Water is an incredibly important part of long distance backpacking to make sure you stay hydrated and healthy. Unfortunately, water is heavy so minimizing the amount you carry is always helpful as long as you can access enough of it along the trail. To figure out how much to carry you need know; how much you drink, how easy it is for you to filter water, and how frequent water sources are.
How much water do you drink in a day of backpacking? Roslyn and I have figured out that we use 5 to 6 litres of water each per day if its about 20C out and we are doing moderate hiking. 6 litres of water weighs just over 13 lbs, which us about half of the 'safe' weight maximum of 30 lbs we try to stay at. If we are doing strenuous hiking or the temperature is higher we pretty quickly hit 9 to 10 litres of water each. 10 litres of water comes in at 22 lbs, which is just a back breaking amount to add on top of everything else if you are trying to cover 20 km.
I also want to point out that a large portion of the water is used in the morning when we wake up, and at night for supper and before bed. We use about 2 litres of water at camp per day, so on a moderate hiking day only 3 litres is used on trail.
Now that we know how much we need in a moderate day (5 litres), how easy is it for us to get that water filtered? Roslyn and I use the Sawyer Mini, which is a very simple and quick filtering system. We can filter about 3 litres of water in 10 to 15 minutes if we get to a water source. Other systems like gravity feed systems or tablets required more time or at least more care to make sure you don't run out of water before having more ready to go.
With our setup, we can filter quickly and easily so down time is not a large issue. If you are using a water purification method that takes longer though you might want to consider timing water filtration with larger breaks (lunch or another 30+ minutes break) in order to minimize unnecessary downtime. Unfortunately, filtering less often means carrying more between filtering periods.
The last piece of information you need to figure out is how frequent water sources are on the trail. Whatever source of navigation you are using should have water sources on it, and you can then figure out what the distances between all of them are. Roslyn and I try to make sure we have enough water to travel between 2 to 4 water sources with out refilling and then aim to refill at source number 2 or 3 depending on how they are looking and how much we are drinking. This means that we are likely to get to a source before running out even if our first planned stop is dry.
Now to bring it all together with an example. For a moderate day of hiking we each need 5 litres of water to cover about 20 km, 3 litres while hiking and 2 litres at camp. With these numbers we are drinking about 0.15 litres per km. If the water sources are spaced every 3 to 4 km then we can easily carry 2 litres of water each to get about 10 to 13 km with out needing to refill and have plenty of opportunities to do so before running out.
If its a hot day on strenuous terrain and we need 10 litres of water (2 litres at camp and 8 litre while hiking), for a 20 km day we are drinking about 0.4 litres per km. On 2 litres of water we can get about 5 km. If water sources are still every 3 to 4 km we need to carry at least 3 litres cover two water sources in case the first one is dry. To easily cover 10 to 13 km without worries like in the first example we would need a bit over 5 litres. That's a difference of about 7 lbs of water, and something we would like to avoid. In this situation, instead of taking enough to get 10 to 13 km we would only bring about 3 litres each so we can get to two water sources and then plan on filling up at every water source.
The second example shows how quickly you can go from 2 litres is okay and only needing to refill once or twice in a day, to 2 litres gets us to the next water source I hope its not dry. Making sure to plan out your water is one of the most important parts of a backpacking trip to make sure you don't injure yourself, especially in hot and strenuous conditions.
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