# Deso - Green R & water



## kanoer2 (Mar 5, 2011)

A question regarding how folks deal with water on the Deso-Green.


Got off the river Jun 14th, first time, had a great trip!, but wondering how others dealt with drinking water when the river has such a high sediment load.


We had a home-made duel filter system, 1st filter was a 10 x 2.5 inch commercial wound yarn type filter, 2nd was a carbon filter. All raw water was pre-treated with alum to settle out the sediment over night, decanted and then pumped through the filter system. The grit was so fine that the 1st filter didn't do much even though the alum seemed to a great job, which resulted in the carbon filter constantly clogging.


Thoughts?? Or next time just carry enough?


Thanks
C


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## Riverwild (Jun 19, 2015)

I"ve always just carried it all and bring a filter as a backup, but you could really only rely on Rock Creek for clear water.


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## unlucky (Sep 2, 2012)

*Deso water*

We always bring our own drinking water. If you needed water on the trip you could boil or filter rock creek, range creek or chandler (on reservation side though). early in the year some of the other canyons have clear flowing water.



We also use the wound filament filters you described for clear dishwater. a 10 micron followed by a 1 micron. There was so much silt we had trouble with the filters plugging up and the 2nd not getting all of the silt (still looked cloudy) and eventually gave up. Normally the set up works great on deso and the san juan, but I would not use it for drinking water.


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## Jfizzle1 (Oct 9, 2015)

Has anyone ever used the Katahdyn expedition filter? Think it is made for this right?


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## Osprey (May 26, 2006)

Need to know what micron rating your filters were to really know what the issue was with clogging. If your first filter is too large and then the second too small you'll get that. . 

Deso though, we just get water from Rock Creek and then I'll treat it with aquamira and not even bother to filter.


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## 2tomcat2 (May 27, 2012)

My experience with Katahdyn and other filters is if you have sediment, the filter will eventually clog. Steri Pens used to require filtered (for sediment) water for the system to work correctly. Have used settling/decanting, alum, bandana, gravity fed line both on the river and backpacking. We carry enough water, use boiled cooler water for dishes, and have clean drinking water from melted ice jugs as the trip progresses.


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## MontanaLaz (Feb 15, 2018)

We do 10 gallons per boat, plus juice jugs (ice at the start, water at the end), boiled river water for dishes, and have a Katadyn base camp filter for extras. This year, Rock Creek was running so high it wasn't clear enough to bother with filtering but Range Creek looked good. We haven't had to use our filter in the last three seasons on any trip.


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## kanoer2 (Mar 5, 2011)

On Idaho Salmon River trips, we use a "20 yr old" gravity filter with ceramic insert from Cascade Outfitters which always worked great except for one trip a side creek blew out dumping loads of sediment. The filter would do about 3 gal., before having to be scrubbed. So that was the reason for building the 2 filter system for the Deso trip.


Me thinks the Katadyn expedtion filter would not deal with the silt either. Well, as long as we have raft support, carrying lots of water will work for future trips. 



We felt the side creeks were as "silty" as the Green, nothing was running clear.


Oh yes, the red canoe only swam once on day 2, not sure which rapid, but got caught in a reversal . .


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## SherpaDave (Dec 28, 2017)

I just carry water for trips up to a week, including Deso this year. 

Although Deso has had really high water this year, I don’t typically like to filter through mining areas like eastern Utah.


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