The Survival Gear Thread

[Bear Ribs]

Due to recent events my survival bag is quite at the forefront of my mind, and having gone through a bad situation I'm both looking at the options I had as well as wanting to pass on some of what I've learned for everybody else who wants to prep for an emergency. Post your tips here people and let's all find our way through emergencies, well prepared.

Tinder for your Survival Kit.

Fire is one of the most essential tools for survival. Tinder is essential for getting a fire going. So what kind of tinder should you have in your kit? I'm going to cover three favorites here which should handle all your needs, plus a bonus item you may not have considered.

First let's cover how homemade tinder works. Simply put, it's a candle. You need a wick and fuel. Just as you can light a candle with a single match, you can light a good piece of tinder with a single match.

Yes, you've probably read that tinder is bird's nests, tree sap, dried grass, and other similar combustibles. You can, maybe, use those. But in a situation where you're struggling for your life, do you want to take an extra hour to look for bird's nests when you're soaking wet, the sky is dark, and need to warm up before hypothermia sets in? I don't think so, especially if you were put in that situation by a storm and all the dried grass is less dried and more soaking wet. So you need to bring tinder with you.

Cottonballs soaked in Petroleum Jelly
This is my go-to where tinder is concerned. Take a cottonball and soak it with Vaseline. Actually not that, use the generic dime-store brand petroleum jelly, you're going to burn it so it's not worth paying more for a brand name.

Making it is really simple. Melt the petroleum jelly and dip cottonballs in it, then store them in a dry container like an Altoids tin, or an empty pill bottle. Now how to melt the petroleum jelly? If you stuck it in your microwave, you're in for disappointment, it doesn't have the right molecules to heat from microwaves and will just sit there, still jellified, mocking you, no matter how long you nuke it. Instead, you can heat it by floating the jar in a bowl of water and microwaving that. Or, since it melts at about a hundred degrees, you can use my preferred extra-lazy method which is to put it on my car's dashboard in the sun for a couple of hours.

A vaseline-cottonball will burn fiercely for about two or three minutes which is usually more than enough to ignite twigs you find and get a proper fire going. Before lighting it, it's best to tease a few threads of cotton out, forming a natural wick that will ignite easily.

Assuming you're so staggeringly stingy (as I am) that you don't want to spend money on cottonballs, dryer lint will work.

Burlap Log
I don't generally make many of these because burlap isn't commonly available and I'm stingy. However once Thanksgiving is over, burlap scraps sometimes become abundant as old fall decorations and fake scarecrows get trashed, and then I'll snap up those scraps and make these.

A burlap log is essentially a vaseline-cottonball writ large. Spread petroleum jelly on a strip of burlap like you're spreading peanut butter on a sandwich, and roll it up into a cigar shape. Then store it in... an Altoids tin or a pill bottle. Look, those containers are cheap since you probably have excesses of them anyway, they're lightweight, and they keep stuff inside dry, all critical components of a good survival kit.

The primary reason to have these instead alongside cottonballs is that a burlap log will burn much, much longer. A midsize log will burn with intense heat for fifteen minutes or more, which is enough to ignite even fairly wet twigs and can get a fire going in the rain, a certain consideration if storms are the main reason you might be out surviving in the first place.

Charcloth
Charcloth is, simply put, charcoal in cloth form. It's much more advanced and difficult to make than the previous two options. Charcloth has historically probably been used as tinder more than anything else, old-fashioned tinderboxes were filled with charcloth along with a flint and steel and a skilled woodsman could have a roaring fire going in under a minute with those tools.

You'll need a metal container, such as the Altoids tin (I love these things for survival situations) to make the charcloth. Fold up some natural fiber cloth such as cotton, jute, linen, sisal, or hemp, and put it in the tin. An old, torn up tee-shirt will work. Worn-out terrycloth towels are great, the large surface area makes terrycharcloth... yeah let's go with that, particularly easy to light up. You can find a number of other cloths, but make sure they're all natural plant fibers, no wool or synthetics. Add a tiny hole to the tin, one made by a thumbtack is sufficient. Some people prefer a hole on both sides. Put it in a fire and watch the smoke come out. An Altoids tin will take about five minutes on one side and two on the other but it's not an exact science, the time will depend on the cloth and how much of it you put in there. The second it stops smoking, you need to remove it from the fire and block the hole. Putting a toothpick in will work or you can just throw dirt over it if you're doing it in the field. Let it cool slowly before opening, if it's still hot then the second oxygen touches it, it's done.

Once it's cool, the tin will (if you did it right) have charcloth inside. It should be matte black and somewhat flexible. If it's brown you didn't cook it enough and if it's gray or crumbles to dust you cooked it too much. If it has shiny spots, you used the wrong cloth and there were synthetic textiles in the mix, which ruins it for tinder purposes. Do not use wool, wool has unique fire-resistant properties. "Try me bitch" is the typical reaction of a sheep when a fifty-foot-long fire-breathing dragon drops into the pasture.

Charcloth is tricky to make and you'll probably screw up a few times. The chemical process is identical to making charcoal, the gasses expand from the cloth from the heat, taking a number of complex compounds with them, and escape as smoke while leaving the pure carbon behind, but only as long as no oxygen can reach the carbon to combust it. That's why you watch for the second the smoke stops coming out, when it does, no more gas is expanding and oxygen is free to enter through the hole and ruin your efforts so you have to cover your hole and let it cool slowly without oxygen to preserve the carbon.

So it being much harder to make than the previous options, why would you want to make charcloth? For one thing it's incredibly light, and every ounce counts. You can also make charcloth "in the field" in the event that you have a going fire but no tinder for tomorrow, but also happen to have a cotton shirt or bandage so you need to make tomorrow's tinder today.

The big reason is that charcloth cooks off more readily than anything else. It never flares up into open flames but it produces a slowly expanding coal from the slightest spark that can be easily transferred and used to ignite your other, more regular scavenged tinder like bird's nests and dried grass. Old school survival tips for making fire, like rubbing sticks together, creating sparks from hitting rocks together, or making a magnifying glass out of a bit of ice? Yeah, good luck, those require expert skills to make work and they're never going to cook off tinder you find in the wild. Unless you have charcloth, because it ignites more easily than anything else in the universe. With charcloth, those options actually work and can create a glowing ember that you can use to ignite a fire even if your matches are soaking wet.

Candles
I've found that candles work decently. This was a bit surprising but my recent experiences have made me a convert to having a few candles in my emergency kit. You can, quite obviously, easily light a candle with a match. While the flame isn't exactly huge, a candle can transfer its flame readily enough to twigs, grass, or other thin natural fuel. Further, you can extinguish the candle easily and relight it as needed, and a candle is easier to use as a light source in a pinch than homemade tinder stuck on the end of a stick.

The much hotter, heartier flames from cottonballs or burlap logs are superior for actually lighting a fire under damp conditions, and charcloth can be lit with a flint and steel where candles cannot. Consequently, I would not recommend using candles as your primary tinder source, but a few small candles adds very little weight for a decent amount of utility.

 

[Sergeant Foley]

Due to recent events my survival bag is quite at the forefront of my mind, and having gone through a bad situation I'm both looking at the options I had as well as wanting to pass on some of what I've learned for everybody else who wants to prep for an emergency. Post your tips here people and let's all find our way through emergencies, well prepared.

Tinder for your Survival Kit.

Fire is one of the most essential tools for survival. Tinder is essential for getting a fire going. So what kind of tinder should you have in your kit? I'm going to cover three favorites here which should handle all your needs, plus a bonus item you may not have considered.

First let's cover how homemade tinder works. Simply put, it's a candle. You need a wick and fuel. Just as you can light a candle with a single match, you can light a good piece of tinder with a single match.

Yes, you've probably read that tinder is bird's nests, tree sap, dried grass, and other similar combustibles. You can, maybe, use those. But in a situation where you're struggling for your life, do you want to take an extra hour to look for bird's nests when you're soaking wet, the sky is dark, and need to warm up before hypothermia sets in? I don't think so, especially if you were put in that situation by a storm and all the dried grass is less dried and more soaking wet. So you need to bring tinder with you.

Cottonballs soaked in Petroleum Jelly
This is my go-to where tinder is concerned. Take a cottonball and soak it with Vaseline. Actually not that, use the generic dime-store brand petroleum jelly, you're going to burn it so it's not worth paying more for a brand name.

Making it is really simple. Melt the petroleum jelly and dip cottonballs in it, then store them in a dry container like an Altoids tin, or an empty pill bottle. Now how to melt the petroleum jelly? If you stuck it in your microwave, you're in for disappointment, it doesn't have the right molecules to heat from microwaves and will just sit there, still jellified, mocking you, no matter how long you nuke it. Instead, you can heat it by floating the jar in a bowl of water and microwaving that. Or, since it melts at about a hundred degrees, you can use my preferred extra-lazy method which is to put it on my car's dashboard in the sun for a couple of hours.

A vaseline-cottonball will burn fiercely for about two or three minutes which is usually more than enough to ignite twigs you find and get a proper fire going. Before lighting it, it's best to tease a few threads of cotton out, forming a natural wick that will ignite easily.

Assuming you're so staggeringly stingy (as I am) that you don't want to spend money on cottonballs, dryer lint will work.

Burlap Log
I don't generally make many of these because burlap isn't commonly available and I'm stingy. However once Thanksgiving is over, burlap scraps sometimes become abundant as old fall decorations and fake scarecrows get trashed, and then I'll snap up those scraps and make these.

A burlap log is essentially a vaseline-cottonball writ large. Spread petroleum jelly on a strip of burlap like you're spreading peanut butter on a sandwich, and roll it up into a cigar shape. Then store it in... an Altoids tin or a pill bottle. Look, those containers are cheap since you probably have excesses of them anyway, they're lightweight, and they keep stuff inside dry, all critical components of a good survival kit.

The primary reason to have these instead alongside cottonballs is that a burlap log will burn much, much longer. A midsize log will burn with intense heat for fifteen minutes or more, which is enough to ignite even fairly wet twigs and can get a fire going in the rain, a certain consideration if storms are the main reason you might be out surviving in the first place.

Charcloth
Charcloth is, simply put, charcoal in cloth form. It's much more advanced and difficult to make than the previous two options. Charcloth has historically probably been used as tinder more than anything else, old-fashioned tinderboxes were filled with charcloth along with a flint and steel and a skilled woodsman could have a roaring fire going in under a minute with those tools.

You'll need a metal container, such as the Altoids tin (I love these things for survival situations) to make the charcloth. Fold up some natural fiber cloth such as cotton, jute, linen, sisal, or hemp, and put it in the tin. An old, torn up tee-shirt will work. Worn-out terrycloth towels are great, the large surface area makes terrycharcloth... yeah let's go with that, particularly easy to light up. You can find a number of other cloths, but make sure they're all natural plant fibers, no wool or synthetics. Add a tiny hole to the tin, one made by a thumbtack is sufficient. Some people prefer a hole on both sides. Put it in a fire and watch the smoke come out. An Altoids tin will take about five minutes on one side and two on the other but it's not an exact science, the time will depend on the cloth and how much of it you put in there. The second it stops smoking, you need to remove it from the fire and block the hole. Putting a toothpick in will work or you can just throw dirt over it if you're doing it in the field. Let it cool slowly before opening, if it's still hot then the second oxygen touches it, it's done.

Once it's cool, the tin will (if you did it right) have charcloth inside. It should be matte black and somewhat flexible. If it's brown you didn't cook it enough and if it's gray or crumbles to dust you cooked it too much. If it has shiny spots, you used the wrong cloth and there were synthetic textiles in the mix, which ruins it for tinder purposes. Do not use wool, wool has unique fire-resistant properties. "Try me bitch" is the typical reaction of a sheep when a fifty-foot-long fire-breathing dragon drops into the pasture.

Charcloth is tricky to make and you'll probably screw up a few times. The chemical process is identical to making charcoal, the gasses expand from the cloth from the heat, taking a number of complex compounds with them, and escape as smoke while leaving the pure carbon behind, but only as long as no oxygen can reach the carbon to combust it. That's why you watch for the second the smoke stops coming out, when it does, no more gas is expanding and oxygen is free to enter through the hole and ruin your efforts so you have to cover your hole and let it cool slowly without oxygen to preserve the carbon.

So it being much harder to make than the previous options, why would you want to make charcloth? For one thing it's incredibly light, and every ounce counts. You can also make charcloth "in the field" in the event that you have a going fire but no tinder for tomorrow, but also happen to have a cotton shirt or bandage so you need to make tomorrow's tinder today.

The big reason is that charcloth cooks off more readily than anything else. It never flares up into open flames but it produces a slowly expanding coal from the slightest spark that can be easily transferred and used to ignite your other, more regular scavenged tinder like bird's nests and dried grass. Old school survival tips for making fire, like rubbing sticks together, creating sparks from hitting rocks together, or making a magnifying glass out of a bit of ice? Yeah, good luck, those require expert skills to make work and they're never going to cook off tinder you find in the wild. Unless you have charcloth, because it ignites more easily than anything else in the universe. With charcloth, those options actually work and can create a glowing ember that you can use to ignite a fire even if your matches are soaking wet.

Candles
I've found that candles work decently. This was a bit surprising but my recent experiences have made me a convert to having a few candles in my emergency kit. You can, quite obviously, easily light a candle with a match. While the flame isn't exactly huge, a candle can transfer its flame readily enough to twigs, grass, or other thin natural fuel. Further, you can extinguish the candle easily and relight it as needed, and a candle is easier to use as a light source in a pinch than homemade tinder stuck on the end of a stick.

The much hotter, heartier flames from cottonballs or burlap logs are superior for actually lighting a fire under damp conditions, and charcloth can be lit with a flint and steel where candles cannot. Consequently, I would not recommend using candles as your primary tinder source, but a few small candles adds very little weight for a decent amount of utility.

Subbed and following this thread quite closely with intriguing interest.

 

[Zyobot]

I take it this is more a thread for how to survive in a life-or-death emergency when dropped into the wild cold, rather than a long-term preppers' thread for how to accumulate the skills, supplies, and assets needed to become self-sufficient in general?

If so, I'd suggest creating a separate General Prepper Thread somewhere, since having independence from bloated supply chains and centralized infrastructure will prove far more useful with time — just as you've already said about your survival bag.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Your Survival Knife

So people will tell you, to survive in the wilds all a good woodsman needs is a quality knife.

Balderdash. Yeah, it's theoretically possible but that's kinda like bowling a 290 game or finishing a golf course 20 strokes under par. If you're that skilled you probably already spend so much time in the woods that the first thing you'll know of the apocalypse is when the bear that delivers your mail every six months doesn't show up.

However, that doesn't mean your knife isn't one of the most critical parts of your kit. Even if you don't plan to survive with a knife by itself, your knife is probably going to be the most important, and quite possibly the most expensive, piece you have. So what do you look for in a good knife?

I'm not really going to recommend specific models here, both because I haven't been bribed enough by any knife-makers and because models of knife change from year to year so such advice would soon become obsolete. Instead, I'm going to cover what to look for in a knife, and why.

Now you may fairly have a bit of a difference of opinion from me here. I build my own kit with only disaster survival in mind, there are no self-defense or fighting options that I give priority in my survival bag. A knife can, in fact, be a viable means of self-defense so you may choose different options from myself on that basis. I'll try to note where that matters.

Handle: Full Tang
This is the single most important bit. You don't have a full toolbox in your go-bag, unless you're way stronger than you have any right to be. Consequently, you won't just be cutting with your knife. You'll use it as a prybar, as a hammer, as a scraper, even as a small shovel, basically it will do a ton of different jobs for you. A full tang means the metal of the blade extends all the way through the handle in a smooth unbroken piece. This adds tremendous strength and ensures the blade isn't going to snap off. This means no folders, yes I carry one around day-to-day for opening packages and trimming my nails but I wouldn't count on my folder if my life was on the line. This also eliminates all those "survival" knives with a kit in their hollow handle. Those knives are all garbage, you don't need kit in your knife, you need a knife in your kit and it needs to be solid, not hollow and prone to having the handle snap off in a pinch. It's okay if the sheath has a sharpening stone or a firestarter, but your general rule should be to get a knife that's all knife and add other stuff to your kit for other jobs.

Point: Drop or Clip
Knives have a range of blade shapes. There are two that are suitable for survival, the drop or spear point, and the clip point.

Spoiler: clip point

Spoiler: drop point

A clip point is what classic bowie knives have. A section at the tip is "clipped" out giving it a sharper point. A drop point smoothly curves on both sides to a point. In general, a clip point will be superior for fighting and generally better for anything that needs piercing or fine detail work while a drop point is significantly stronger and will serve better when you need to pry or do something horribly abusive like batoning that will have most knife enthusiasts clutching their sheaths in horror.

Many people like a saw on the back edge of their knife. This is a pain if you need to baton but it has other utility. Pretty much a personal decision there. If there isn't a saw on your knife, think about how you might need to cut with one and how to supply yourself with a saw in your kit.

Alloy: Exists
I'm pretty sure there are more steel alloys than there are atoms in the universe. Okay maybe a couple less. But basically, it's not worth my time to tell you about every alloy and its properties. If the knife is made from a quality alloy, the knife maker is going to be boasting about it so you can go look the alloy up yourself and determine if it's suitable on some knifemaking forum. If the knife is just "steel" that means the alloy isn't worth bragging about, and consequently the knife isn't worth putting in your kit. Watch out for "carbon steel" (not to be confused with high carbon steel which is a whole 'nother animal) and "surgical stainless" as these terms have no legal meaning and might just as well be wads of tin.

Alloys are all tradeoffs between edge retention, corrosion resistance, hardness, toughness, and a few other factors. You'll need to decide for yourself if you prefer more rust resistance, a tougher sharper blade, or one that can be sharpened really easily in the field but doesn't hold its edge as long. The important thing is knowing what the alloy is in the first place so you can make that decision.

Pommel: Metal and Flat
Here's where a lot of survival knives drop the ball. You're going to wind up using your knife as a hammer, you didn't have the weight to spare to pack one in your kit. Consequently, the end of the handle of your knife should be a solid chunk of metal, and ideally it should have a flat surface suitable for driving tent stakes into the ground or cracking nuts you found. I'll break with my policy of not mentioning specific knives here to call out the Air Force model 499, which has been used as a survival knife for decades by military and police forces and literally has a pommel shaped like a hammerhead for that exact purpose.

If the knife has a compass set in the pommel send it back, remember what I said about a knife that's a kit. There's a fair chance there's a hollow compartment under that compass, and anyway, a compass isn't a critical part of a survival kit anyway and is going to see way less use than a hammer is.

Size and Feel: Good
Naturally, as you're carrying basically your life on your back, you want everything as light as possible. And since your knife is a critically important bit, and larger knives are more durable and useful, you want as big a knife as possible. Obviously you're going to have to make some tradeoffs. Personally, I like a blade around 4" long, making it about 9-10" overall. However, this is very much subjective., I know a fair few people who prefer bowie knives eight inches long or more I also have a machete next to my kit that a family member carries as part of theirs, so I can get by with a smaller knife.

Also subjective, and also critical, is how it feels. When you get your survival knife, hold it in your hand. Try several poses and grips. Go sharpen a stick with it. Does it feel good or are you developing blisters already? Does it slip around or does the grip feel solid in your fingers? Strap it to your waist and go for a jog around the block*. Does it flop around uncomfortably or does it feel snug and secure?

Now for the acid test. You're eating some canned vegetables with your next meal. Put the can on the counter and punch your knife right through the top, then saw the can lid open and use the knife to pry it open to get at the food#. This is an important survival skill, canned goods are going to be the easiest and safest food to scavenge and you need to get the cans open. Yeah, maybe your folder has a can opener but you can't count on that. More importantly, how did your survival knife hold up? Did it cleave through that can lid like a tsundere through a soyboy's excuses or did it feel like your arm was going to fall off before the lid was open? Look at the edge, is it still sharp or has it developed a blunt or wire edge? Is a mere can inflicting serious scratches beyond the cosmetic in the metal? Now imagine that you've been displaced from your home and you need to open five cans for each meal for you and your family/companions, three meals a day. Is the knife good enough for that kind of abuse for a week straight?

If not, return it and try again with a new model of knife. Your life depends on this knife, do not settle for one that will let you down when a can of corn and a homemade spear are the only things standing between your loved ones and starvation.

As a personal choice, I like knives with brightly colored handles. This looks less cool or amateurish to a lot of people but if you drop your knife in the dark or in a pile of debris, that day-glo orange handle is going to be mighty nice compared to a black or brown one.

*It's not a bad idea to carry/wear your emergency bag during this test, to get a feel for what it's going to be like hauling this weight around. At the least this can be decent exercise and it can tell you if you can reasonably put more weight in, or if you're overloading yourself and are going to have to make some hard choices and lighten the load so you can endure longer.

#For the exact technique to saw open a can with a knife, there are numerous forum posts and tutorials you can peruse.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I take it this is more a thread for how to survive in a life-or-death emergency when dropped into the wild cold, rather than a long-term preppers' thread for how to accumulate the skills, supplies, and assets needed to become self-sufficient in general?

If so, I'd suggest creating a separate General Prepper Thread somewhere, since having independence from bloated supply chains and centralized infrastructure will prove far more useful with time — just as you've already said about your survival bag.

Sorry, was most of the way through throwing the article together when I saw you'd posted.

This thread is principally about building a proper emergency kit, hence the gear thread. I intend this to include how to make certain kinds of gear, but for actual techniques I think that would mostly be better in its own thread. That said I'm pretty sure I've made some prepper threads and they all died pretty fast, then again this one hasn't drawn any attention until now either so it may just not be a subject people in this forum are interested in.

 

[Zyobot]

Sorry, was most of the way through throwing the article together when I saw you'd posted.

No problem.

This thread is principally about building a proper emergency kit, hence the gear thread. I intend this to include how to make certain kinds of gear, but for actual techniques I think that would mostly be better in its own thread. That said I'm pretty sure I've made some prepper threads and they all died pretty fast, then again this one hasn't drawn any attention until now either so it may just not be a subject people in this forum are interested in.

That's really too bad.

While not at the point of building my own nuclear bunker yet, I've been curious about beginners' advice on learning elementary First Aid, growing some of my own food, and performing basic maintenance of some of the more high-tech gizmos people depend on to sustain their way of life nowadays?

Novice-friendly book recommendations would be best, I think. In my experience, they lay out more of a comprehensive "framework" for how to approach the subject than most online advice does.

 

[ThatZenoGuy]

Depending on the environment (or how much you want to carry), a lightweight axe or machete can be pretty nifty. Chops wood, chops human-shaped things, chops through doors, in general chops pretty good.
Helps with making a fire, making shelter, and self defence.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

That said I'm pretty sure I've made some prepper threads and they all died pretty fast, then again this one hasn't drawn any attention until now either so it may just not be a subject people in this forum are interested in.

I'm interested and reading...well, most call it lurking.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Tarp or Tent

Food, clothing, and shelter are the three basic requirements for survival. Of those three, shelter is the one you're going to lose first in a disaster, you can probably scavenge canned goods for food and unless you were supremely unlucky, you probably start out dressed already. But your house? If it's still there you aren't bugging out in the first place. So packing some emergency shelter in your bugout bag is essential.

First I want to preface this by noting the single best shelter available, your car. It's already waterproof, better insulated than a tent or tarp, and while the seats probably aren't exactly comfortable to sleep in they will get the job done and let you rest free of snow, rain, mosquitos, and stray animals. If you have your car available it's always a good choice to use to shelter from the weather. It's also significantly more visible to rescuers than most tents will be. Always stick with your car if the conditions allow it, only leave your car if its position threatens your survival and you're unable to move it to a better position.

However, things happen. Storms may destroy your car, or flooding ruin your chances to get to it, or maybe it's just out of gas and you need to move to a safer position. You may be fleeing a fire and the roads pass through the danger zone, or maybe the highway is just jammed. So you need a backup shelter in your bag. As you might guess from the threadmark title, there are two basic means of shelter available in backpack-able form, tarps and tents. The decision on which to carry is fairly simple, how practiced in survival are you?

A tent generally comes with its own poles, lines, and stakes. Most tents are designed to be put up even by a complete amateur in the dark in bad weather (skill level varies, check reviews on your tent and practice setting it up in your yard a time or two at a minimum). Tents are, not to put too fine a point on it, relatively easy for people who don't want to practice survival skills all the time. If you just want to have an emergency bag but you don't intend to regularly practice beyond maybe a camping trip every few months, a tent is the way to go.

Tents have a few disadvantages. The tent poles make them heavier than tarps, and when you're running through wet, uneven ground every extra ounce of weight on your back is a problem. Tents also lack versatility, a tent generally is what it is and you have little recourse for modifying it for local conditions.

On the extreme side, there are tents that are practically fixed homes, such as Yurts, but these are beyond the scope of a bugout bag so I won't divert a lot of wordcount to them.

On the flipside of tents, tarps require practice. Tarps obviously don't come with poles, and you'll need to supply your own rope and stakes for it. Generally speaking, this means that a tarp is much lighter than a tent, but also dependent on having suitable trees nearby to tie it to. Fortunately, most of the world is within a reasonable walking distance of a tree, lightpole, or some sort of support to use.

Tarps allow a significant amount of "customization" if you know what you're doing. One pattern of ropes and supports will get you a breezy shade shelter with no walls suitable for hot weather while reshaping the tarp and ropes can let you enclose three sides and build a fire on the fourth, impossible for most tents but also far warmer than tents can manage. Tarps can take advantage of natural terrain features (my personal favorite is using a fallen tree. The torn-out root ball provides ample shelter and support in one direction and it inevitably digs a crater out of the ground that provides protection in all directions, add a tarp and a fire and you have an incredibly cozy camp.)

Tarps can also have purposes besides shelter, such as making a rain catcher to get fresh water or being used as a sail on a cobbled-together raft. A tent can't do these kinds of things.

The gripping hand is, you're only going to be able to take advantage of the tarp's many versatile uses if you actually put in the hours to figure out how to make all these complex shelter options, how a rain catcher works, etc. This isn't a dig or insult, not every person can afford to spend a couple days a month practicing survival skills. If you don't have the time to practice using it, you should go for the tent every time. If you can spare the time, learn to use a tarp effectively.

In choosing a tent, I advise never going with smaller than a two-person tent. Depending on your family's size, you may well go for larger but don't go beneath two. Simply put, sharing body heat is incredibly important in a survival situation. Don't get squeamish, this will keep you alive. Anybody you trust enough not to shank you in the back in your sleep is a potential space heater. Really. Even if you somehow don't have another human available, a large dog can be the difference between life and death when all that stands between you and horribly cold weather is a thin layer of nylon fabric, and if you're that alone I bet you own a few cats or dog. Get a slightly larger tent, while I do tend to stress that every ounce of weight is critical, the value of sharing warmth with an extra body makes the two-person tent a winner every time.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Foods for Your Go-Bag

Even the least preppy of preppers... wait that came out wrong. Pretty much everybody who does any prep at all will plan to include food. As one of the most basic needs for survival, yeah food's important. You can tell the idiots who have no idea what they're doing because they expect to go lone-wolf in the forest and live off the land by hunting. Good luck with that, it took entire tribes of humans working together to make the hunter/gatherer lifestyle work and that was entire tribes of people who lived the life everyday and knew exactly what they were doing, not a lone-wolf in a forest with five thousand other "lone wolves" all hunting the same deer, who bugged out itself two months ago when it realized its forest was getting overrun with humans. The second big error is people who are relatively casual about survival filling up their backpack with canned soups and energy bars, which also won't work as I'll get into shortly.

So, not all foods are created equal. What do you want to pack?

An ideal food doesn't exist, because every location is different. You're going to have significantly different dietary needs if you're trying to survive in Florida than in Alaska or Arizona. So the list needs a bit of customization for the weather. Overall, however, your goal is to get a maximum amount of nutrition out of a minimum amount of weight.

F'rex consider the aforementioned canned soups. A glance at the Cambell's Tomato Soup in my cupboard shows 90 calories a serving and 2.5 servings per can, so let's call it an even 250 calories to be generous. It weighs about twelve ounces counting the can, which you need to since that can's going to be hanging off your back. So about 20 calories per ounce. A typical human female working a desk job needs around 2000 calories a day, 2500 for a similarly active male. However, that's working a desk job, not marching through the wilderness with thirty pounds of survival gear hanging off your back, possibly in inclement weather. Under those circumstances, a typical person will be burning 5000 calories a day. So that means about fifteen pounds of soup per day, how many days do you think you need to survive to reach a safe place? Three days? A week? That weight is a killer. You quickly start running into a survival-themed version of the rocket equation where you need to add even more food to supply the calories needed to haul all that food.

The situation is not hopeless of course, it's just that your savior isn't a can of soup and some carb-intensive candy bars. Let's look at some better options.

You need to take into consideration three factors:

Shelf Life
Ideally, your bugout bag is ready to slap around your shoulders and go 24/7. I keep mine right next to the front door so that I can simply grab it on the way out and run straight to the car. So any food needs to be able to sit for days at room temperature and swapped periodically. If it can keep weeks to even years, that's even better.

Macronutrients
Carbs provide short-term bursts of energy, but fat and protein keep you going much, much longer. In a survival situation you need to largely reverse normal health wisdom. Your body loves horribly fatty foods because it hasn't gotten the memo about modern technology, and plans on you consuming enough nutrition to handle escaping a lion following by marching twenty miles with a tent and setting up a new hunter-gatherer camp in a less-lion-intensive area. So you'll actually be wanting to go for particularly fatty and protein-rich foods rather than the lighter stuff a sedentary lifestyle requires. That doesn't mean you should ignore vitamin content entirely, but since the bugout bag is meant to be short-term, on a scale of days to a week, you can slide on vitamin nutrition in favor of calories for that short a time frame.

Ease of Preparation
If you're bugging out in an emergency, there's a possibility you won't have time to prepare Julia Child's Beef Burgundy or some similar hideously complex recipe. The ideal prep time is "Remove food from pouch and insert into mouth" but I've found from experience that hot food can also be incredibly beneficial, both to morale and even to survival in very cold weather. So I do recommend being able to do some limited cooking, though even then it should be along the lines of "Boil food for five minutes." You'll also need to allocate some weight and space to a mess kit for this purpose.

In general, you should pack multiple kinds of foods. Not only is it disheartening to eat the same thing every day, during a period of your life where everything is falling apart anyway, but you will have different needs in different situations, sometimes you may need to eat "on the go" with something you can just grab and munch as you march. Other times the weather may be rainy or snowy where marching is contraindicated, but fresh water is plentiful so boiling up some dried food for a hot meal is just the thing.

With those considerations in mind, let's look at some winning foods:

Best Calorie/Weight Ratio, No Cook time, Keeps for Months:

• Peanut Butter (avg. 186 calories per oz.)
• Sunflower Seeds (162 calories per oz.)
• Mixed Nuts (varies, around 160 calories per oz.)
• Trail Mix (varies, around 150 calories per oz.)
• Chocolate (avg 145 calories per oz.)
• GORP (avg. 142 calories per oz.)

All of these are solid choices for emergency snacks. Peanut Butter, in fact, is the single most calorie-intensive food you can reasonably store in your bag and is not unhealthy to boot. Go for pouches instead of heavy glass jars of the stuff to save weight.

Other Options

• Dried Lentils (About 130 calories per oz.)
• Ramen Noodles (About 127 calories per oz.)
• Pemmican (varies by recipe, about 120 calories per oz.)
• Dried Rice (About 112 calories per oz.)
• Instant Oatmeal (About 105 calories per oz.)
• Fruit Cake (Just over 100 calories per oz.)
• Beef Jerky (About 90 calories per oz.)
• Dried Beans or Peas (About 89 calories per oz.)
• MREs (About 46 calories per oz.)
• Canned Sardines (About 40 calories per oz.)

MREs do surprisingly poorly as hiking food, due to packing a lot of extras besides food in them. However, calories aren't the whole story by themselves. On the face of it, Ramen Noodles appear to beat out Pemmican (The original survival food by which everything else has been judged for thousands of years) but Pemmican packs enormous amounts of micronutrients and protein while Ramen Noodles are mostly empty carbs with some salt. While you might think Protein can fit under the same "Don't worry about long-term health" clause as vitamins, in truth your body is going to need every strand of protein it can get in order to keep your muscles in working order while you scramble towards safety. MREs, meanwhile, heat themselves which is not only convenient but saves the weight of a mess kit, stove, and fuel so they may actually come out well ahead on weight depending on the number of days you're looking at and how well you expect to be able to scavenge firewood.

Fruit Cake keeps surprisingly well, is tasty, and appears to have originated as a travel food in ancient Rome. While mostly carbs it has a decent amount of fat and carries a surprising array of small vitamins. I don't recommend carrying it as a staple but if you have one in your freezer grab it, it'll keep at room temperature for at least a month.

Canned Sardines are a bit of a special case, although I would normally advise against canned foods due to the weight of the can, sardines are particularly smelly, and have some very good nutritional value. The reason I emphasize smelly is that can work either for or against you, it can attract other people... or bears. It can also be used as suitable bait in traps or as fishbait due to the smell also attracting other fish and small predators. Finally, the odd shape of sardine cans makes the cans useful in a number of weird ways in a survival situation. Pick the ones that are preserved in oil for best bang for your buck, and avoid sardines in water or mustard.

I have a soft spot for good old dried rice and beans. Actually, I keep multiple sealed five-gallon buckets of both, in the event of an emergency where my car is available I can transport over a hundred pounds of them into the truckbed in under a minute for maximum food transport. I also keep a bag of each in my emergency bag. I have a preference for peas and lentils over beans, as pinto beans need extra preparation to avoid making the consumer gassy. Lentils contain a significant amount of protein, and when rice and peas/beans are eaten at the same time, your body's alchemical engine can produce a complete protein from them yielding more protein than you'd expect from either alone.

As a few final thoughts, despite being relatively poor on nutrition for their weight, if you're packing a lot of peanut butter it's worth bringing crackers to eat the peanut butter on. Peanut Butter by the spoonful is sticky and hard to get down. I also include a bottle of honey, a small bottle of olive oil, and a number of seasoning packets from pizzerias and fast food places. Olive Oil and Honey have medicinal uses alongside being edible, and the hundred of an oz. some spices cost are far outweighed by the extra comfort they provide.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Drink for Your Go Bag

Continuing on being prepared, you might notice a trend with foods that are calorie-intensive for the weight: They're also all dried. Water is quite heavy and bulky, but also quite vital to survival. You could, in a pinch, travel for three days without a crumb of food but you would be quite dead if you tried the same with water.

One of the most useful pieces of advice I can give you is, if you see signs of an incoming emergency, you should immediately chug a gallon of water. Most people go around badly dehydrated 24/7, it's literally trained into us beginning in grade school to drink less so we don't have to use the bathroom. In a survival situation, it's very hard to keep up your hydration level, much less increase it when you're pouring a sweat because you're marching through the heat with thirty pounds of gear on your back. So boosting your initial hydration right away with water you know is safe gives you a huge leg up. Do yourself a favor, if you

Generally speaking, how much water you need to pack depends on your environment. If you're in a fairly lush area with regular rainfall or reasonably common streams, you will be able to get water on the way. The deserts of Arizona or California, not so much so you'll need to pack more. This directly interfaces with your food choices, dried foods like jerky and lentils or salty foods like mixed nuts and peanut butter don't really give you the weight advantage if you're having to carry the extra water for them, and wetter foods pay off more. In general, you should have a plan on where you're going to go well before the emergency and note the prevalence of water up-front while making that plan.

In general, water will come from five sources:

Bottled Water
Expensive, heavy, but you need a few of these. Choose half-liter bottles and reject other sizes, there's a good reason for this. Save those bottles after you've drunk from them to refill. Carried water has the advantage of always being available, and also the advantage of not requiring you to stop or do anything but grab the bottle. This can be critical if you feel you're in immediate danger or you're trying to avoid other people. It's also pretty important if you can't guarantee a chance to gather water.

Boiled Water
The gold standard against which all other waters are measured. In a survival situation, if at any time you are stopped and there is burnable fuel nearby, you should immediately boil water to add to your supply. Historically this was the case for the British, who had "immediately make a pot of tea" as their doctrine. The boiling guaranteed a safe drink and helped keep the army hydrated at all times.

Boiling for five minutes kills everything, and a great many volatile toxins like benzene will boil out too. Boiling generally does nothing for debris, dirt, or dust, so running the water through a cheap filter or bandana can help a lot. Military canteens are typically made of stainless steel and designed so that you can put them right on the fire and boil your water that way. Any steel canteen can be used this way provided it's single wall, that is, not insulated in any way. Stainless steel imparts a metallic taste to the water, if you find this unbearable a titanium canteen will do the same job without the taste. It will be lighter weight but also much more expensive.

Rainwater
Rainwater is safe to drink without any treatment. If you have a tarp or poncho, it's well worthwhile to collect rainwater if you get the chance. Well water is typically also safe if you happen to be able to stop at a friendly farmhouse and they have a hand pump instead of an electric one, but that's a sadly unlikely scenario today. City water is likely to become unavailable quickly but grabbing it while you can will help. Sadly, rain isn't predictable so while a nice bonus, it's not something you can ever count on having.

Filtered Water
There are a number of inexpensive filters available. The current choice among hikers is the Sawyer Squeeze or Mini. I have these in my pack, they weigh only a couple of ounces, can filter at a reasonable clip, and one filter is good for 100,000 gallons of water so they don't wear out easily. A squeeze filter will remove all dirt, debris, bacteria, and parasites but does nothing for viruses or toxins. In the US this is pretty much sufficient, there are few waterborne viruses. Other filter options include filter straws that fit inside a bottle and gravity filters that can stockpile water over time while hanging from a tree branch. Squeeze filters can also be used in-line from a hydration bladder though I personally find the flow too slow to be desirable there. A good second option are filter straws that fit directly into a bottle and filter it as you drink.

There are a number of other filter options too, most of which use some variety of muscle power to operate pumps. I have tested a few and found the others are usually heavier for the same performance as the squeeze, however. A downside of the squeeze is that I find it hard to fill the bags unless I can find running water. The best trick is to use a ziplock baggie with just one corner cut off, fill the baggie from your standing water then put the corner into the squeeze bag's mouth to fill it.

Treated Water
Tablets of iodine or similar have been in use for ages and kill all germs but do nothing for toxins or debris. The standard-size tablet treats 1 quart or half a liter of water, which is why half-liter water bottles are ideal. Once you've drunk them you can refill them from a convenient stream or lake and pop in a tablet. You can easily pick up a hundred tablets for the price of a meal and the bottle will weigh less than an ounce. The water from these tends to taste a bit weird so it's a good idea to test it out before you're committed and employ water flavoring if needed. Also, the actual process is slightly complex, normally you need the bottle lid loose for a few minutes to outgas, then seal it tightly to let the chemicals work for half an hour or so. Read the instructions carefully and, as with all survival gear, do a test run or two to make sure you already know how it works rather than trying to read an instruction manual by flashlight during a thunderstorm. If you choose to take a metal canteen,

Overall I advise using... all of these methods. Water is too vital to rely on a single source and most of them are lightweight enough that packing a filter and tablets and boiling when you travel are all viable, and you need at least a few bottles both for refilling purposes and because you can't guarantee there will be a convenient stream or puddle to filter in the first place.

Other Useful Items

Hydration Bladder
Many military-style backpacks and hiking packs like the Camelback include a bladder at the top with a mouthpiece that rests on your shoulder, allowing you to continually sip on the move. This can be a significant advantage over drinking from bottles as it encourages you to constantly drink rather than grabbing at a bottle when stopped for a moment, slowing dehydration compared with other methods of drinking. Some water filters are designed to go in-line with the bladder to filter as you drink.

Bandana
I intend to give the bandana its own article eventually, few items provide as many benefits to survival in the same weight class as a bandana. Special water filter bandanas are available to strain particles out of water before boiling, but even a regular bandana will sift most of it away and make boiled water cleaner and more palatable.

Jerry Cans
Jerry cans are too heavy and bulky to carry by hand but if you have any chance of escaping by vehicle, you should always take it, and throwing an extra 25 gallons of water in the car gives you a great head start.

Solar Still
There are a number of ways to get the sun to evaporate and purify water for you, ranging from the old trick of digging a hole and covering it with a plastic sheet to solar cones to the trick of cutting the bottom of a plastic bottle and folding up the inner edge. These have the advantage of requiring no fuel or effort on your part, but the disadvantage is that most of them don't produce that much water and need to sit around all day to do that. Solar stills simply don't cut it if you're on the move, though larger immobile ones can be a good investment if you've reached where you're planning to stay for a while. The exception to this is if you're escaping by boat since salty or contaminated water is always available and you don't have to carry the still around. Boats often include a solar still as an emergency water source.

Additives
Packets of electrolytes like instant Gatorade, vitamin C shots, or other vitamin packets can add some flavor and nutrition if you're on the go and really sweating a lot. The weight isn't very high but check ingredients carefully to make sure you're not getting empty calories from sugar but rather electrolytes and vitamins. If you're a caffeine addict some instant coffee or teabags won't be heavy enough to be a problem, and coffee filters or teabags can also be used to filter particles from surface water so there's some utility there.