The Sawyer mini is one of the smallest on the market which translates into light weight. Although I think the lightest option would be to treat your water with chemical tablets which we did see along the trail.
The Sawyer mini simply attached to the top of a standard water bottle, Once you filled the water battle you simply squeezed the water into another empty water battle to get a filtered water product. I say a water bottle to attache the filter to but you could use the collapsable bag that was supplied with it. To be honest this was not very good and we simply left this behind as it didn't function very well. The water bottles worked much better. It did take a small bit of time to filter water for us, there was three of us together on the trail and basically just used one filter. The product also came with a straw and a hand pump that was to be used for the filter back flush process. The straw could be used for double duty, with the pump to back flush and with the filter to get a drink. We had no issues with this along the way but did see some folks that had theirs broken, I suspect due to dropping it. overall the product worked well and I will continue to use it.
Its funny what you learn along the trail. The first main one with regard to the water was to hydrate while at a water source, I know this sounds simple but when we first started hiking this wasn't a thought. We would fill up our bottles and hike for an hour then stop for a drink. We would consume much of our water at this point and need to get more, we were always looking for the next water source. It became laughable when we said Why Didn't We Drink at the Stream. LOL. After that we fully hydrated at water sources while filling our water bottles. The next Lesson that we learned and this was from another Hiker was to leave the Sawyer Water filter on the water bottle, I had always taken it off and placed in the backpack. This caused two issues, One I had to look for the filter every time and Two Which bottle was the unfiltered water. By leaving the Filter on the bottle both issues were resolved.
The Blackstone Traverler
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