The Many Uses For a Nalgene Water Bottle While Backpacking

1. Purify Your Water: A water bottle is perfect for dipping a Steripen or dropping a few iodine tablets in it. It's pretty hard to do these tasks with a water bladder, but simple with a nalgene. Just pour the purified water from the nalgene into your water bladder and get going.

2. Stay Warm at Night: If it's really cold outside, hear up a liter of water with your camp stove and put it in your water bottle. Put this water bottle in your sleeping bag, best place is between your legs, and it should stay warm all night. Just make sure the cap is on tight.

3. Measure Water for Cooking: Dehydrated food packs need certain amounts of water, and a Nalgene water bottle has graduated markings showing ml and oz. This is very helpful when you need to measure out 8oz of water on the fly.

4. Storage: What you can store in a Nalgene bottle is pretty much and endless list. You can use to keep your wallet and phone dry if you expect getting wet, trail mix, pancake mix, or gatorade dry mix, etc.

5. Counterweight: A simple counterweight for a bear bag, just fill the bottle with sand or rocks, carabiner it to your bear bag rope, and adjust the bear bag to the right height.