Water is obviously an important consideration for any trip, especially if you’re going to be off the grid for stretches of time. Besides staying hydrated, we also need water for cooking, cleaning, and making coffee. Having access to water all the time is something we definitely took for granted before living in the Jeep. Here’s our strategy and the gear we use to make sure we always have enough drinking water on the road when we’re overlanding or on any roadtrip.

Sources

There are plenty of places to get water on the road, often for free. The trick is getting into the habit of filling up whenever you have a chance to, even when you’re not already out of water.

We generally bring our water bottles into any restaurant we go to, and most places are cool about filling them for us before we leave. Other places we frequently get free water bottle fills are park visitor centers, campsites (if there’s a potable water tap), and big-box stores like Walmart, Home Depot, etc.

I also carry a few options in the Jeep for filtering water in case we can’t get potable water.

Containers

My everyday water bottle is the 18 ounce Yeti Rambler. It’s relatively small, so it fits in the Jeep’s cupholders and my backpack’s water bottle pocket. It’s also one of the most durable things I own, and it keeps water hot or cold for an incredible amount of time.

I also always have the 1 liter Platypus DuoLock Bottle with me. It’s collapsible, so when it’s empty it takes up no space (I keep it in the laptop compartment of my backpack when I’m not using it), and it has a built-in carabiner to clip to my clothes, my gear, or the grate in the ceiling of the Jeep at night.

We keep a Nalgene Tritan Widemouth Bottle (the classic Nalgene) in the car, too. These are inexpensive and indestructible, and because they’re so ubiquitous, a lot of water filters are made to work with them, like my MSR filter, which screws directly to the top of it (see below).

My wife uses the 2 liter Platypus Hoser Hydration System in her backpack, which also works great as a hanging water bag at campsites. Like the other Platypus, it collapses totally flat when it’s empty.

Since those bottles only add up to about 4.5 liters, we also usually keep a 2.5 gallon water jug in the car (the disposable kind you get at a grocery store, though we keep and refill them). When we have one of those, we can go days at a time without having to refill.

Filtration

We don’t use filters all that often when overlanding, but I keep a few options in the car just in case, and they’ve come in handy a few times.

The first option is my Grayl Water Purifier Bottle, which is probably the easiest to use. You just fill up the outer bottle, then press the filter and inner bottle down like a french press, and it’s ready to go. It does take some force to push it down, but it’s still a quick and easy way to get a bottle of drinkable water. I also take this with me when I travel internationally, since it works for filtering viruses and bacteria from questionable tap water too.

When I want to filter larger volumes of water (e.g. for cooking or to fill up our large water jug), I use my MSR MiniWorks EX, which is a pump filter that attaches directly to a standard wide-mouth Nalgene bottle. It pumps at about a liter per minute, so I can fill up a 2.5 gallon jug in about 10 minutes.

As a backup, I also keep a LifeStraw in the Jeep. It’s not a convenient substitute for a water filter, since you can only filter as you drink, but it’s great as a tiny and inexpensive backup, just in case. I also never go backpacking without one of these.