Garfield Pond

[TJsName]

A rather famous refrain by many thru hikers after they are treated for giardia. The person I hiked with never treated water for 40 years of hunting and fishing, he got nailed from a spring in the 100 mile wilderness and ended up with an IV in his arm three days later and 30 pounds lighter. I know of some of the first people in the whites in the 1970s to get giardia in the Great Gulf when the local doctors didn't think it was in the area and was a Western US issue. One of them went through 6 months of various treatments by his employer (a hospital) before he demanded to be treated for giardia and was fine after that. I think it hard to get but play the lottery long enough and you will loose.

My understanding is that not all who have a Giardia infection will show symptoms (looking it up, it appears it's around a third who 'get sick'). This allows most people to spread the pathogen asymptotically. This is another reason it's very important to dispose of human waste properly.

As a child, I carried strep throat asymptotically. They only tested me because my brother kept getting sick. Ironically, I had an allergic reaction to the first two medications they tried giving me. The lesson - just because you're not feeling symptoms doesn't mean you can't impact others.

 

[peakbagger]

To get way off the Original Topic you are correct many folks carry giardia and are can give it to others but they can also have flare ups when sick. Berlin NH was an unfortunate guinea pig for giardia in the public water supply and the CDC researched the unusual fatality rates in the city during flu epidemics. This research and other surface water outbreaks ultimately contributed to the US Surface Water Treatment Rules https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/surface-water-treatment-rules Another outbreak of Cryptosporidum in Milwaukee Wisconsin caused further tightening of standards. These rules caused numerous private water supplies to close and many others to have to drill wells. This included the AMC that had to fly special portable well drilling rigs up to most of the huts to drill groundwater wells. Places like BSP just got rid of all public water supplies. There were pumps and spigots at major campgrounds and most of these systems still exist and are used by park staff but not for public use due to the requirements for public water supplies. There were numerous road side spring in the whites where the state ripped out the piping and closed the springs but some people still flock to the remaining ones, like the private spring on RT 2 in Jefferson near the Water Wheel restaurant.

The Berlin water supply was to the west of RT110 running up to the York Pond area. The watershed is very large with almost no development at the time. It was a surface water source with plenty of beaver dams and even then moose. During typical yearly flu epidemics the number of elderly folks dying from the seasonal flu was much higher than the general population and this was eventually traced to chromic contamination of the water supply with Giardia. I expect most residents had some resistance to it but when they got sick, the giardia would flare up and cause their symptoms to get far worse. Eventually long before the Surface Water Treatment rules, Berlin switched the water supply to the Androscoggin River upstream of any development in town including the mills. They used an aggressive chemical based treatment system and when I first moved to the area I learned to avoid the water as it definitely had a significant taste. Federal funds got freed up to install surface water filtration systems with passage of the act and Berlin installed a slow sand filter on their old water supply and abandoned the Androscoggin River source. The water in Berlin is quite good now and the local bottling companies selling bottled water slowly went out of business.

Talking to folks who frequent the third world, Flagyl http://www.medicinenet.com/metronidazole/article.htm or the equivalent is generally sold over the counter for treatment. My understanding is MATC and other organizations switched to composting privies as the old method of filling over the old privy and digging a new one left reservoirs of human waste that could take decades before the pathogens were gone. Apparently proper composting will kill the pathogens rapidly.

 

[hikerbrian]

Well that's very interesting. I've always wondered about the wells at (for example) Hancock campground and (IIRC) Osceola Vista. These are hand pumps with no signage regarding potability. I've used the one at Hancock as a source of drinking water for my kids and me for the past few years without any problems. Have we just gotten lucky? I'd think the FS would need to post them as non-potable water if they were in fact that. OTOH, I expect the water we've pumped out doesn't pass through any filtration or treatment of any kind. Hmmmm.

 

[peakbagger]

The Federal Government doesn't typically have to follow their own rules. These pumps may meet the definition of a ground water well from an underground source versus a surface source and therefore the surface water rules don't apply. It really doesn't take much filtration to take out giardia and crypto, normal soil will work although sometimes it takes a while to build up a fine filter layer. Many municipalities use slow sand filtration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_sand_filter bury a pipe in the ground with adequate filtration and it rarely has biological contamination unless a critter gets into it. It can on the other hand have more chemical impurities than surface water. AT BSP, I have seen several pipes heading up streambeds that just have a strainer on the end. The mystery iron pipe along part of Jefferson Notch road and Mt Clinton road that has been in an out of service over the years appears to be drawing directly from a brook and I expect its part of the Bretton Woods Water system (hopefully non potable).

As I mentioned previously, AMC does seem to add chemicals to their sources on occasion which leads me to believe that they are not true ground water wells and are at least partially fed by surface water so they add chemicals as a precaution

 

[TJsName]

My understanding is MATC and other organizations switched to composting privies as the old method of filling over the old privy and digging a new one left reservoirs of human waste that could take decades before the pathogens were gone. Apparently proper composting will kill the pathogens rapidly.

Yeah, looking at the EPA literature, Giardia cysts will die after temps in the 130s. Compost piles can easily exceed 150 degrees F (and can get much higher without proper aeration).

 

[egilbe]

I love those new composting Privies that the MATC is building. So much better than those smelly pit privies.