Category: Survival Mindset

Cache and Carry, by Highlander

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Like many of you, I consider having buried caches a critical part of being prepared. However, I don’t have the land or finances necessary to bury multiple 55-gallon drums full of food, guns, and ammo miles from my house, and in a time-sensitive situation spending an hour or two digging up a huge cache may not be possible. I’m not saying that larger caches are a bad idea (I have a few spread around), but like all of my other preparations, having a multi-layered approach makes the most sense for me. I live in a rural-suburban area, with 1-2 acre …


Letters Re: My Family Preparedness Plan, by R.S.

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R.S., Wow. I found this to be a grim and sobering article but one of the most sound that I have read to date. I don’t think anyone could cover all the myriads of possible scenarios, but this gives a great launching point for most I can imagine. Thank you for your time in writing such a good article. – J.W. o o o HJL, Most deaths in a post-EMP or post-solar-flare/grid-down situation will be from the combination of starvation and disease. Starvation can be prevented by storing sufficient food to last until the next crop comes in. Disease can …


Two Letters Re: My Family Preparedness Plan, by R.S.

Hugh, As the article observes, silver will be more useful in small denominations. My question is: How will sellers recognize that “junk silver” has more than face value, and how will that value be determined? – RJB HJL’s Comment: Junk silver has the advantage of being widely recognizable, and the smallish value as well as the wear and tear that it already has makes it harder to counterfeit. It certainly has a distinctive look to it and is easy to evaluate. It will not take long for that value to be recognized and established. As to what that value is? …


Letter Re: My Family Preparedness Plan, by R.S.

Hugh, The best books I have read concerning an EMP are Lights Out by Ted Koppel and Collapse You’re On Your Own by Kay Mahoney. One is fiction, and one nonfiction tells us all we need to know about a terrible event. The first book examines the reality of our delicate electronic infrastructure and how easily it can be shut down. The second book tells the story of the aftermath of an EMP on regular, small town folks, like us, and how we might handle the calamity. I like my electricity and the comforts it provides to me and my …


Letters Re: My Family Preparedness Plan – Part 1, by R.S.

SurvivalBlog had an overwhelming number of people write in about this article. We’ve tried to pick a few of the letters Reader PWS has a pretty good grasp of the whole EMP issue: There is much mythology around EMP. Based on testing done by the Congressional Commission To Assess The Threat of EMP To the U.S., only about 6% of the national light vehicle fleet will be EMP-ruined. The main problem for most will be fuel. Second, EMP will not damage solar panels in a significant way. Some suffered up to 10% degradation but kept working just fine. The charge …


My Family Preparedness Plan- Part 2, by R.S.

Grid Down (continued) Given the specific differences in this scenario, the steps would vary post-event. This event will be different in its onset. With an EMP event, panic will set in much more quickly. When everything ceases functioning simultaneously, even if people don’t know what’s happened, they are going to know something has happened, and mobs don’t usually react with calm reasoning. If the power goes out, even a widespread outage, it isn’t a huge cause for alarm initially because people are used to power outages. Thus, you’ll have a bit more time to get things in order. What to …


My Family Preparedness Plan- Part 1, by R.S.

We live in an uncertain world. Riots have popped up in cities across the United States under the guise of righteous protests of elections or officer-involved shootings. Terrorists have taken to the streets in attacks both large and small. Hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes have wiped out entire cities. Our economy is under siege from within and without. Ebola, Zika, West Nile, and H1N1 have dominated headlines, though admittedly done little damage. The ability and precedent for grid failure are ever present. And finally, and maybe most nefariously, our very own government waits in the wings for any one of these …


SurvivalBlog Resources: The Diabetic Prepper’s Dilemma

Introductory Note: The following is another in a series of articles by JWR that will link to some of the thousands of archived SurvivalBlog articles, grouped topically. Today we address the issue of diabetes, with an emphasis on the particular requirements of preppers. Because 21st Century Americans are collectively both over-fed and incorrectly fed on sugary “junk food”, diabetes now affects more of our citizens than ever before. According the American Diabetes Association, 29.1 million Americans (9.3% of the population) had diabetes, as of 2012. Of those, about 1.25 million Americans (both children and adults) have the dreaded Type 1 …


Saying Goodbye to the Worst Camo Pattern, Ever

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In 2015, with the rollout of Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP)—a slight variation of the Crye Multicam pattern, the U.S. Army announced that it is nearing the end of issuing the much-hated Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP, also known as the Army Combat Uniform or ACU), a conspicuous grayish blob pattern that is actually prominent against most natural backgrounds. The transition from the UCP to OCP Multicam is taking four years. The last day that the UCP uniforms are still authorized for wear for the U.S. Army will be September 30th, 2019. All that I can say is, good riddance to the …


Letter Re: Surviving Custer

HJL, Almost all vehicles have a purely mechanical lock in the door for when the battery is dead or similar failure, and these are the simple flat keys which you can just keep with you in your wallet or keychain or hidden somewhere instead of the fat remotes and can be duplicated most places that do other keys. If you get a spare security key, you can keep it in the (locked) glove compartment or some other secure place; you’ll need the anti-theft feature of the fat key to start the car. There is also the common scenario where you …


The Accidental Survivalist, by Athena

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Allow me to first apologize for all of my ignorant assumptions about a survivalist lifestyle. I grew up in a life of prudence and subsistence, and I swore I’d never put myself in a position to have to homestead or subsist again. During the hot summer at the canning tables and fish smoking racks, I swore I’d grow up to live in cities with abundant grocery outlets, fancy cafes, and pastry shops on every corner near my cute little apartment. Never again would my life rotate around a harvest schedule or my weekends spent in hunting tents. But life is …


Letter Re: Surviving Custer

Hugh,I always keep a hide-a-key attached to my car for situations just like your reader at the Custer Monument. It has saved my bacon more than once when far from home. If you have an older car, it is relatively simple to get spare keys made and tucked away in a magnetic hide-a-key box under the vehicle. However, with today’s anti-theft keys, there are some challenges you must overcome. First, if you live where the temperature drops below freezing, the battery in the electronic key fob can become frozen and not operate. When this happens just tuck it under your …


Letter Re: RS’s Story

Hugh, I read RS’s story with interest in the March 18th entry. It seems like it’s one of those situations that slowly snowballs out of control but thankfully had a happy ending. Personally, I would have called either the police or a tow service from the lodge to get into the “locked” car (although it turned out to be unnecessary), but I am mostly writing to suggest that RS invest in a couple of those FRS radios from the big box store or Amazon. While they don’t get nearly the range advertised, it may have allowed for communication during the …


Surviving Custer, by R.S.

Let’s be honest, how many of you ever expect to find yourself in a survival situation? You’ve probably day dreamed about it, wondering how you’d fare. The fact is, we don’t walk out the door in the morning expecting to find ourselves in a predicament. I certainly never expected to find myself in such a “survival” situation on a summer day in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. Yet, there I was facing such a situation just last summer. We had finally taken our long-awaited family vacation “out West”. We live in the suburbs outside a large Midwestern city. So the …


Preparing Out of Necessity, by B.H.

Many articles regarding prepping and “how-to” leave me to wonder how people survive in this world. I’m not judging, as only GOD can; rather, I am perplexed at how they can afford it. You see, many of the skills being taught are just what I had to figure out in order to get by. I learned how to fix machinery myself because if I did not these things would no longer be of use to me. I learned how to buy second hand because I simply cannot afford new. I learned to garden in order in eat; the why in …