Category: Retreat Groups

Letter Re: As Preppers We Must Invest in Our Marriages

My most important prep, While most people start by thanking Captain Rawles, and rightly so, I would like to thank Dan in Montana.  I’d also like to start with a question.  Has anything every just hit you and made you think, “that’s been it all the time?!”  Well it just happened to me.  I have been prepping for several years now and even farther back if I think about it.  So it seems like an easy question, what is my most important prep.  I have seen my focus change over the years.  It has changed, as I have changed.  Being …


Preparedness and Divorce, by Dan in Montana

“We” had been prepping since Y2K, reading, watching, canning, storing, organizing, teaching and moving to the North West Montana mountains. A Monday morning knock at the door three months ago changed everything.  At the door was a court appointed clerk serving me divorce papers. The crash I felt was not the economy or a gale force wind blowing down my house.  My entire world had just collapsed around me. For me the TEOTWAWKI just occurred. It took hours to orientate myself, stop my head from spinning, re-read the court papers and try to accept what had happened. My wife of …


Letter Re: Advice on Family Preparedness

Sir, I’m a suburbs dweller, living about 25 miles out of Milwaukee. I’ve gotten my mom–who lives nearby–into prepping. (Loaning her my copy of your “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It” book worked!) So what do I do next, to get her farther down the road [to prepping]? I bought her a Kat[adyn water] filter. She has no clue about storage of foods. (We aren’t one of those “canning” families.) I bought myself a bunch of MREs and Mountain House foods, but she can’t afford to [do likewise], since she’s a retired school teacher. …


Letter Re: Jewish Resistance During WWII

James, Your mention of Zus Bielski’s birthday and the film Defiance. (and the book upon which it is based) brought to mind an excellent 90-minute documentary by PBS, “Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans,” produced in 2001. It is available online at Vimeo.  (or from PBS Home Video on DVD) It includes interviews with many partisans among them Aron Bielski, the youngest of the brothers (still living). After more than half a century since the holocaust, the myth still persists that all of the Jews just walked peacefully to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.  Nothing could be …


A Written Plan for Your Preparedness, by M.B.

I am an active prepper. I do not have a retreat or bug-out vehicle (yet), but I do what I can for bugging-in and preparing for emergencies. I have extensive food and water preps, tactical supplies, and all of the other trappings of modern-day prepping. Although my family is aware of my prepping, and support my efforts, they are not “in the loop” with how to do what, when to do it, and what to do it with. I have come to realize that many of my preps will be useless if anything happens to me. A good example of …


The Importance of Prepping Together, by F.G.

As I imagine many of the readers on this site, I once found myself somewhat isolated in my prepping, embarrassed to let on to how I felt, why I prep, et cetera . My family is very close, very involved in each others lives, and I couldn’t imagine or want it any different. My entry into this contest will be an explanatory background on myself and my preps, followed by a realistic guideline on how to “save the ones that matter” to you; or at least, my means of doing so. I am a young, 30 year old father of …


Letter Re: Prepping and a Terminal Cancer Diagnosis

JWR, We’ve been preppers since the late 1970s when we were living in a New Jersey seaside apartment and our long term food was stored under furniture in a 400 square foot apartment.  After that a job relocation to a more rural area enabled us to buy a 35 acre fixer-upper farm where we lived for 16 years and learned how to garden, raise livestock, heat with wood, and become generally self-sufficient.  Then we bought our second rundown farm in upstate New York (we were suckers for fixing up dilapidated farmhouses) and started up a commercial sheep operation on 360 …


The Night I Became a Community Organizer, by Sergeant Dad

We started “Prepping” the day I was issued my DD-214 from the 2nd Marine Air Wing back in 1970. Even way back then the writing was on the wall if you cared enough to take a hard look and pay attention.   The VietNam War was pulling this country apart. “So you don’t believe, we’re on the Eve of Destruction?” We swallowed John Prine’s antidote, hook, line and sinker. “Blow up your TV, throw away your paper Go to the country, build you a home Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches Try an find Jesus on your …


Bugging Out of the City with Your Family, by O. Dog

The never-ending threat of the TEOTWAWKI looms in the depth of all of our minds.  My work experience lays primarily in public safety, government peroration to emergency response, tactical team assaults, gang mentality and survival, logistics and law enforcement radio communication.  My personal experience is very broad beginning with my first job at age 15, working continuously through college, being married for the past 16 years to my “high school sweetheart” and raising three young children.  I have been validated in court as an expert in several fields regarding gangs, firearms and narcotics.  I would like to share with you …


Getting Out After a Trigger Event, by Paul H.

Despite years of reading valid arguments for moving to the American Redoubt or other remote area, of the hundreds of preppers I’ve met I can count on one hand those who made the move and most of those were retired.  I meet relatively few preppers living at a secluded retreat, a few with secondary retreats, many planning to bug out to property they do not own (hopefully by agreement), and the majority still living in and around cities with no alternative plan to shelter in place.  Only one of those four types I just described is unlikely to be on …


How to Budget for TEOTWAWKI, by Louie in Ohio

Prepping is never far from my mind. A few months ago I was talking with a friend and the subject of TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We know It) came up. Tom (not his real name) said that he would like to prepare for upcoming emergencies but didn’t know where to start. The answer was simple; start where you are. Obviously most people cannot start with a full larder and weapons/ammunition cache. That is of course, unless you really do have all of that, in that case…well, that’s where you are. I asked Tom what scenarios he wanted …


The Family SHTF Operations Manual, by Col. H.

SurvivalBlog provides a wealth of prep-related information. Many here cut and paste critical essays to store as Word documents for safekeeping and later access when crisis times call for it. I suggest going one step further. Build a structured notebook of your family’s prep information, with each topic index tabbed for easy access and available for all family-tribe members to consult when the need arrives. Let this notebook become your family’s SHTF collapse response manual, your SOP for surviving a collapse. People panic and make fatal errors under crisis when they do not have enough information and do not know …


Two Sisters Like Peas in in a Pod, by Peggy W.

1

My sister and I both retired due to disabilities are working as we can trying to prepare for the family. Often, we say did we really do that, like talking to a stranger in our local Wal-Mart and saying we would like some green beans and he happened to have about a bushel in his truck he had not sold so, we got them and yielded 14 quarts of beans we needed. Ask and ye shall receive hit us in the face so hard, Thanks be to God! We are on an extremely small budget but we continue to buy …


Interrogation for Preppers, by Tim G.

(Editor’s Introductory Note: The following article is presented as an intellectual exercise, or gedanken. Be forewarned that there are mentions of torture (mental and physical) herein which are of course not conscionable behavior! But this mention is only for the sake of showing the full range of potential interrogation techniques, and as a warning that in the future — under different circumstances — you might have to be prepared to resist interrogation. “Forewarned is fore-armed.” Again, none of the following is intended to encourage any SurvivalBlog readers to do anything immoral, or illegal, or unethical. It is in your own …


A Family Bike Camping Experience Sheds Light on Bug Out Treks, by J.E. in St. Paul

My experience this past weekend camping with two of my friends and all of our children reminded me of the difficulties that one would have in a TEOTWAWKI situation.  To begin with I have two friends that I have known since jr high or longer.  We have, since that time spent lots of time together camping, hiking, biking, canoeing and any of a number of other outdoor adventures.  We have climbed over 12,000 foot passes while backpacking and ridden our bikes for hundreds of miles, camping along the way.  When we began having children we decided that we would do …