It’s been said that most American households only have enough food on hand for 2-3 days worth of meals. We tend to see this as factual, because of the run on grocery stores and corner markets that occur as even something as mundane as a winter storm approaches. In my experience though, glancing into the cabinets and pantries of people’s houses over the decades, while visiting, I tend to think this supposed “fact” is overblown.
To be sure, there may be only a few days worth of the components of the meals the family is accustomed to eating, but even in the least prepared households, I’ve almost always witnessed enough foodstuffs to feed the family for at least a week of 2-3 meals per day, contingent only on how that family defines “meal.” Most people today, after all, would not consider a bowl of oatmeal porridge to be a “breakfast.” Few people would consider a sandwich with a slice of bologna and a slice of cheese, with a smear of mustard or mayonnaise on it, to be a “lunch,” once they’re past grade school age. Most middle-class Americans would no longer consider a pot of beans to be a supper for their family. A significant portion of the problem with short-term emergency preparedness, in terms of food storage then, is not a lack of available calories, or even variety, but rather, the spoiled attitude of modernity.
Just a Minor Inconvenience
Over the last decade and a half, or more, despite their absolute shit performance after disasters like last year’s hurricane Helene, FEMA has at least done one thing right: they’ve begun to focus, in press briefings, and on the agency website, on the passing on the importance of disaster preparedness for self-reliance. This started out, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, twenty years ago, with the recommendation that people build simple 72-hour kits for every member of their family, but in more recent years, has progressed to further recommendations towards increased self-reliance with suggestions like having a two-week supply of food and water on hand at home, as well as having vehicle emergency kits when traveling. For all the—sometimes tremendous—flaws inherent in that federal agency—this at least, is a solid, valid recommendation, as a starting point for short-term preparedness.
Given human nature, and the ever-American quest to “make a buck,” price-gouging is not only the be expected, but has been witnessed in the near past, even absent scarcity.1 Any kind of localized disaster will almost certainly see severe deleterious impacts on many families, from an economic perspective. Not having to deal with “scalper” prices on essential survival items like foodstuffs, can keep those impacts from being ruinous. Recent history has illustrated that, even in the most calamitous localized disasters, the worst of the emergency—at least to the point of outside assistance beginning to arrive—is largely past within about two weeks. That doesn’t mean everything is back to normal, and peaches and rainbows, it just means additional assistance is generally available by that time. Having a plan to subsist for that two weeks—aside from the obvious black swan events like your house being buried in a mudslide, or a tornado flattening your apartment complex, or a wildfire actually turning your house, specifically, into a pile of cinders and ash—will allow you not only the ability to survive without ruination, but will also often provide the psychological and physical security buffer to allow you to be useful to your friends, family, and neighbors.
The common recommendation among preppers—especially the typical middle-class, soccer Mom turned preparedness guru, by virtue of a YouTube channel—is to simply stockpile more of what your family already consumes. While broadly good advice, there are a couple of considerations that should be kept in mind that I suspect their inexperience with actual field or disaster living conditions results in them overlooking.
I took a break this week from our ongoing discuss of both land navigation and tracking skills, to discuss something that occurred in a Search and Rescue Training event the other day, because it’s something that comes up here occasionally as well.
It’s seldom a bad thing to do a deep dive into the arcana of a training topic, but never make the mistake of thinking–as important as depth of knowledge is–that it’s more important than breadth of knowledge. Each has their place of importance, and WHICH is MORE important depends entirely on your personal contextual needs. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about combatives, physical fitness, fieldcraft, or gunfighting.
Why you should have a Silva Ranger….Just kidding…..sort of…..we look at some other options as well.
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance
Both natural and man-made disasters have always occurred. There’s nothing novel about their occurrence, despite the disaster porn ranting of the media. In my own lifetime, I’ve experienced tornadoes, wildfires, housefires, hurricanes, blizzards, chemical spills/leaks, and terrorism impacts, as well as war. While it’s sometimes hard to fathom that there are adults in society who were not even born when 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina occurred, anyone over the age of ten or so has been exposed to the reality of these occurrences, even if just via media reports.
This year is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which was—for many Americans—the first really major natural disaster to enter their consciousness: a disaster from which full recovery and rebuilding has still not occurred, and likely never will. For many Americans, even those who followed President G.W. Bush’s advice after 9/11 and “went back to the mall,” or who sleepwalked through the hype around Y2K’s potential, Katrina served as a wake-up call, that nobody was coming to save them. While many hit the metaphorical “snooze” button and rolled over to go back to sleep, a percentage of those so awakened remained awake and aware to the reality that preparedness, as a guarantor of safety and survival, is an American heritage birthright and obligation.
Over the last twenty years though, millions of Americans have again hit that “snooze” button and become complacent. Right and Left alike, the vast majority of Americans are content to sit idly by and expect someone else to come and save them. While it’s somewhat understandable, given the tax burden of the American citizen today, to expect that SOMETHING would be done to help, the response to Hurricane Helene, as well as the recent Los Angeles wildfires, should be illuminating.1 From political malfeasance and corporate greed, from threats of nuclear conflagration to insurance claim refusals; from relatively “minor” localized disasters to potential “world-ending” threats, planning ahead can make the difference, at least for you and your family, friends, and neighbors, between being a frightened, panicked victim, or a confidence, useful individual looking for work that needs to be done to contribute to the welfare and safety of those around you.
It’s often been said in disasters, “look for those who are doing.” The best option you have for survival and success in a disaster is not to look for guidance from those who are doing, but to be the one doing, that others are looking for. This is the epitome of the theme discussed in my book Forging the Hero.
In the military, whether for a short-term patrol, or the long-term preparedness of a unit to conduct it’s wartime missions, planning provides the guidance needed not just for specific actions, but also for the planning and preparation needed to be able and ready to achieve those specific actions. Having a plan will help you—and your kith-and-kin—successfully maximize the odds of successful survival for as many as possible, by providing specific SOP2s, allowing each of you to know what to do, and how to best do those tasks, as well as understanding what to expect from each other.
Short-Term THEN Long-Term
The panic created as a result of chaos and confusion in a disaster scenario are commonly as likely to result in catastrophe as the physical devastation of the event itself. Having a plan of action and response, prior to the beginning of need, can go a long way towards increasing your odds of survival and safety.
What threats are the most likely to occur in your area? Understanding what threats are actually likely will go a long way towards helping you avoid waste of your limited time and energy. Where I live, for example, hurricanes are never going to be a threat, and tornadoes are vanishingly rare. Since we are entirely off-grid, for my family, even power outages are simply not a factor for us to need to consider as they are for most people.
Winter storms, earthquakes3, and wildfires, on the other hand, are all common, regular occurrences here, both regionally and in our specific area, depending on season. It doesn’t make sense then, that we would focus our preparedness planning on hurricane threats then, does it? No more so than someone in Clearwater, Florida, or Baton Rouge, planning for a week-long blizzard!
I’ve long been an advocate of the school of thought that “if you prepare for TEOTWAWKI, then any lesser, localized disaster is no more than a minor inconvenience.” I still stand by that conviction, but I’ve come to recognize that, for someone who hasn’t been seriously considering the subject for years—or even decades—THAT can be overwhelming to the point of paralysis. That paralysis results in preparedness for even less encompassing disasters ends up not occurring.
On the other hand, here in our area, preparing to be snowed in for a week or more at a time, is a regular occurrence, at least for those of us in remote rural locations.4 Learning to plan for these “minor” emergencies serves two important purposes:
(1) it prepares you for these often frequent occurrences, so you’re not in the way, nor are you suffering needlessly over stupidity.
(2) It teaches you the processes and procedures needed to develop the mental framework to prepare for more severe, reaching disasters.
A young NCO team leader learns to plan, organize, and conduct “hip pocket” training long before he is promoted to platoon sergeant or first sergeant, where he is responsible for helping to develop and execute planning and training for the higher echelons of platoon and company. This serves the exact same purpose: by learning to execute smaller tasks, you learn the patterns and procedures needed to execute larger, exponentially more complex tasks.
The simple fact is, once an emergency commences, it’s too late to plan for that emergency. At that point, you’re stuck reacting. Whether you are reacting in blind panic, as things occur, in the often futile hope that something will work, or you are reacting to anticipated stimulus, with planned, effective courses-of-action, is dependent on whether you planned and prepared or not.
Sit down—preferably with your spouse and any children in the household old enough to contribute to the discussion—and consider what the top three most likely local disasters are, so you can make effective plans to confront those, when they occur. Packing a rifle and a plate carrier in your vehicle every time you leave the house, is utterly fucking pointless, if you don’t even bother keeping extra blankets and bottled water in your car in case of a breakdown or emergency that precludes getting home…
Too many Americans today try entirely too hard to shield their children from reality. Obviously, a major part of the responsibility of being a parent IS to protect our children, but keeping them blind to reality does not achieve that. Instead, it leaves them victim to circumstance. Prepare your children by having them contribute to the planning and preparation, at whatever level they’re capable of. That is probably a significantly greater level than you anticipate. It can range from helping to brainstorm solutions to helping organize and pack equipment. When it’s time to act on the planning, your children—from toddler to teen—are less likely to panic, and more likely to help you and themselves, if they’ve been given ownership in the process.
As you plan responses, identify “battle drills” and create actionable plans that can be practiced by all members of the family. As a family, discuss your plans. In our wildfire response plan, an example of this can be seen in our plans for gathering and moving the horses. While I am hooking up the trailer and moving it to a loading position, the older two kids’ task is to catch, halter, and tie the horses in the corral, so they’re ready to be loaded when I get the trailer hooked up and moved. Meanwhile, the youngest, the boy, is tasked with getting the other animals caught and tied, and start moving their food and dishes to a pre-determined point to be loaded in the truck as well.
Discuss your intended rendezvous locations, in case the family is not all together when disaster looms; discuss emergency contacts, both in the area and outside of the area. Discuss specific courses-of-action that every member of the family should take, in the case of each of the three emergency scenarios. Again, toddler to teenager—especially if they’re EVER away from your immediate physical control, such as at daycare or school, or even with a babysitter, while you are doing something else—involve your kids in this planning. Allow them to express their concerns and ask questions: allow them, and encourage them, to contribute ideas and possible solutions, no matter how initially outlandish those may seem. In a worst case scenario, you can always take the time to explain why their concern is groundless, or why their solution to a scenario may be sub-optimal. That’s how they learn.
Important Considerations
Ask some critical questions during your planning:
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Tracking is one of those outdoors skills, much like land navigation or fire building, where even the most amateur outdoorsman believes he is far more skilled than objective testing shows them to be, while the non-outdoorsman looks at it as some sort of epigenetic skill available only to a small population of indigenous peoples. There are both legitimate experts and almost clueless amateurs writing entire books on the subject.
In practice, tracking can range from rural kids trying to follow small game animals, to military and law enforcement personnel pursuing dangerous, armed fugitives. There are dozens, if not hundreds of books on the subject, ranging from the educational and useful, to the most absolute, utterly useless bullshit. There are numerous classes around the country, ranging from quality instruction in mantracking, by experienced combat trackers like John Hurth and David Scott-Donelon, and local courses put on by Search-and-Rescue teams, to nonsense “I learned from an old Indian” courses taught by self-professed experts who couldn’t track a muddy Labrador Retriever through a hospital.1
In this series of articles, I will discuss both the psychological and mental aspects of tracking, as well as the practical, including specific techniques, as well as training and practice methods. While this series is not, specifically, focused on mantracking, we will discuss aspects of that, as well as tracking game and other animals.
My introduction to tracking as a practical skill came about because of reading. As I read various fiction and nonfiction accounts of the American westward expansion, I would regularly come across references to tracking, both mundane, and—even to a young, impressionable pre-teen boy—obviously fanciful nonsense. Growing up in the woods, as I did, any apparently useful skill was of interest to me, and tracking seemed like one that should exist near the top of the pyramid! In pursuit of practical, real-world knowledge, I would ask the adults around me for advice and guidance, often to meet responses like “tracking is a lost art!” Others were honest enough to admit, “I don’t know anything about it,” while a few claimed to know a great deal about tracking, but could only point out the most rudimentary things like the difference between a whitetail deer’s track and a cow track, or the difference between a dog’s track and that of a feline.
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(as a veteran of both Cole Range and the Star Course, I feel it is incumbent on me to point out to my fellow alumni of those land navigation courses that what will follow in this series will not always adhere to US Army doctrine. While elements of it will, for obvious reasons, those deviations from what might be found in the appropriate field manuals, student handbooks, and unit doctrine, are a result of personal experience and education utilizing methods that I have either found superior in application, or that make the learning process simpler and easier. There may be the “Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the Army Way,” but sometimes, the Army Way is fucking stupid.” –JM)
While I have long been suggested that most American outdoorsmen do not possess a fraction of the map-and-compass expertise they suppose they do, the inescapable fact is that, each year, an even smaller percentage of hunters and backpackers rely on this older means of wayfinding. This is a result not of a return to more traditional, reliable “primitive” route finding methods, but instead a growing reliance on such technological crutches as GPS, and GPS-based phone apps like OnX and CalTopo.
For outdoor travelers in more settled regions, or those places like National Parks, that expect regular visits from untutored urbanites, many travelers even rely on route numbers and posted trail signage. “Why bother with a map and compass, when I already have my phone with me, and besides, the trails are clearly marked!”
Setting aside the sheer stupidity of relying, as a means of finding your way to shelter and safety, on something as battery draining as the modern smartphone, there is a simple reason: while not as reliable as even more prehistoric means, the fact is that map reading—for at least the last one hundred years—has been an essential piece of the education of any serious outdoorsman, and it should be for any human being1. Whether you consider yourself an experienced hunter, hiker, or backpacker, if you cannot read a topographical map proficiently—accurately and rapidly—you’re one wrong turn away from becoming a statistic.2
If you are the typical hunter or fisherman, you may have done most—or even all—of your traveling to the deer stand or the secret honey hole, through rote familiarity with the routes, unless you’ve relied on a local, experienced guide instead. As you gain more and more experience in the same general hunting areas, the lay of the land and the most obvious landmarks quickly become engraved in your subconscious working mind, if you are competent enough to recall them later. When it comes time though, to traverse new territory, or you find yourself turned around and confused by the unfamiliar appearance of familiar landmarks, if you happen to have obligations that require you to return home hearty and hale, from the wilderness, by a given date, you will probably need to come to rely—to some degree at least—on map and compass work for route finding.
For those interested in learning and mastering the more traditional “primitive” navigation methods we’ve been discussing, then a practical familiarity with map and compass can lead to a degree of confidence that provides you the freedom to learn. Similarly, even if you intend to rely on technological methods of navigation, simply possessing a map and compass, without the knowledge of how to properly use them, is not—in any way, shape, or form—a suitable “emergency backup.”
Fortunately, not only is navigation with map and compass extraordinarily useful, it is also interesting, and entertaining to learn, when approached properly. Map study and compass use translates well to a variety of subjects, games, and even competitions, to pique curiosity and interest. For those of us with children, learning to navigate with map and compass can help them more readily internalize and learn lessons in geography, geology, language arts, and mathematics, as well as history.
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Check out the video here, and join the discussion:
I have close to 3000 subscribers on this site. On Patreon, we have less than 1000 paid subscribers, and just a shade over 1100 free subscribers. Whether free or on a paid tier, what is keeping you from subscribing there? Is there something I can do to provide more value, than the articles I’ve been producing for close to 15 years, on real-world, experiential preparedness, that would convince you to join us there?
Never show alternate ways to tie knots! Now my head is all fucked up trying to tie them new ways! The Alpine butterfly is stupid simple for me when I use the hand wrap. We used to use a directional inline figure 8 for inline knots which was a PIA for me.
Hahahahaha! You’re welcome! I’ve always used the handwrap method for the butterfly, but when I was shown the twist method, it made sense, and it’s WAY quicker and simpler. Give it a try a couple times.
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I typically use terrain association while hunting. Only twice I had to pull out my compass to figure out what direction I had to go ( during the day ) once the clouds dropped to the horizon and I couldn’t see the mountains to my west and I was in a big flat mash, and the second time I got caught in a blizzard 🤣. I always carry a compass! For Just those reasons. Before GPS was affordable while hiking in a remote location via a known trail on a topo map I would compare my elevation on ground where the contours lines on the map crossed the trail. It can help locate your position on the map.
Terrain association is the foundation of all land navigation. Even when I’m using stellar or solar navigation for direction finding, I’m noting local landmarks as both directional reference points, and for future reference, if/when I return to the same place in the future.
Using altimeters and contour interval lines to establish location is absolutely legit. I’ve used it on multiple occasions to confirm my location in the mountains, when my intersection/resection wasn’t as concrete as I’d like. On the other hand, I’ve also had issues with traditional altimeters, in lieu of GPS based altimeters, when a storm is brewing, because of the changes in barometric pressure.
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A good number of people—probably most in the modern, western world—have long since abandoned bound paper notebooks for journal keeping in favor of the various notetaking, organizing, and so-called “productivity” apps available for the pocket computers that most of us carry around with us all day, every day. My first recollection of using a computer for journal keeping hearkens back to childhood, and the situation comedy, featuring a very young Neil Patrick Harris, Doogie Howser, MD. At the end of each episode, there would be a screen shot of the character recording his thoughts on the events, on his computer.
There are—allegedly—a number of extremely useful such apps, although my only experiences with them left me more than unimpressed, whether with calendar/date book versions, or simpler note taking programs. For me—and given the resurgence in popularity of traditional, bound paper journals, I’m far from alone on this hilltop—they simply offer nothing that a properly organized notebook journal doesn’t, while suffering numerous, very real drawbacks.
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MountainGuerrilla 
