Wilderness Survival

I titled this "Wilderness Survival instead outdoor survival because this is the one where you may want to go into the wilderness and disappear, at least for a while. This is the case of wanting to get away from whatever is happening. While most of us will never venture into true wilderness for any length of time, the time may come when some of us want to. To those that want to and can handle it, this could be one way to survive panics, rioting, martial law and other scenarios.

There are several things that a person could do. You could possibly take a van or a small camping trailer and drive it as far into the woods as possible. You would then need to do an excellent camouflage job on it so it could not be seen from the air and would be very, very difficult for anyone but you to find on the ground. I personally have a pop-up camper that I keep fully equipped. However, I do not intend it to be a wilderness camping unit. My idea, other than using it for pleasure camping, is to go to some remote state or national forest and camp should rioting or other panics occur. I would not want to use it for a hiding place during martial law or other time when our government decided to round up all survivalists and put them in a camp. For this purpose I have another camping method prepared. This is my backpack method of disappearing.

First you will need a pack that is large enough to hold a lot of equipment, but yet is not so heavy that you have a lot of trouble carrying it. I do not carry a tent in my backpack, I carry only a light five foot by seven foot tarp. I can use it as a lean to, a ground cloth or I can wrap up in it. You can obtain woodland camo tarps at a very reasonable price. I have been keeping a mummy style sleeping bag with my pack but in the name of weight and space I may switch to a wool blanket. If you wrap up in a wool blanket and also wrap the tarp around you, you can stand some fairly cold temperatures. I intend to test my theory out when winter returns to Wisconsin. Until then I will keep my sleeping bag with my pack.

Here is an idea which I know will work. I have not used it for many years but used it in my younger years. All you need to do is to pull up a pile of leaves and other forest floor debris into a pile about three feet wide, seven feet long and three feet high. Now if you crawl right into the middle of it you will stay warm in temperatures down to the mid twenties. With your wool blanket you could probably stay warm in below zero weather, I am not sure because I have not tried it with the wool blanket. You could also carry a couple of the small, cheap space blankets. With a foot of leaves on the ground, a space blanket shiny side up on top of that and the second blanket shiny side down then a couple of more feet of leaves and when you crawl between the two space blankets, I do not see ever being cold. This would allow you to not carry a heavy sleeping bag or even a blanket and it would also eliminate the tent. By the time I get the whole list ready for you, you may want to leave the tent and blanket home.

I will pick this subject up again next week, but now as I promised last week, we are going to start building a medical case. This is not going to be a first-aid kit not even a well stocked first-aid kit, this is going to be and honest to goodness real medical kit. You may be able to do much more than first aid with it. The reason for it is that if we head for the wilderness or even if we are stranded in our present locations, we may not be able to get to a doctor or a hospital.

First we need a way to carry all of the items needed and there will be a lot of them. I was going to use a fifty caliber ammo box, but decided that I would rather have a soft pack. I am ordering a surplus medical bag used by a foreign army. It has several pockets and looks like it will hold the many items I am going to put in it. I am going to try to limit the purchases to a half dozen per week to keep this within most of our budgets. This week, besides the container put aside or in the container if you have it: a box of regular band aids, hydrocortosine creme (1 tube), spray disinfectant, a bottle of one hundred aspirin and a roll of medical paper tape.

I will be continuing both subjects next week. Until then "prepare".