Skip to Content
Back­country Water
The ultimate guide to drinking surface water—on the trail, in the woods and in the wild!

Privacy Policy

Hike Naked Day
Hiking naked is not a part of our privacy policy, but it is exhilarating! I gave it a try during my PCT thru-hike while heading over Kearsarge Pass to resupply. But I did cleverly cover my junk for photos because, you know, privacy is important!

In a nutshell, we treat your information like we would want our own information to be treated. We won’t sell your name or email address to spammers or advertisers. We’ll do our best to protect your private information (not that we collect much—it’s not needed for this website), but admittedly, hackers are a creative lot and we cannot make any guarantees against unauthorized access by such evil-doers.

Our web servers collect information about your computer configuration when you visit our site including (but not limited to) browser type, operating system, the website that referred you and your IP address. We might use a feature called “cookies” to track your movement throughout our website, but all this is standard stuff that applies to pretty much every website on the face on the planet.

If you use that Contact Us button at the bottom of every page, we’ll ask for your email address so we can reply to your message (if needed). While most of the time it will be a private conversation, if there’s important information that others might be interested in, we may share it publicly. You’ll keep any and all copyrights to material you submit, and if you ask us to remove any of your copyrighted material, we’ll be happy to respect that request. (Keep in mind, however, that the webmaster here is a serial long-distance hiker and is often out of town for weeks or months at a time—and checking this email account is not a high priority. Responses can be slow!)

Advertisers: We currently use Google AdSense to provide advertisements on our website. While we do not provide Google with any information about you, they will collect information about webpages and websites that you visit in order to serve ads that better target you. Check their privacy policy to see what sort of information they collect and how they might use it. At the time of this writing, the Google AdSense program has this requirement: AdSense publishers must have and abide by a privacy policy that discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browsers, or using web beacons to collect information as a result of ad serving on your website. Consider this your disclosure!

We’ll also display links to Amazon.com—typically for products we love and recommend—but we do receive a commission for any sales made. Like Google, we do not provide Amazon.com with any of your personal information but they’ll undoubtedly collect information about the webpages and websites that you visit and you should check their privacy policy to see how it might be used.

Sites to Which We Link: Our site includes links to other websites, and we usually have no control over the privacy policies of these websites. When you access another site to purchase products or services or conduct other transactions, use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you’re visiting.