Nalgene

Nalgene is a maker of high quality, nearly indestructible camping bottles. The best ones are made of translucent charcoal colored high impact plastic.

Nalgene also makes lab equipment. I don't think it can really be called glassware. The indestructible bottles are actually somewhat destructible. They're made of Lexan, which is very solid, but somewhat brittle. The softer translucent white bottles made of form of HDPE, are less likely to actually fracture.

I know this because someone once used one of my Lexan bottles, filled with water, to try to hang a bear bag ina tree. The rope used was too long, went up, missed the branch, fell down, hit a rock, and cracked. Actually, no, that's not quite what happened. The rope was looped through the lid loop. (Nalgene bottles typically have a lid which screws on and off, attached by a plastic loop to the neck of the bottle.) The rope pulled the lid loop off the neck, the bottle fell, hit the rock.

Anyway, the Lexan model is really great if you have to pour boiling hot water into it (if you're purifying water by boiling it). The opaque/translucent models go squishy at that temperature, which is disconcerting.

The Nalgene 1 litre bottle comes in both wide-mouth and narrow-mouth varieties. Both have their uses. The narrow-mouth model is much easier to drink out of. The wide-mouth bottle is much better for filling from streams/lakes. It also can have water filters attached.

I feel that this is the appropriate place to share an anecdote about the indestructibility of a Nalgene bottle...

I am the proud owner of several Lexan 1-liter widemouth Nalgene bottles. I firmly believe that it is well-nigh impossible to crack them, and here's why:

I was up in the Second College Grant last summer, cutting firewood, picking blueberries and having a great time. Now the highest point in the Grant is called Diamond Peaks, and there's a nice 200 foot or so cliff from which you can see most of the 27,000 acres of sweet, sweet lovin' that comprise the Grant.. I was sitting up there enjoying the view, when I absentmindedly kicked over a bottle full of blueberries and water (I had just picked the berries, you see, and I put them in water to make them stay cold and fresh for inclusion in a cobbler or pie) (Obligatory shameless self-promotion: See Blueberry Peach Cobbler for what to do with your blueberries). It skidded, it rolled, it went right off the edge and started plunging towards the rocks below. I leaned over to watch it fall and break, already lamenting the loss of my blueberries.

When it hit the bottom, much to my surprise, it bounced. Really high. Two or three times. Shocked, I went to the bottom of the cliff and found the bottle, intact, with only a tiny few gouges in the lid.

These things are indestructible. I love them.

One of the most important features of a Nalgene bottle is that the lexan is completely nonporous. If you leave, say, cranberry juice in a normal plastic bottle for a fair amount of time, the plastic will absorb the juice, making it sickly red and causing everything thing you drink out of it for the next millenium taste faintly of cranberries. A Nalgene bottle, on the other hand, can be rinsed out with one pass, and will have no more in common with cranberry juice than it did when it was brand spanking new.