Im sold! I'm going to order the cold steel shovel when I get paid. Sunday I'm going to hike cowles mountain with the pack to ensure it can hold up to the abuse and to ensure I can too. How many of you guys have thrown on your packs and give it a test drive?

I can only speak for myself, but I don't unless down range. At home I have case of bottled water in the truck for use. This way the water wouldn't get stagnate.


CD

It's called rotating your supplies...

And no, I don't keep anything in my camelbaks. I just make sure they're good and dry and roll up the bladders.

I heart this thread.

haven't spent much time on the SF for the last couple of years, but that was an extremely hot topic back around 2006-2007. there are a couple of salient points to be considered. first, water is very expensive to carry calorie-wise. while the load decreases as you go, you're probably not going to be able to carry more than a gallon of water at a time. therefore, that water has to be a backup to finding water as you go. you will need purification options, and you will need to route accordingly––water becomes the single most important consideration for your routing if you're going to be on the road for more than 2 days. your single best resource for this is google earth/google maps.

i use heavy khakis, but i'm in a pretty dry area. aside from that, IMO the goal for a bug-out is immediately to get out of an urban area. after that, it's safe and steady progress––not fast. so i'm prepared to be uncomfortable, and i'm also prepared to take my time and be methodical. so being weighted down with soaked pants isn't early as big a problem as having my clothing fail.

I've read the same thing.
These guys are some of the best if not the best in survival training so I would
feel very confident in using a lot of their methods.

i pack dry/wet.
what i hike in gets taken off in camp,dry sets put on for bed time/dry time. in the AM. on goes the ddirty sweaty stuff i wore the day before. Why dirty more clothes when you cant wash them anyway while on the move.
Plus it cuts weight and imhowhen you change to dry it gives you time to do hygene and body checks ( ticks, or other parasites, and get clean)

BlackHelo –

Your comments about bug-in/hunker down, particularly with kids, resonated with me. I live in suburban Wisconsin, ~25 miles from downtown Milwaukee, pretty far from the main highways, etc. I have 2 kids, a 6YO and a 5YO. I’ve been focusing most of my efforts on a hunker-down scenario. My thought process is that for any catastrophic events, that it’s likely to be a blizzard, tornado, or some kind of extended power outage. I’m making sure we have a reasonable amount of food stockpiled, and working on backup power and heat, making sure I have a full, spare cylinder for the gas grill, etc.

In case of a bug out scenario, I’ve started to pull together the things I might need into a couple of boxes/areas around the house. MRE’s, some survival gear, FAK, etc in boxes in the bedroom closet, food in the first floor pantry, plastic sheeting/hand tools/rope in the basement work area, and camping gear in the garage (obviously have firearms and ammo as well). I then have a sheet with the list of all the areas I need to hit if I need to BO. Bottom line is with a relatively unprepared wife and two younger kids, I’m not bugging out anywhere on foot, so I’ve stashed things in logical areas, so if we did need to leave, we could get out relatively quickly, get everything into the truck, and go. All that said, I’m flip-flopping in my mind . . . on one hand, I’m reading other people’s plans, and feeling like I’m not planning enough, and then on the other hand, the reality of having 2 younger kids sets in, and backpacking tens of miles with them becomes pretty unreasonable, particularly during winter snow. So I’d appreciate people’s thoughts on bugging in vs bugging out . . . is there some sort of sliding scale, where it makes more sense to focus more heavily on bugging in, at a slight expense of focusing less on bugging out?

Also, for BOL’s, what types of BOL’s are people thinking about? Does everybody own second parcels of land/houses, etc? That’s not realistic for me, so I’m kinda curious what people are using for BOL’s, so I can better prepare. Right now, in the event of a minor evacuation, I’d relocate to my parent’s house but only if I needed to leave my home. Their house is further away from the city, but closer to a main highway, so I wouldn’t plan on leaving right away. My in-laws live further away from the city, and live near a lake, so that would be a secondary “if I really needed to get the hell out of dodge” scenario, in a catastrophic scenario like a chemical/biological attack on Milwaukee.

I’d love to get feedback . . . does anybody else have similar bug-in plans? What are people using for BOL’s? Pick apart my plan and offer constructive advice.

Thanks

Go butcher a couple of animals with that rascal and get back to us on how good a "survival" knife it is.

That is impressive to say the least.Hmmm.

To clarify how I use them in my pack...
Most of Arcteryx's gear comes in natural colors that would blend when going from an urban environment to a natural one.

The Rampart Pants come in at an impressive 10.1 oz, then their Skyline Shirt came in at 6.4 oz. I vacuum sealed these together in a food storage bag along with a Classic Beanie (I shave my head). This allowed me to carry a change of clothes in a compact size weighing just a little over 1 pound.

I plan on doing this for my car also.