I’m fairly new to SurvivalBlog but now it’s an every day read. I wanted to write and share my own journey of preparedness with you and your readers. After living with three and a half million people for about 22 years, a move to the country was long over due. I made the decision to get out of the city back in 1999, when I starting to take things a bit more seriously with all of the talk about Y2K. I was really hoping that something would have happened back then so I could test my skills at being prepared for it. I fear that those skills will be tested in the not too distant future none-the-less. Like you, I grew up in the age of bomb shelters and the threat of nuclear attack. My father was a member of the Civil Defense and I remember a small book that he gave me that showed how to build a fallout shelter in your basement. I always wished he would have done that but it never happened. What a great little fort that would have made for me and my brother, more on that later.
Anyway, I have wanted to live in the mountains since I was 12 years old so I headed out to the Rockies in search of a good bug out spot. I found just the right spot out in the middle of nowhere, 36 acres off a dirt road with the nearest Wal-Mart on the other side of the mountain range. It took another 5 or 6 years to actually be able to make the move. I was fortunate enough to start dating a like minded gal before the move and the minute we started talking about bug out bags and storing food, I knew I found myself a winner. We sold most of my furniture and put my home up for sale and were finally able to make the big move to our retreat property and start getting things situated.
Since we settled down we have been able to stock up on about two years worth of food, medical supplies, gasoline and diesel etc. To date we’ve put up about a ½ ton of wheat and a ½ a ton of corn, beans and rice. More than enough for us and enough to share with those that haven’t or couldn’t do it on their own. I love making things from scratch, so owning a welding and fabricating business has been a huge blessing as we are able to make most anything right here in the shop. And those things don’t necessarily have to be made from metal. We’ve been able to fabricate everything from a well water retrieval bucket made of pvc to our own colloidal silver generator to our bio diesel processing set-up. We converted an old exercise bike into a pedal powered grain grinder and I’ve made a lead melting pot so we can pour our own ammo and start loading it once we set up a loader. We have made a solar oven, solar air heaters for the roof of the shop and will be putting together a solar hot water heater real soon.
The shop has a small lathe, mill, drill press, cutting torch set up, MIG, TIG, Arc, and Plasma machines with two generators, sheet metal bender, notcher, roller, English Wheel and a ton of various hand tools. The hand tools will be a real important part of the operation when there is no more power from the grid and the gas for the generators runs out. We’ll be putting together a Faraday shielded box for some of our electronics in case of an EMP. In this box we will store a spare computer set up, radios, walkie talkies and anything with a circuit board that we don’t want to do without. Granted, the Internet may become a thing of the past but we have a lot of valuable information stored on hard drives and discs, we’re talking thousands of pages of info, and if we have a working computer, then we can access that info when needed.
Speaking of information, our survival library is currently at over 75 books, so at least some of our information is accessible without a computer. A few of the books and magazines that I would personally recommend would be “Dare To Prepare” by Holly Deyo, “The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It” by John Seymour, The Foxfire Book Series
Every library should have books on gardening, first aid, holistic medicines and any skills that you might consider learning. It could be hunting or fishing or re-loading ammo or carpentry, canning, raising livestock or whatever peaks your interest. ‘Never stop learning’ is a good motto to hold on to. We try to learn something new every day. And this blog is a great way to do that.
We’ve been able to put in a huge garden, two greenhouses and I take a deer right off the land each year to put in the freezer. Moving here really has been a dream come true. Many of our friends here in the mountains feel the same way as we do about what the future holds and it amazes us as to how many people are getting ready for what’s to come. And yet we only discuss it with a select few from our church.
We have always felt that this was our bug out retreat since we left the hordes, but lately we’ve been wondering what we would do if we had to bug out of here. So, as soon as the ground thaws this spring, we start the next big project, an underground bunker. Dug into the side of our mountain, it will be made out of cinder blocks with the roof made out of ½” thick channel iron, since we just happen to have a bunch of that laying around. Then the entire thing will be buried under about 2 or 3’ of soil and will have two steel doors and even a periscope that I’ve made out of two 90-degree fittings and a couple of mirrors that we found at the hobby store. That way we will at least have a small view of the outside world if we have to hunker down for an extended period of time. Our biggest problem will be concealing everything with the proper camouflage, the tube that the periscope will be housed in, a solar panel to help keep the battery charged, a wire antenna for a radio and one of the steel doors will all be outside of the shelter. I‘m enjoying the other posts on this site of other shelters and would like to see more folks write in with their ideas. There are some pretty talented folks on this site.
My father has been a Ham for as long as I can remember and before too long I will be getting my Ham radio license and that will be another big asset for this whole effort. We’ll even try to install a transceiver in the shelter so we can keep in touch with the outside world.
I’ve read quite a bit on this site about obtaining skills for when TSHTF and couldn’t agree more. One of the first things I did when we got settled in was to join the local Search & Rescue team and Volunteer fire dept. and not long ago I got involved in a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). The training that I’ve received from each of these has been invaluable. Skills like wilderness first aid, CPR, rock climbing, rope rescue techniques, evacuation, firefighting, use of radio and much more. It takes a lot of personal time but I urge others to make the commitment and learn as much as they can. Being involved in these organizations might also give us a heads up with some advanced information and that could come in real handy.
Another thing we’ve done here is to load up a number of six gallon buckets with all sorts of items that we might need if we had to evacuate the house for some reason. These buckets hold some emergency supplies like food, bottled water, meds, blankets, tarps, rope, fire starters, gloves, socks, knife, flashlight, spare batteries and a small Sterno stove to heat water with. It’s amazing how much stuff you can cram into a six gallon bucket if you do it right. These buckets are buried strategically throughout the property. We keep the locations handy so we can get to the nearest bucket, dig it up and at least have some supplies to work with. In each bucket taped to the lids are the locations of the other buckets. Chances are pretty slim that anyone would find any of the caches by accident, being that all the buckets are buried on our own property and well camouflaged. All of the containers have a good seal around the lid to prevent moisture from getting in and when we bury them we have a piece of plywood cut in a circle that is an inch or two larger in diameter than the bucket. This helps keep the dirt off the lids when we need to dig them up. Each bucket is buried only a few inches below ground level and we stash a small garden shovel nearby underneath a rock, bush or by a tree trunk to make it easier to get the buckets out in a hurry.
As far as transportation goes, we have a gas powered pick up, a diesel pickup and a 1970s-vintage Jeep that has no [microprocessor] electronics in it that would be affected by an EMP. We burn vegetable oil in the diesel during the summer months, the harsh winters here make it a bit too thick to use, even with the additives we put in to help thin it out. I would also suggest that you get a good bike for each family member, know how to tune it up, know what the most common items are that would break and how to repair them. Have the right tools to carry on the bike and know how to use them. Here in the mountains we are a long way from anything and someday a bicycle might be the fastest way to get there. But in a big pinch there is always foot power. You obviously need to have good packs that fit well and a couple of comfortable pairs of hiking boots. You also need to maintain good physical health if you plan on hoofing a lot.
We try to teach others to be prepared as well. Not necessarily for TEOTWAWKI kind of thing but for the more common ‘what if’ scenarios like bad weather, power outages etc. We feel that if we can get our family members to consider those scenarios then they will be able to use that knowledge in case things really do hit the fan. It’s pretty frustrating knowing that my loved ones will not leave the big city and are pretty clueless as to how to survive when things take a turn for the worse. All we can do is pray for them and hope that they get a clue before it’s too late.
I know some readers will be thinking that we have it made being able to have a retreat, vehicles and a business that allows us to fabricate most of the things we need. Much of the emergency items we have were purchased from yard sales and thrift stores. We also barter for a lot of items and services. No doubt we’ve been blessed but it was not easy in any sense of the word. When we first got here we lived in an old camper with no water, shower or toilet for 14 months. We started out with a bucket for a toilet until we could get a port-a-potty hauled in. That was reason for celebration! It took about a year to get our place built and has been an ongoing struggle the whole time. But it has all been worth it. Being out in the middle of nowhere, we had no idea how we would make a living. It took about two more years to make a name for ourselves in the fabricating business. But word of mouth is the best advertisement in tight knit localities like this. We depended on miracles almost every month (and still do) when we didn’t know where the money was going to come from to pay the mortgage. It was a big leap of faith moving here but that’s what we were led to do. That leads me to one more item to mention before I close and that is faith in God. As many others have stressed, getting yourself right with God is the most important thing you can do. Faith has brought us this far and we continue to build our faith as things start to look darker and darker by the day. Pray for each other for knowledge, provision, wisdom and discernment and that we’re on the other side of the fan when it finally hits!!