Wow.<br><br>First, thanks for experimenting and sharing the results.<br><br>Many of the reasons that we pick different items for our kits boil down to expecting different scenarios. I may experiment with condoms, but I think I’ll stick with the oven bags (Reynolds 10” x 16” Oven Bags). Here’s why:<br><br>1. What you describe having to go through sounds like a great deal of work and trouble.<br><br>2. I’m mildly concerned about the powder coating you describe. That’s also been described with balloons, by the way. I’m also concerned about untying one, especially without that coating, when the rubber adheres to itself.<br><br>3. Most important, in my time backpacking up and down the Appalachians, I don’t think I’ve seen more than a few water sources where you could submerge a condom all the way and pull it through the water. On the principle that losing altitude in the wilderness is usually foolish and often painful (what goes down must come up), most sources you come accross are near the ridgeline and thus small, just trickles and seeps. If I saw enough water to do what you describe, I’d suspect I was too far downstream, and I might be better off getting my drinking water closer to the source where it's less likely to have been bathed in, or worse. In many of the cases where there was that much water at a spring, say, you wouldn’t want to go through that routine anyway, it would stir up silt and mud that might take a long time to settle.<br><br>Things probably work differently out West where you get a lot more pools and pockets in bare rock, and maybe get a lot more water from larger streams running over rock. It seems like a paradox, but, while there’s generally more water in the East, there’s much less available for drinking in the woods. Ask anyone that’s been on both the Pacific Crest and Appalachian trails. There's also much less chance out West of finding that the creek you just drank water from is straddled by an entire housing development somewhere out of sight upstream. Filters and iodine don't do much for detergent.<br><br>You might want to try one of the oven bags in your experiments. I think I sort of expected them to be sturdy and easier to open and close, which they seem to be, but what impressed me was how small they fold, with a little care to eliminate air. One of these, folded carefully and tightly, takes little more room than a condom, fits easily even in the Altoids-size kit- and I think it might be a lot easier to use.<br>