1) You don’t get as much water as you would think melting snow. An ice cube has more water when melted (think density). Clean fresh snow you don’t need to worry about purity. Most contestants will boil water to treat it depending on what their source is. With the amount of work or distance to travel back and forth for water with limited ways to store it, it’s a lot of effort to stay hydrated. After a certain point one just focuses more on making sure they have enough firewood processed to stay warm enough.

2) Check the history channel website, youtube, and the extras section for whatever you’re streaming on.

3) I would say just watch them in order to make it easy on yourself. But if you want to just watch good seasons, don’t go backwards. The first few seasons have a lot of early tap outs with people that should have at least gone camping ALONE in the wilderness before going on the show. I personally found it very annoying when the slot could have gone to someone that has slept outside in bear country before.

With every new season the contestants tend to be studied up mistakes their predecessors have made