to a recent fire.  By the second day, Kyri had 6 blisters, 3 matching ones on each foot.  I started off loading weight out of her pack, then carried the whole thing on the 4th day.  The last day we started out at 8,800 feet with snow on the ground and temps in the low 40’s and descended to the desert floor north of Palm Springs, where we were greeted by 105 degree temps.  My water filter gave out on us the second day.  The filter needed to be replaced prior to the trip.  In my infinite optimism (stupidity), I figured we could squeak one more trip out of it.  That left me drinking out of the most suspect water source we encountered on the entire trip on the second day.  On day 3 we detoured by a restaurant where I borrowed a couple of ounces of bleach.  2 drops per liter of water and it will render even the nastiest water safe to drink after 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, I seemed to have contracted a case of giardia from that one untreated water source.  I spared my wife and let her have the balance of the filtered water we had when we came on the stagnant stream I got the water out of.  She cast me one of those sideways glances when I stated we were going to need to get water out of it—never mind the tad poles and slime.  When you are in the desert, there aren’t a whole lot of options for water, sometimes you have to take what you can get.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the new filter from MSR to test out before we left.  But it is good to know that giardia isn’t a totally disabling experience, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend you go out and contract it to see how your body responds to it. 

   Another thing I found interesting was how much our appetites decreased.  Last year we dumped about 8-10 lbs of food halfway through the trip when I realized we had brought way more than we were eating.  Remembering that from last year, we reduced the contents of our daily food bags, but still ended up with too much.  It seems the heat really reduced our interest in eating and hiking for a week hadn’t quite got our bodies to recognize the increased metabolism and thus need for more calories.  On the last day, we ran across another hiker that was lamenting a 3 day food shortage.  He was going to have to make a 9 mile round trip detour in town to be able to re-supply to make it to his next food shipment (he was a through hiker).   We dumped our large food cache off on him.  It was like seeing a kid on Christmas morning, especially when he discovered the elk jerky.  I was happy to be relieved of the weight and help out a fellow hiker.  Later that day we ran into a European kid that he had shared some of the jerky with and he was thanking us as if we had been handing out pockets full of gold.  Good stuff, that jerky is!

 Sorry for the delay in getting this post up.  It has been a little crazy around here.  As promised I'm going to tell you about the water filters I was at the Outdoor Retailers Show.  The first one is from MSR.  The filter is smaller and lighter than any others that I've tried and it blows the doors off of the competition in speed.  The Hyperflow Pump is what they are calling it and it weighs just 7.8 oz.  It is hard to expect great performance when you are getting such a compact, lightweight unit, but the manufacturer boasts 2.75 liters per minute!  That is almost 3 times the speed of most of the filters out there.  I tried it at the show and was surprised at how little effort it required to use.  Also, a great boon to it's design is that it is field serviceable; no disposable cartridge to plug halfway through your trip.  It takes a couple of minutes to disassemble the pump to backflush the system, but the inconvenience is well worth the benefit.  I've had my disposable filter pump leave me high and dry when filtering murky water. 

   Another new pump that I thought was worth adding to your equipment list is the Platypus Cleanstream.  It is a gravity filter with using the same filter technology as the MSR Hyperflow.  With this filter, simply fill the 4 liter bag, elevate it above the other and the inline filter does the work for you.  It is spec'd at 4 liters in under 2 1/2 minutes!  Cleaning the filter on this one is even easier, simply disconnect your "dirty" water bag and elevate the filtered bag.  The filter gets back flushed, dumping the sediment back onto the ground.  Unfortunately, I don't have a weight spec to provide you with, but their stuff is usually really light.  I'd expect no different from this one. I'll be field testing one or the other of these filters on the next leg of the Pacific Crest Trail my wife and I are hiking next month and I'll give you feedback if either is anything less than excellent.