Whew! What a week, I have been camping with my extended family since Saturday. My parents and siblings joined us at a lake in Central Iowa. The weather was great, the lake was wonderful, and I have two exhausted little boys and a camera full of fabulous pictures. I’m more than a wee bit tired myself.
So, here to speak some sense today, is SmokeCheckTim, with some thoughts on having a plan. I’ll be back full force next week.
You’ve been warned people, brace yourselves. 😉
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A lot of blogs and websites spend lots of time talking about the latest shiny toy, how to set up your bug out location or even how to build a tank trap….really? a tank trap? What I haven’t seen, at least lately, is a discussion on what should come first before all the beans and bullets, A PLAN. Now if you’re a grizzled old prepper this article probably won’t help you much, but you may pick up a nugget or two and I’m sure that you will be able to add a comment on things I may miss.
First of all who are you prepping for? Yourself? You and your other? One family or a group? Once you have figured out who will be in the plan the next step is OPSEC ( operation security). No one outside the plan should know about the plan. Don’t talk to people about where you will be going and what you’ve stored. Don’t go on TV to brag about what you have because if there is trouble somebody just might decide to take your plan with your beans and bullets and make it theirs.
You now have a group and you have to make a lot of decisions about what you will be doing. You should work backwards from where you plan to stay, permanently if needed. This has to be based on where you are, what your finances allow, and where you can reasonably expect to travel. Will you shelter in place for a week or two to weather the initial panic? Will you try to get to the final bug out location directly or will you have a intermediate location where your group will muster, gather up supplies and head to your longterm hideaway. How will you travel? Do you have small children or elderly parents to consider?
THE PLAN is dynamic. As the group develops and changes the plan must change too. I’ll set up one possible scenario and you can use this example to fit your plan. Your family and your brothers family have located a small hobby farm located about 20 miles from the city. You plan to meet at your house in the suburbs and move as a unit from there to the farm. From your house you have located three different roads routes that will get you to the farm. You have also developed a backup plan that involves moving without vehicles cross-country if needed. Lets look at what needs to happen for this to work. If you can drive to the farm no problem. If not, 20 miles will take time and you will be limited as to what you can carry, so most gear will be stashed at the farm, with a cache hidden along your overland route to resupply your group as you walk to the farm. Your suburban house should have enough supplies for at least a week as you wait for everybody to get to your house from wherever they are when the balloon goes up.
Still working backwards you should assume that the trouble will hit when you are not at home, sitting on your front steps with your faithful Remington 870 across your lap. How will you get home? How will all family members get to your home? You need to develop individual plans for each person that includes multiple routes to get from work or school to the house. A bug out bag is critical to be sure that each member has the supplies they need to cover the distance they need to travel to reach home. With school age children a bug out bag may not be an option because of restrictions placed on items that are allowed in the school, so their bag may have to be modified or placed at a friends house nearby. Possibly you could plan to round up the kids as people move toward your intermediate stop. Also, you have to decide how long the group will wait before leaving for the farm. For whatever reason there may be a member who doesn’t make it due to injury, blocked routes to your house, or even death.
The group might want to consider the fact that the final destination might not be needed because the crisis appears to be short term in nature (loss of electricity, flooding). History says there is a good chance that you will face some sort of temporary crisis many times before TEOTWAWKI. Ice storms, social unrest/riots,Tornadoes, Hurricanes, less then lethal earthquakes, all can cause a temporary situation that could take several weeks for the authorities to get straightened out and utilities and order restored. You want to know that you have the supplies in in place to wait a temporary disturbance out with minimal stress.
While working on the plan you can still begin the process of stockpiling food and water. Its important to remember to start slowly and stay within your income. You can buy a large bottle of water with each visit to the local big box store and a couple of pounds of beans or rice shouldn’t break you. This website has a huge archive of articles that cover many things that you will have to consider on this prepper journey. Good Luck!
– SmokeCheckTim
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Remember, a goal without a plan, is just a wish.
– Calamity Jane
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27 comments
I think you will need to do a lot less “planning” if you forgo the bug out concept and shelter in place. If you’re not in an area where that’s conducive then your first “plan” should be moving there. In the end, bugging out should be a fall back option, not a first resort.
sounds like plan to me.
Here’s the part I have trouble with. The “cache hidden along your overland route to resupply your group”. As I sit here thinking about this, obvious issues arise. The biggest one being “where” this cache would be hidden. As anyone who has ever traveled by car knows, there is hardly an inch of land in the US not surrounded by some kind of fence. This cache would have to be “hidden” somewhere, and folks who propose this never say just where and how. Do we trespass on private property in the dead of night and dig a hole hoping nobody will discover us digging or the cache later on? I’m just wondering if others out there have actually accomplished the creation of a hidden cache, and how they went about it (without giving up their’s of course).
Glad you pointed out that nonsense.
i’d love to read more blogs about how to assemble a group, and how to buy a group retreat that would protect ownership for all members of the group.
Me too!
“Bugging out”Man I’v herd this a thousand times, Well dude Where ya’ gonna go? My family owns a 200 ace. farm in eastern Ky. On the map its marked D.Boone Nat.Forest. Every year we catch some city dumb a** digging a big hole on our farm,and every year we send them to jail.If you try” Bugging out” east of the missisippi river, you will almost allways be in sombodys back yard.”Bugging out” is code for “nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there” . Almost everyone who trys this will wind up the very outlaws most of us dread,Starving men with starving women and children who will do ANYTHING for food and shelter. Medics call that “to stupid to live” —Ray in Ky
yeh, what Ray said.
thanks ray but if you actually read the article, in my example this group had a farm to move to. Your comment verifies what I’m trying(maybe not clearly enough)to say. You cant just say bug out! You have to have a destination before you go. You have to gather supplies to store at your destination. The whole idea was to prepare a plan that take into consideration factors like do you have to “bug out” or are you better off where you are now. Now everyone needs to “bug out” and not everyone has a safe place to “bug in”
Ok, How you gonna get there? Walk? East of the Mississippi ,pretty much every bit of land is owned. Ever try walking cross country? Fence every 200 yards. At best with food + water you make 10-15 miles a day alone. With kids elderly or wounded yer’ lucky to make 2-5. If everybody starts with MAX food+water loads ,its all over in less than a week. That gives a max solo range of 70-100 miles. 25-40with kids ;In a week. Try it sometime. Take off walking,see how far you get,and how fast. Sleep in the ditch. Do this for 7 days . Then call someone to get you. Then look at how far you walked, and how fast, you won’t like it.
For those living in the big city, sheltering in place won’t be a healthy long term option. Eventually they will be discovered by those who didn’t prep. Doesn’t matter so much to me, as I live in the Rocky Mountain West and we have plenty of wild areas where people rarely go due to terrain. Vehicles may get us close, but my location is foot or horse only, and far off the path.
I think the whole “bug out” thing’s a built on a bunch of myths. Besides the big worries here in the Puget Sound Region are earth quakes and if we get a big one of those no one will be going anywhere.
Stay home, work with your neighbors and town. The more you all pull together the sooner the crisis will pass.
Sorry to beat up on you on your first post, but I just don’t believe in the bug out thing.
If everbody bugs out then you will have the whole neighborhood to yourself ! Stay within your enviroment, pay attention to who comes and goes, you will be able to spot something amiss faster when you are within your existing enviorment than out in the woods, unless you already live there. Think how can I survive long term where I am at? Then work toward those goals. If it some type of natural disaster displacement is uncontrollable and you are probably more worried about immediate survival and truth be told there are places of support ( church, family, friends, ect) to get through that short time event.
Man way to just hammer the guest poster!!!!! Just ask. Hey Smoke Check how does someone establish a cache? Does it have to be buried? Could my group rent a storage shed along the way or maybe a dumpster? BTW maybe we are in TEOTWAWKI but nobody has noticed. It sure isn’t the world I knew when I was 12. The soup lines have been replaced by EBT cards. One computer hack by a 12 year old could take out all the debit/credit/ ebt cards. Have a nice day!
good points D’ja’c…
sorry Tim.
not the world of my childhood either.
lots more “self storage” spaces exist now. some with 24 hour security…
ammo storage, fuel storage probably against the “rules”. (if anything were to go wrong)
thanksD’ja”c: the idea is to get comments that may help others. Who has info on caches, who has organized a group and what problems arose. Even if you hunker down at home, you may not be at home when things go bad, then what.
I just “binged” ‘how to establish a survival cache’ and found some ideas. One thing occurred to me is using water ways to cache supplies. Sealed sheet rock buckets and PVC pipes (youtube it) can be submerged in rivers, lakes, streams, culverts, etc. Or the infamous “hiding in plain sight”. Heck, if you find me I’ll hide some stuff for you in my pond or well on your way to The American Redoubt.
just got back from Maine , was following the blog on my cell . It was VERY hard to come back to AZ
Maine- The way life should be!
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Good read to get the mental juices flowing. I live in Oregon where there is lots of land but nothing I would consider safe for a cache. This got me to thinking of people I trust in the area surrounding the city where I live and who I could stash some relief supplies with. The other thing I want to add is: why do people only think about bugging out by car or foot. A good mountain bike and trailer will easily carry 100+ pounds, make 50 miles a day if you are in decent shape & most important can easily be portaged around failed roads, small creeks or other moderately sized obstacles.
I like the bike/trailer option, too. Hard here with the mountains, but doable.
Plan to prepare, isn’t that redundant?
Imagination is more important than knowledge
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