Make: SmartWater | Model: sport cap 700mL | Year: 2018 | 32g | $1.49
When I first started hiking Nalgenes were all the rage – huge, heavy, and indestructible. In hindsight, none of those qualities are what I would consider selling points for a water bottle. They were also a pain to use, requiring you to stop and ask for assistance in removing one from your pack (and putting it back) whenever you wanted a drink, or taking your pack at least halfway off if you were hiking solo. When I finally upgraded to a hydration bladder (and with it the ability to easily sip water whenever I wanted) I wrote off water bottles for good.
Hydration bladders are not without their own shortcomings. In even a halfway full pack they can be a pain to get in and out of their sleeve, and it’s almost impossible to judge how much water you have left (and whether you should stop at this water source or keep moving on to the next one) without digging into your pack. To compensate I would often fill the bladder to its full three liter capacity, trading multiple pounds of unnecessary weight for the convenience of not having to fill up on day hikes.
When I became more serious about backpacking and lightening my pack I gave water bottles a second look. SmartWater bottles are popular because they’re light, durable, cheap, easy to replace (see: any gas station or convenience store), and – unlike other water bottles who share almost all of these traits – their threads are compatible with Sawyer water filters. I have yet to use them with a Sawyer Mini directly attached but I can attest to everything else.
I first tried the 1L versions with the screw-off caps. These suffer from two major drawbacks:
- The screw-off caps require you to use two hands and deal with a screwed-off cap, which is easy to misplace or drop (perhaps misplacing permanently)
- The 1L bottles are too long to easily fit into the bottle loops on the Osprey Exos backpack’s holster pockets. If you do so it requires two hands to get the loop back off of the bottle’s neck, meaning that you can no longer remove the bottle without also removing your pack
Both of these points were made very clear on a three night trip to the Enchantments. Ascending the rocky portions at the top of the trail from Snow Lakes to the core I had 1L bottles fall out of my pockets several times when I leaned over due to not being able to easily put them in the retainer loops. On the plus side the bottles only suffered some scuffs on the cap and were otherwise undamaged, which made me feel a lot better about their durability. I also dropped the caps a couple times but was fortunately able to retrieve them.
In constrast, the 700mL bottle has a flip-top sport cap which can be opened and closed with one hand. Combined with a holster-style side pocket this means drinking water is now a completely one-handed affair. Because the bottle is shorter it more closely matches the depth of the Exos’s side pockets, allowing you to put the bottle loop on and off the neck with a single hand.
The downside of the smaller size is the smaller carrying capacity. I carry two, one in each side pocket, giving me slightly less than one-and-a-half liters of water at any given time (and also some redundancy in case one fails). For trips where sources are few and far between I throw in a 2 liter Evernew soft bottle for additional storage. Because I can see how much water is left in each bottle as I’m drinking, making decisions on whether to stop and refill is a snap. Refilling is also much easier since accessing the bottles is trivial so I don’t mind that I have to filter more often. I almost always carry a gravity filter for backpacking so I just hold the bottle upright between my feet, insert the tube at the top, and wait a minute.
Finally, there’s the weight and cost. My previous hydration bladder system, the Platypus Big Zip LP 3L, weighs 170g and costs $36.95. Two 700mL SmartWater bottles cost $3 and weigh 64g. That’s a tenth of the cost and a third of the weight. After doing over a hundred miles of backpacking using these bottles I don’t think I’ll be switching to anything else anytime soon.
Measuring Cups
A 700mL bottle is almost exactly three cups of water (710mL). The line for the first cup sits between fats and carbs on the nutrition label and the two-cup line is near the top of the label (the picture at the top of this post shows a bottle filled with two cups of water). The final cup brings the water line to the base of the neck. This can come in handy for measuring out water for rehydrating meals. I’ve tried using various kinds of markers to add tick marks for cups, half cups, etc. but find that they rub off.
Backflushing Sawyer Filters
It turns out that the little outflow spout on the Sawyer Micro (and likely other Sawyer models) fits snugly inside the opening of the SmartWater sport cap. By inserting the spout into the opening of a mostly-full water bottle and squeezing it you can force water back through the filter. This is a better-than-nothing way to backflush the filter in the backcountry without having to lug around the 31g cleaning syringe that comes with the Sawyer.