Springs
OK, I am not nearly as experienced a hiker as many here, nor am I very well versed in parasites, but I am a hydrogeologist and I do know a bit about springs. Just because something is a spring does not mean it is any cleaner then a stream or a pond. On the contrary, it can often be worse. A very early post on this thread mentioned that while the poster usually uses a filter, they never filter the water from the spring on Slide Mt in the Catskills. I would caution against this as well. Water from a bedrock "spring" is flowing through fractured rock which provides little or no natural filtration. Often the source area of a spring can actually be a place for wastes to collect because it is more of a point source then a broad collection area.
The spring on Slide is less than 200 ft from the summit, and the summit is highly traveled. The woods around the summit are the source of the spring, and those same woods are used as bathrooms by the visitors to the summit. I would definitely recommend treating water from springs unless, like other water bodies, you understand the source area. I would definitely treat water from the spring on Slide.
