The National Outdoor Leadership School's Wilderness Guide by Mark Harvey

Author:Mark Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

DEHYDRATION

In the course of a hard day hiking in the sun, I sometimes feel myself getting grouchy and the smallest things—missing a trail junction or tripping over a tree root—irritate me. If my campmates are lucky, I recognize one of the symptoms of dehydration and stop and drink some water. Acutely dehydrated, I can find reason to grumble about nearly anything under the sun.

Perhaps the second most used dictum of NOLS instructors—after “Use your judgment”—is “Drink some water.” I have seen fellow instructors recommend a chug from the water bottle for ailments ranging from fatigue to headaches. It’s good advice. The water in our bodies carries nutrients, oxygen, enzymes, and hormones, controls body temperature, flushes out toxins, and eliminates waste products. Unless you are in the desert, where water is scarce, staying well hydrated is one of the easiest, cheapest, and most effective things you can do to keep a high level of energy, travel efficiently, and stay healthy.

We constantly lose water from sweating, urinating, breathing, and defecating (human feces are roughly 70 percent water). When we’re working hard and sweating heavily we can lose up to a liter of water per hour. At high altitudes where the air is dry, you can dehydrate yourself merely by breathing at rest. If you have ever dried your clothes on a clothesline in the Rocky Mountains, you can imagine that a climate that dries a towel in about twenty minutes can suck you dry pretty fast too.

Under “normal” conditions our bodies’ thirst mechanisms—a dry mouth, the hypothalamus, and hormones in the kidneys—stimulate us to drink enough water to stay properly hydrated. But if we are working very hard and sweating profusely, if we are in a very hot or dry climate, or if we have an aggravating condition such as diarrhea, or nausea that causes vomiting, we have to drink water deliberately and regularly regardless of how thirsty we feel.

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