Those of you who live in the Portland, OR area will hopefully recognize the area I’m about to describe. As for the rest of you, I assume there are similar spots elsewhere.
Heading west on Highway 26 out of the Portland area leads to the coast, just south of Seaside. The mile posts count down to zero going westbound. Starting around mile post 50, until it ends at Highway 101, Highway 26 is a mountain road with very little in the way of civilization. There is a rest stop near mile post 28. About a mile before the rest stop, there is a turnout with a sign that says “drinking water.”
I’ve never stopped at this turnout myself, but every single time I drive by, someone is there stocking up on water. Often, there is another vehicle or two waiting their turn to fill up. Sometimes they are RVs, sometimes it’s just someone in a car. When I was heading out to the coast on Saturday, as an example, there was a sedan parked there, and the person had six or eight of those 5-gallon water cooler jugs they were filling up. Coming home Monday morning, there were a couple of cars parked there, and I saw several smaller, square-shaped jugs on the ground.
It all strikes me as odd. Who are these people, and why are they doing this?
I recall, as a child, going to Big Bear (mountain resort area in Southern California) many times. There were turnouts in the mountainous road here and there with water fountains – intended mainly, I think, for cars that had boiled over driving up the mountain. The fountains were obviously fed by nearby springs, I gather, since this was out in the boonies with no obvious water infrastructure.
I recall it being very good water, being spring water with the right amounts of dissolved minerals to make good drinking water. (I’m not so sure if that’s the best stuff to put into your radiator.)
Maybe the Highway 26 water is like that. Maybe these people are stocking up on water they like, or maybe just stocking up on free water.
Where I live now, the municipal water is awful. There are water vending machines around town where a lot of people buy water – 35 cents a gallon; you supply your own gallon jugs. These machines just sell municipal water, but they treat it right there in the machine. So if there were free water fountains in the mountains around here, I’d guess people would be doing that too.
I can speak only for myself. My home on Hawai’i Island relies on catchment water, which is fine for washing dishes, clothes, and people. But bird and lizard poop, diseased leaves, volcanic ash, and all kinds of what-have-you can and do show up in the catchment water. Do I want to drink that stuff, untreated? Nope.
I could boil the shit out of my catchment water, and then filter it - in fact, that’s my “plan B” if for some reason I don’t have access to supplies of “drinking water” at 35 cents a gallon in my refillable jugs (cheaper at larger sizes; I usually fill 3 gallon jugs at 95 cents each).
But as a general matter, it is cheap and easy to fill large containers with drinking water from dispensers. I generally get 6-8 gallons at a time and that lasts me for a couple of weeks or so, since the water is only for making coffee or drinking straight up.
Why is that crazy? I can’t stand that taste of our tap water, so I buy supermarket distilled water in gallon jugs. The tap water is ok for making coffee or cooking, but not for drinking.
Here in the NE of the US it is not uncommon to see people filling up 5 gal bottles at some such places. Many near me have closed down/sealed up usually with a sign that the water tested contaminated and the practice is fading, but still common enough that my thoughts when I see it is remember that spot, it must be good water.
I used to drive past Dickenson Spring many times, never stopped.
Finally did about 15 years ago, filled up a gallon jug on a whim. It was icy cold, tasted great, and free.
I now make it a required stop if I’m out that way. I don’t purposely drive just for the water, that’s why I have a Brita pitcher at home.
In Milwaukee we have a well that’s been running for over a hundred years. It used to naturally rise to the surface, but as the pressure dropped, the city added an electric pump to it about 30 years ago. There’s nearly always people either drinking directly from it or filling up bottles from it.
Apperently it tastes like metal (iron), as you’d expect from well water and due to it’s Strontium levels, the city has put out notices saying that it’s probably no big deal, but maybe don’t drink this water, or at least don’t drink a lot of it or drink it exclusively Free, fresh water flows from Bay View's well.
Years ago on a Vegas trip, we rented a car and were going to drive to visit some semi-famous desert sights (Mouse’s Tank, valley of fire, where The Gorn episode on TOS was filmed, etc.).
We were told to keep (2) 2-liter bottles of water in the back seat whenever driving outside of the cities / neighborhood populated areas. Something-something if your car breaks down on the desert floor and you don’t have water, you’ll die.
It’s been many years since I’ve been in the area so I don’t know if it’s marked in any way. It used to be just a tap among the rocks and you could find it by the lined up cars.
In the Italian Alps a few years back I saw something similar to that described in the OP. A man was filling a container from this random pipe sticking out of the mountainside. I made a u-turn and doubled back to it. I took a little drink and it was cold and very refreshing.
I’ve never seen this here in the SFBA CA. Fortunately we have great tasting tap water coming to us from Yosemite.
I found an sfgate article saying it was about 1.3 miles west of Skyline/35. I marked the approximate spot on my map, and the next time I’m through there I’ll see if I can spot it. I’m doubtful, but I’ll look anyway.
When I lived in Philadelphia, I would occasionally stop at a park with a spring. There would always be a line of people waiting to fill their containers with spring water. I remember it being very wet.
There is a spring water pipe near Johnstown,. as well.
Its on Google Maps! Looks like the source is a natural spring and there are a number of positive reviews of the water: Google Maps
If you scroll down past the reviews to the web results, there is a listing for it on a website called “Find a Spring,” as well as a couple articles about the history.
There is a similar spring near a place I visit in the UP of Michigan. Always people stopped there filling jugs, even when it’s half frozen in winter.
As for RVs filling up, filling your fresh water tank adds a lot of weight to your rig. If you’re heading to the coast from Portland for the weekend, might as well stop there when you’re almost to your destination and fill up with water you know will taste good.
In 2012 my dad and I went to the Lake Como area of Italy to see the columbarium where his brother’s ashes are. We stayed in the small village where Bill and his also deceased Italian wife had lived and had dinner with her relatives every night. They went across the street every night before dinner to a pipe to get drinking water for dinner. It was really good water.
There was a spring near our apartment in New Jersey. It closed in 2015 because the people who were maintaining the infrastructure decided that paying to get it tested 4 times a year was too expensive.
I thought the tap water was perfectly fine, so I never signed up when we were there.
I can’t say I’ve ever run across a public spring-fed water source like that, or even one with boring old municipal water.
What I have seen is that there are these little filtered water dispenser kiosks in grocery store parking lots and/or vending machines up at the front of the store. They filter standard city water and resell it as “healthier” or more pure. They seem to be very popular among immigrant communities from what I’ve observed, presumably because of lingering distrust of municipal water from where they’re originally from.
