The Bad Water

NOTE: this story contains the word "vomit", excessively so perhaps. So if the word bothers you don't eat while reading this story.

It was a warm, perfect Ouray* day in August (2007). Clint and I were doing an overnight hiking trip. The plan was to hike the Bear Creek trail, link to the Horsethief trail, link to the Bridge of Heaven, and come down the Old Horsethief Trail, a round trip of about 27 miles (http://www.trails.com/tcatalog_trail.asp?trailid=HGR271-002).

The Old Horsethief Trail would drop us on the outskirts of Ouray, where we would walk 1 mile back to Clint’s apartment. Getting our usual alpine start around noon, we got a little lost and missed our trail turn off, and ended up coming up a gully to American Flats. Sunset was earlier than we had expected on that side of the ridge. The wind was blowing cold, and there was already a light snow coating the plain, which is at about 11,800 feet.

In the distance we could see little white tents of the sheep herders. They looked like little tissues dropped in the grass. The area where we were hiking is used by ranchers to graze their sheep. We found a boggy, somewhat flat field to set up the tent, and we went to a nearby stream to filter water for dinner. By this time it was rapidly getting dark. We noticed a few sheep droppings and sheep prints around the creek but thought nothing of it.

I am normally insistent that the water be chemically treated, but the San Juans are, comparatively, rarely traveled and filtering is normally all that is needed for most of the mountain streams. In fact, the morning we left for the hike, Clint insisted that I unpack the small, 1 ounce bottle of chemicals for purifying water that I had put in my backpack.

After getting our camp site set up Clint made a quick dinner dinner of broccoli, rice, and mashed potatoes. I decided to re-hydrate myself by drinking half a bottle of red wine, where as Clint stuck with the more traditional approach of water. After dinner Clint buried our food and stove under a pile of rocks in a boulder field about 200 yards away from the tent in an attempt to keep the marmots out of our food. I was organizing our tent and didn’t pay much attention to where he put the stuff sack with our stove and food. We then settled in to the tent around 830, with the idea of getting up around midnight to see the Hale Bopp meteor shower, which was almost over. I had spent numerous nights during August driving to various locations around Denver at 2 am to see the shower with no success. The meteor shower was coming to an end and this was my last chance to see it.

I had brought along the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which turned out to be a pretty bad choice for reading at 12,500 feet. I started dozing off, with the occasional suggestion from Clint that I drink some water waking me. I had decided to not drink much water that night because it was about 20 degrees F, and I had just come from 100 degree F temperatures in Denver. The thought of going out in the cold every few hours to pee was less than appealing.

Around midnight I was trying to rouse myself and get some clothes on to see the meteor shower. Clint suddenly sat up and lunged for the front of the tent. Not sure what was going on I watched as he fumbled the zipper, stuck his head out the tent door, and then started making a noise that sounded as if he was being strangled.

Still half asleep and wondering if he was playing some kind of joke on me, I sat up too. The smell of broccoli and cheese vomit wafted into the tent.

That’s interesting, I thought to myself, pulling my clothes on at a more hurried pace while trying to remember if the side of the tent Clint was puking on was the same side where I had put my backpack. He struggled out of his sleeping bag and ran a short distance from the tent as I pulled my shoes on. I found my head lamp and crawled outside, avoiding the big vomit pile just outside the tent entryway.

It appeared his body was doing a full exorcism of everything he had eaten in his past three lives. He squatted in the dark at the edge of the field seemingly attempting to shit and vomit himself to death. I started trying to piece together what was wrong with him. The situation appeared to be an allergic reaction, at least from my personal experience. But everything we had for dinner was a staple in his diet. I wondered if he was having a combination high altitude/too much wine vomit attack. I knew it couldn’t be food poisoning because that meant I would have been sick as well.

Then it suddenly hit me. The water.

When Clint finally came back to the tent he insisted on drinking more water to re-hydrate, even though I tried to convince him otherwise. I pointed out to him that the water was the only thing he ingested that I had not. All the water I had been drinking during the day and that evening I had packed in with me. The stream water that we used to make dinner had been boiled. There was no other factor that could have been making him so ill.

After another attack of vomiting, he finally agreed with me.

I headed over to the boulder field to locate the stove to boil some water so that Clint could re-hydrate without getting sicker. I also had snuck a Coke into the food stuff sack when Clint wasn’t looking, and I figured he could drink that as well. I stumbled around the boulder field with my headlamp trying to locate the tragically colored black stuff sack that had the stove and Coke in it (the stuff sack was about the size of a loaf of bread). It took about twenty minutes to locate. I also remembered, as I was walking back to the tent, that we had taken an almost empty gas canister with us because we didn’t think we would need much fuel. I hoped there was enough gas left to boil at least a few ounces of water.

Back at the tent Clint’s vomit and shit fest seemed to be waning. He got the stove fired up (for some reason he doesn’t trust me to light the stove, although I have patiently explained to him many times that all my stove calamities have been with the big appliances) and we boiled the contents of his Nalgene bottle, about 64 ounces of water. He mixed 6 ounces of water in with some Emergen-C and drank that. Then he drank about half the can of Coke. This seemed to re-ignite the evil water spirit. More vomiting and shitting ensued.

We still had a 12 mile hike out the next day, with about 4,000 feet of upward climbing between the down climbs as we crossed the various ridges. It was not going to be an easy hike out. Also, I was unfamiliar with the area we were hiking in, and there weren’t many good landscape features to pick out the trail based on the topographical map we had. Parts of the trail were still covered with a thin layer of snow making it even harder to figure out where to go.

I started thinking about what I was going to do if Clint wasn’t able to hike the next day. There was no simple way back to civilization from where we were. I stared pensively up at the sky, just to have something to look at besides Clint crouched over in a pool of headlamp light, rocking forward into the grass as he spewed Coke and Emergen-C. At that moment I saw five meteors shooting across the sky.

“Look! The meteor shower!” I yelled to Clint. He responded by puking.

Around 330 am we crawled back into the tent and Clint managed to fall into a light sleep. His breath still smelled like broccoli and rice, mixed with bile and probably pieces of stomach lining. I regretted agreeing to let him use my sleeping bag for the trip.

I finally fell into a light sleep myself, waking up at first light. I thought about our predicament. At least 12 miles away from help. Only 32 ounces of water to get us through those 12 miles. Two severely dehydrated hikers. Me, the healthy one, lacking knowledge of where the trail went. A temperature variance that would have us hiking the first 6 miles in temperatures cold enough to preserve snow, and the last 6 miles in summer time temps, causing further dehydration.

Well, the situation can’t possibly get any worse, I thought to myself. And then I looked out the tent flap. It had started to snow.

Clint woke up around 830 and I started packing up the camp while he drank more water. The morning was solemn and a herd of thick grey clouds seemed to be wandering our way. We got on the trail and started our hike out. At that point I had not had anything to drink since around 8 the previous evening, when I had the wine. But given Clint’s situation I couldn’t really complain about myself. I decided to let him drink all the water, partially because he was so sick, and partially because the Nalgene bottle he was drinking out of smelled like puke.

We walked along in the snow, and then the rain. We constantly had to take off or put on clothes to adjust to the weather. Clint’s feet were dragging in the dirt, and he had to stop every 15 or 20 minutes because his body kept trying to disgorge any remaining fluid. He would take a sip of water and throw it up 5 minutes later. His listlessness was starting to scare me. We didn’t talk because he said even the effort of listening to me say anything made him want to puke. Hmmm….

We finally found what we thought was the old Horsethief trail and started down it. It was a relief to be across the ridges and headed downward. We did stop for a few minutes at the Bridge of Heaven, but I was so worried about Clint that I barely remember it.

As we got further down the trail we realized we had gone the wrong way. We were much further from the outskirts of town that we expected. We ended up taking a different trail back towards the town since neither of us really felt like hiking 3 miles along the highway into Ouray. The trail was steep and little used, and dangerously unstable due to the rain that was falling intermittently. I worried that one of us would slip and fall because the narrow trail kept crumbling under the weight of our steps.

We finally arrived back at Clint’s apartment around 330 PM. I had not had anything to drink for the whole hike so I guzzled water. I then headed off to the pharmacy to some stomach medication for Clint. While he slept I did research and determined that we had gotten leptospiriosis, a small bacteria caused by sheep urine and feces in stream water. It turns out lepto is a rare bacteria and one of the few that can’t be filtered. It must be treated either by boiling or adding chemicals to the water. It normally takes 2 days to manifest itself, but for some reason it hit Clint right away, possibly due to altitude, or the amount of water he drank, or his level of dehydration.

That night we were sitting on the sofa watching a movie. I was smugly congratulating myself for not getting sick, as I am usually the one puking. I assumed the reason was because the only water I had consumed had been boiled. But then Clint pointed out to me that the hot cocoa I had at dinner was only heated and not boiled. But he couldn’t remember if the water came from the packed in bottles or the stream.

The next day I became extremely ill. It was even worse than the time I almost died from appendicitis. I was up all night repeating Clint’s performance. It was a day before I could hold down fluids, and another two days before I could eat. We had to take two different courses of antibiotics to get rid of the bacteria and both of us still have relapses, although that is supposed to stop after 6 months or so.

So, next backpacking trip, I’m in charge of the water…

*Ouray, Co, located outside of Telluride