Many of the preppers reading this will wonder why I chose to write about the #2 reason instead of the #1. We all know that most of the population will die in a SHTF or TEOTWAWKI situation. The reason we as preppers might survive is in the name, we prepare. In reality it is tougher to prepare for the #1 reason because it’s based in our mind instead of in equipment or knowledge. The will to live or WTL is the number one reason any person would fail, even preppers.
For this article I will be focusing on the second reason which is simply experience with your gear.
The importance of having proper gear is huge, however most actual preppers have some gear and a dedicated bug out bag. This gear will help you survive IF YOU KNOW HOW TO USE IT PROPERLY! Yes I said it, and feel free to get really pissed!
Guys and Gals I am not spending time at my computer to tell you the obvious which is that you need to understand your gear. I am here to make sure you take the time to get to know your gear in its natural setting. I want all the people left on the earth after SHTF to be the community who reads our prepper blog. (Maybe a few others)
So really what are we talking about here?
Let me give you 4 reasons to take your survival gear into the streets or forests and try it out.
Reason #1: Knowledge of your Survival Gear
Your situation while using your equipment will most likely be in less than ideal conditions! You think the rain cares if apple stocks aren’t even useful as toilet paper? You think a starving mailman cares if he talked to you every day for five years? Nature and man will be stripped to their bare components and it won’t be pretty. You need to be VERY familiar with your survival gear and any other bug out bag equipment.
Reason #2 Verification of proper gear
How many times have you gone hiking or camping and realized you either forgot something or you brought the wrong thing. Sometimes I even bring too little or too much of certain fishing gear. If you are listening to us when we say to get your butt out into the wild and test your survival gear, then you will undoubtedly find things wrong with your bug out bag. Yes you may have copied GrayWolf or SouthernPrepper1 and those guys do know a lot. One thing they do not know is your exact situation. Are you in the swamps of Louisiana or Florida? Do you already live in a place that is the perfect bug in location? Are you in the arctic on a ship? I hope this rings a bell with some of you who think that a specific kit is going to work for everyone, it will not! I can agree that we as preppers will need a lot of the same things, but I really want you guys to build your own custom bags. I will do my best to cover a few of the various regions of the United States and Canada in future bug out bag builds. But rest assured that I will focus on some of the things that are customizable by region. Take it from me you will find that you want different equipment, just don’t wait until you need it.
Reason #3 Family Bonding
My dad Tony and I often have the problem that our immediate family doesn’t care too much about prepping. We find that they glaze over when we talk about “the government” or “the economy”. We do however love to go camping or hiking and this is something our families can get into without feeling the stress of a failing world. I like to encourage my wife (city girl) to try some things. She loves to shoot guns and recently I have been waiting to get her to shoot my recurve bow. (see our Prepper Show #003 for more info on my new bow) So take your families out and turn the survival gear into a game and maybe you can convince your wife or husband to let you buy more?
Reason #4 Fun!
I know that many of you reading this are gear hounds! You love this stuff from the fire strikers to the thermal blankets. If you guys and gals are anything like me you get stressed out and need a serious break from work and news. Take yourself out for an afternoon and practice prepping. Use your survival gear like your life depends on it and make a shelter with a fire to match. (But don’t use matches)
EXAMPLE OF WHEN JOHN FAILED HARD!
When I first started prepping I tried using a magnesium fire striker. I wanted to test my survival skills and light some leaves after it had rained the entire morning. (I will admit to being one beer into a six pack) My assumption was that the fire from the magnesium would dry the leaves and subsequently start a fire. I failed over and over and finally I decided that my problem was the obvious, wet leaves. As many of you are saying I needed some good tinder and possibly dry leaves. I never found dry leaves but I did use some dryer lint. In our Prepper Show #003 my dad drops a sweet prepper tip that we have been using for some time. Dryer lint is very nearly the perfect tinder, and it becomes more perfect if rubbed lightly in a VERY SMALL quantity of Vaseline. This makes the tinder nearly waterproof and it burns for much much longer. Finally I managed to get my fire lit but I used a huge portion of the striker side on the magnesium striker.
Now in that scenario I used up most of a limited resource. I want you guys as preppers (if you aren’t already) to focus on using resources that are unlimited first. This includes using natural fire starting methods. One method I like is to use a magnifying glass. I wrote a review on a few magnifiers that I purchased for my bug out bag. So remember you need to be intimate with your survival gear so that when SHTF you aren’t failing like me when your situation is horrible.
So in conclusion I want you guys to really take charge and use this weekend or this evening to go out and practice surviving. Then once you realize how valuable it is set yourself a three week challenge. Each weekend go out and live in the wild. When you get off work Monday evening order the things you need to fix any of the problems you had during the weekend. The next weekend take your butt back out into the wilderness and try your old gear with the new items. If everything works well together then you can say, with authority, that you know your gear and it will serve you and your family perfectly!
P.S. I would love for any of you guys reading this to send your experiences on the 3 week challenge. Tony and I will read them on the following prepper show. Send them to John@fathersonpreppers.com and thanks for reading!
Custom bags make real difference, I used a standard bug out bag list, and a great place to start. However once I added stuff for my region and situation (like proper medications for my families various medical conditions), my bug out bag list was considerably larger. You have so hit the mark on this, training makes all the difference, simple things like first aid certifications or learning how to tie knots just my save a life or two, even yours. Oh and cotton balls and petroleum jelly is the best fire starter ever!
Dave that is great! I see that you are from New Mexico, are you in the desert regions or the mountain regions? I am very curious about what kind of custom stuff you are using for your region. If you listen to our show you will know that my dad lives in a more desert region in Utah, and I live in a high mesa region in western Colorado so we are using all kinds of different stuff.
Thanks for your comment.
We are right in the middle, sandwiched between the Sandia moutain range and the Jemez moutain range. If we ever had to bug out it would be in the rugged Northern New Mexico mountains, in even the higher desert than we live. We would need lots of water, and even in the summer some warm weather gear. Up in the mountains at night even in July I’ve seen it get into the high 30’s. Plentiful elk, white tail, and lots of game birds too. I can also say everyone of my families Bug out bags have safety goggles and very good face mask to filter out particulates, the famous New Mexico spring winds would be nasty if you had to be in foot.
Here is a another good reason for failure at all levels of survival prepping, and if someone has the horsepower to get the word out it will save a lot of lives when shft. That reason 4 failure is batteries. Preppers have so many different batteries for so many different can’t live w/o items that there is no way they can keep up with all different types while trekking through the woods. Some people have ten different flashlites and virtually all of them use different types of batteries. No sense to bore you with the whole list so we’ll bring it to a close, if it doesn’t work off of AA we don’t have it in the backpack, stache house, or anywhere else. It’s AA or it isn’t. They are light weight…can carry a hundred and hardly notice the weight…economical to buy compared to others. Standardization is always better than oops. We do the same with our weapons…if it ain’t a 12ga. or a 9mm it ain’t. thanks
One way to really start a fire safely even in wet leaves is to use a birthday candle. You can carry hundreds of them because they are so light weight and they will truly make a very positive difference in your ability to start your fire even if the leaves are wet. Just stack the leavs around it , lite it, and you will have a fire. thanks
At first I thought you were crazy. I said to myself “if you can light a candle, why not light the leaves?” Then it came to me that a dry candle wick might be easier to light than wet leaves. Once the candle is burning you could light a few fires very easily.
Thakns for the tip. I will try to include your battery info and this candle info in episode 005 of our radio show. Feel free to leave a comment on the shows if you feel you could add. Have a great night!
Thanks John the positive feedback is greatly appreciated, and we think you have a good site going. Thanks again.
John, you be the judge on whether to post this or not. But there are many items out here that need to be discussed as to their functionabiltiy during shft. The one we would like to discuss now is the Keltek thirteen round pump home defense 12ga. shot gun. This is an otherwise marvelous weapon, but has one major drawback that requires a lot of training to get used to. Case in point, the gun is incapable of ejecting and chambering a shell during the same stroke. A normal shotgun will eject on the back stroke and chamber on the up stroke. Not the Keltek, it requires two full strokes in between each firing. Overall it is a great self defense weapon and worth every penny, but will get the defender killed if he/she is not aware of how to effectively use it. thanks
John any comment you could get people to leave concerning their experiences with different freeze dried food companies would be great. Quality of food, how they felt an hour after eating it…etc…again your call on posting. thx
Hey plowboy, one thing I can say for sure is that the dried survival food is going to be pure hell. However, if my family is starving we will eat it happily. Eating it is also going to dehydrate people fast. So making sure you have water on hand (which I’m sure you are ready for) is paramount. My dad and I are going to take a week or so off from doing to the podcast to write a beginners series on prepping, not so much for people like you but for people to share with their families. What do you think of that?
Also thanks for the feedback.
Yes, that would be an excellent idea. It’s truly a blessing for us out here in prepper world to have a father and son with the strong bond and friendship to carry on such a project. So give it all you two have and see where it leads. I’m sure it will be good. Also you are very correct concerning the dehydrated food…it makes you thirsty. But we have lots of life straws and we use them for water naturally. We have found the key to consuming dehydrated food is to not set down and eat a big meal. Instead we “munch as we crunch through the woods”, so to speak. This keeps from having a stomach full of food that quadruples in size when you drink a pint of water behind your meal. Again, small quantities and lots of water. We shy away from freeze dried foods simple because of the boiling requirement. Once teotwawki hits anyone lighting a fire is probably signing their obituary column. Of course that’s easy for us to say ’cause we live south of I-10. We would probably be a statistic the first week if we lived in “cold country”. In closing a good point to remember on the lifestraws is they truly work. It is a simple life saving tool no prepper should be without. It is advertised as giving 250 gallons of good drinking water and has not disappointed. However we learned that using a rubber band to place a coffee filter [the paper type] over the end in the water will extend the life of this utensil almost indefinitely. The coffee filter keeps the sand and silt out of the lifestraw and the one we’re using now has filtered countless gallons of water out of the Guadalupe River and is still working fine. Thanks again and keep on keeping on.
Hey plowboy, you got me all wrong brother. I am 100% for freeze dried food. I like it because its lightweight. I don’t believe its a very effective Long Term food source, but it will keep the devil at bay temporarily. In fact my best friend has a serious stock of the stuff. I am considering a purchase of a few different types to do a show on. Maybe live for a few days on each type. Thanks for the comments man.
Forgive me but I overstated something on the dehydrated food. A better way to put it would have been, “small quanties of dehydrated food followed by a drink of water”. Seriously it doesn’t take that much water if you don’t sit and eat a big meal.
No harm done, we have to try different things, freeze dried, dehydrated and whatever else it takes, right. Our main problem with the freeze dried stuff is the long, long boiling time which is usually around 25 minutes for rice and other items. Some like eggs and bacon only require 6 minutes, but that is still a prohibitively long time to stop and cook while on the run in the woods. We had some of the rice, peas, and cheese last night and it was a good meal. But here is my mentality, be it wrong or be it right, that being when the grid goes down, and it will, a better day is never coming. Exactly 100% of the preppers we have had contact with are convinced that within a year of teotwawki the surviviors will simply walk out of the woods and build a new nation. Nonsense! This time when the proverbial “Pearl Harbor” comes our way, we as Amricans are going the way of the dinosaur. We are not our grandparents generation. We as a whole do not have what it take s to pull this nation thru its next crisis. This is a morbid, but realistic thought, have you ever considered what it would be like to have to bury your father, or him bury you, after being in a post-teotwaski environment for say two, maybe three months. It will happen, guaranteed, you will bury him or he will bury you. That is just how tough it ‘s going to get.My wife and I have discussed and made preparations for this same situation. Frankly, living through teotwawki is probably not possible, it’s just how far you can live into it. Death will find you, and it will be ugly and unforgiving. Case in point, we have food, water, all the stuff, but not one prepper we know, has made the financial plunge to purchase a really good geiger counter. What good does a full stomach do if your walking through a radioactive area. Another area that cannot be compromised is good, really good, night vision equipment. Not one prepper we know is actually practicing their plan. During march and april I spent 35 days in the woods, came home 30 pounds lighter, and made every mistake possible, but fewer than was made in the fall of ’12 and will make less this month and October. Perfect practice makes for perfect survival. Honestly, we only have to make one mistake after teotwawki and it’s all over. God bless and thanks for all you are doing.
I agree with most of what you said. I think a Geiger counter is nice, but you have to have the batteries and charging equipment. If something nuclear happened I would make an effort to navigate waterways carefully and stay away from blast zones. I know where most of the water in the states around me is sourced, so I can get water without worry of radiation sickness. I also think night vision is a luxury, I think too many preppers are worried about group military tactics and John Rambo style fighting. In a REAL combat situation you have to take advantage of every possible way of surviving, most of the time that will be to not engage and to hide. Even at fair odds against an enemy, there is a huge chance of being shot or knocked out. I will be hiding until I am forced to fight, and in that situation even if I win I will most likely have wounds that may get infected. In my experience dwelling on the open possibility of death is a waste of time. The only logical course of action is to take a reasonable amount of precaution and hope for the best.
Thanks.
I don’t even know how to respond to what ever you are trying to say, except combat was never mentioned, it was more along the lines of night navigation as in orienteering. Anyway take care and wish you the best.