Author: Pat Henry

This is where I know the article sounds a little like an infomercial, but I am going to continue. What if I told you there was a device you should have at least one of, maybe two or three in your home that was vital to being prepared for certain types of emergencies? What if I told you these devices were approximately $40 each, could save lives and didn’t require any license? What if I said that nobody would look at you weird for buying a couple of these and if the SHTF you would want to have these just…

When it comes to planning for the end of the world as we know it, thoughts generally turn to Bug Out Vehicles sooner or later. For most of us, our BOV of necessity will be whatever we can get our hands on at the moment. For those of you who have a little extra time or money, I wanted to discuss the concept of using a Recreational Vehicle (RV) as your dedicated mode of getting the hell out of dodge. The idea for this came to me from a reader named Alexander who asked the following: I’d like to hear…

Since its inception back in January of 2013, The Prepper Journal has been a blog that I started with the hope of being able to share information with people from all walks if life in order to urge them to prepare for unforeseen disasters. I like to think we have been true to that goal and that hopefully we were able to add something to the conversation that continues to this day. In the articles I have personally written, I have stated numerous times that I believe Prepping is a lifestyle. Prepping is something you have to do every day…

Morgan Carter made it back home to his family in Florida after the collapse in Going Home, the first book in this four part series called “the Survivalist Series” and we now get to see how this story finally ends. Forsaking Home is the last novel I believe in a really great story about Morgan Carter, his family, friends and a few military operators in a post-collapse world. We reviewed the first book in the series, Going Home last December and when I was offered another chance to review the latest in the series I was naturally interested. Forsaking Home…

Usually when we discuss prepping it is with the view that we will be making ourselves better able or more likely to survive a disaster. By being prepared, common sense would seem to indicate that it is completely logical that you and everyone who is prepared will have a huge advantage over the people who didn’t prepare for anything. How can you argue with that logic? People who are prepared will be better off, right? Not in all cases it appears and more and more events are showing how instead of making you better able to ride out the effects…

A new and unique Mountain House sale starts Sunday from Camping Survival.  It’s the first one ever to give away the freeze-dried ice cream. Mountain House food is a great option for your bug out bag or backpacking trip and you can read our recent review of Mountain House from another company here. 6/22-6/28 25% off all Mountain House #10 Freeze Dried Food Cans Plus free Mountain House freeze Dried Neapolitan Ice Cream with every #10 can. 15% off all Mountain House Freeze Dried Food; Breakfast Pouches, Entrée Pouches Dessert Pouches and Buckets. To learn more, visit their sale page here.

How a simple backpacking trip can show you blindspots and wins you have with your current bugging out setup and plans. There are two recurring themes we have in prepping and survival blogs around preparing for disasters of any type. The first is the need to practice or train yourself in the deployment of any plans you have well before the actual need should arise. This is similar to practicing a fire drill with your children so they will have experience going through the motions and the event will hopefully be more successfully executed because of this training. The muscle…

Due to popular demand, Camping Survival.com is bringing back their free LifeStraw with Real Military MREs deal for a limited time. Through Friday, June 20th receive a free LifeStraw with the purchase of every AQ1012 Real Military MRE. At checkout enter “freelifestraw” in the comment box to receive this offer. Ends 6/20/2014, valid while supplies last.

It is a basic tenet of any conflict that you need to be prepared to defend your location. For military forces, they have bases which are guarded by fences and guard posts at a minimum. Kings had their castles with high stone walls and moats. We civilians in the present day have our communities or neighborhoods which are largely constructed without any thought of defensibility. In every conflict there are people attacking and people defending and this as you know if you pay attention to the news or history at all is not something you should consider yourself immune to.…

I was given the opportunity to review the Cold Steel Trail Hawk from the good people at Knife Hog back in May. I am only now getting to this review which is long overdue. I was interested in reviewing this particular tomahawk for two reasons. First, I think a Tomahawk is a great addition to field gear for the utility it provides, which I will discuss later and secondly because of the Cold Steel brand. Cold Steel has been making tough products for over three decades so I was excited to get my hands on a piece of gear from…

I came across an article on the INCH Survival (note: Internet Archive link) site that was originally posted in May. In this article, the author discusses the pro’s and con’s of joining a survival group as opposed to simply going it alone. The article raises some good points, but the concept isn’t only for survival groups. Anytime you are dealing with other people you will have to accommodate their personalities. You will get their strengths and be subjected to their weaknesses. One thing I thought about after reading this post was for a lot of us, our families will be our…

We never know how we are going to go out of this world do we? None of us ever know what will happen tomorrow but we plan and scheme anyway. I know that I can’t say with any certainty what the future holds for our world, but I like millions of others are planning for days that aren’t what we consider normal. The Prepper Journal has been dedicated for over a year now to discussing events that could impact you in ways that seriously affect your daily routine. When what you are used to; running out for coffee in the…

When it comes to long term food storage, there are several obvious candidates. In Prepper and Survival circles, we talk about storing grains in Mylar bags packed in 5 gallon buckets with oxygen absorbers, creating a pantry and canning fresh foods from your garden, MRE’s and freeze-dried foods. I have some of all of these options stored for our family, but some foods are great for other reasons, not just surviving doomsday. You can probably take your 5 gallon buckets of rice, beans and grains to your survival retreat with you provided you have a car and aren’t walking on…

It’s that time of year again and many of you out there, including me are wondering what to get your Father this year for Father’s Day. If you are like me, my Dad is tough to shop for. Anyone is hard to shop for if you have been buying them things for as long as I have. It makes it tougher when your Father doesn’t have “real” hobbies that lend themselves to great gift ideas. You know the kinds of hobbies I am talking about like golfing, sports or woodworking. These hobbies seem to lend themselves to occasions like this…

Camping Survival has a 10% off special on LifeStraw portable water filters so if you wanted to stock up on these for Father’s Day, now could be the time. LifeStraw is a personal water filter that ensures no matter where you go, you will have instant access to safe drinking water. Perfect for hunting, hiking, and fishing not to mention your Bug Out Bag or Get Home Bag as an emergency filtration device. You can drink directly from lakes, rivers, or your water bottle. Simply put the lower part of the straw in the water, and sip through the other…

As many of you are already aware by now, the Government has policies and procedures in place for using our nation’s military against civilians. These polices aren’t new, but the general public largely ignores or simply refuses to believe that the same military we place on a pedestal, clap and cheer for when they arrive safely in an airport and weep for when their flag draped coffins return from war could be the same people we are running for our lives from. The military that is comprised of our best and brightest, our sons, daughters, sisters and brothers is training…

I was reading articles from another survival blog the other day and I came across one that dealt primarily with taking care of women if we have to go through some type of SHTF moment or time period. The author seemed to be concerned with protecting his wife and daughters to keep them safe from bad things or bad men. I agree this is a concern of mine as well and would probably be doing the same things they mention, but the article made me think about how we collectively talk about women in times like this. Who is this…

How many of you remember learning to drive before you got your license? I had a couple of different methods of learning this important but overlooked skill. When I was 14, I was able to drive my Uncle’s sweet Ford Fairmont through the winding, sandy back-roads of Florida and even drove on the beach. That was a highlight in my life as I would imagine any 14 year old boy’s life when I could slowly cruise the shore and wave at girls who must have thought I was older than I actually was. I also learned how to drive a…

When it comes to surviving anything there are a lot of factors that come into play. Certainly the severity of the situation you have to survive in the first place influences everything. The resources you have at your disposal in the way of tools, gear, others, knowledge or experience weigh just as heavily into the equation also but I think two things above all determine your chances of survival better than anything. Those two things are will and flexibility. At some point in my life I started responding to any circumstance that required change by saying ‘I ate a whole…

What do you think about conspiracy theory? When you read that question I imagine that you had one of two distinct reactions. One reaction could have been positive as in ‘Sure I believe in conspiracies or some of them anyway’. The opposite reaction and judging from a lot of news outlets would be negative or something along the lines of ‘only lunatics believe in conspiracy theories’. For years I have wondered why conspiracies were something that “smart” people simply couldn’t believe at best. At worst, some reacted almost violently to the suggestion that anything secret could have happened. Furthermore, anyone…

What is OPSEC? OPSEC is short for Operations Security or Operational Security and encompasses identifying critical information to determine if your actions can be observed by adversaries. To boil that down further, it is making sure bad guys don’t have any information about you that they can use against you.  This could be to either harm you or compromise you or your group in a way that would be detrimental. There, is that murky and ominous-sounding enough for you? If you have traveled in the Preparedness circles for more than 15 minutes, you have heard the terms “Good OPSEC” or…

I was given the opportunity to review the Coast HP550 focusing LED flashlight. I love reviewing new gear on the Prepper Journal but some flashlight reviews are highly technical to the point of using calibrated machines to measure beam intensity and throw. I don’t have any of that equipment so maybe we should put this review in the amateur category. I’ll let you know my overall impressions of the flashlight and you can make a determination for yourself if this is something you want to research further. My guess is that 99.9% of you don’t have the equipment to measure…

This may be the start of one of the more morbid posts on the Prepper Journal to date but as the title implies, you already know we are talking about death. Death is unavoidable and even though we seem to fight so hard to avoid it for as long as possible, death is natural. It happens to the best of us and it happens to the worst of us. Everyone dies sooner or later and in our culture, when that happens, we are comfortable with the traditional funeral service and ground burial for our dead. I was thinking about this…

It is May now and we are fast approaching swim suit season. Are you dreading going to the pool and exposing yourself to friends and family? Even worse, do you simply no longer care at all? Most of us aren’t in the shape we want to be in and if this doesn’t apply to you, don’t worry about it. If like most of us, you have some things you want to improve and are struggling with motivation or keep coming up with excuses then this post is for you. I am not a spring chicken anymore but I am nowhere…

We talk about situations on the Prepper Journal and other survival blogs that are so drastic or life threatening that you are forced to gather vital supplies, throw them into your car or on your back and flee from your current location as quickly as possible. We call this act of leaving while you still can, Bugging Out. There are entire volumes of work devoted to the question of whether one should Bug Out or Hunker down. Even I have written on the subject behind the decisions you should consider when you are asking this question of yourself. Should you…

I never realized how cool my father’s workbench was when I was younger. My Dad had a corner of our basement devoted to building and fixing things for our family. His workbench wasn’t that large and he didn’t have 80 square feet of peg-board adorned with every tool imaginable. He didn’t have the sharpie silhouettes of each tool’s shape to make it easier for the messy kids to find the right spot when they rarely put the tools back but he did have shelves filled with containers of items in neat rows. He didn’t have dual rolling 6 foot high…

One of the biggest hurdles to actually doing something that can save your life is getting started. I know many people who research topics, watch movies, create lists and pages and pages of bookmarked websites that they can pull up at a moment’s notice. For every idea they have a source. For every plan, they have written information, sourced in binders with color coded tabs. This could be the same for you and your food supplies that are all written neatly in a binder or on a downloadable excel spreadsheet or parked on a DVD you bought online from a…

It finally happened. Three weeks ago the grid went down and societies’ unraveling has begun. At first, banks closed and people stopped going to work. When this happened essential services were at first hampered and now they are non-existent. Without getting paid for fuel or their work, deliveries stopped, food dried up and now we are in a full blown panic mode that is sweeping over the country despite the authorities promises to restore order. You being the good prepper are relatively unaffected though as you now find more time to work in your garden which is starting to see…

Prepping is a lifestyle in my opinion, not a political or philosophical position. It’s not a job or the latest trend or buzzword. The people who identify themselves as Preppers come from all walks of life; all ages, races, political preferences, genders, education and nations are represented by readers of this blog, the Prepper Journal. It may be that the term prepping or prepper is American and it could be argued that the topic of Preparing for disasters in all forms has become more popular now than in the past. Some people equate what we used to call Survivalists with…

What is EDC? Well in case you mistakenly go out to Google “EDC ideas” for some inspiration; EDC does not in Prepper lingo stand for Electric Daisy Carnival. What is this world coming to? No, my friends. EDC is one the top 10 great Prepper Acronyms and it stands for Every Day Carry. If you don’t already know, we Preppers LOVE acronyms. EDC is essentially the items you carry with you at all times, or as often to all times as possible. It’s the quintessential Prepper gear that you have handy without any backpack or BOB (another of my favorites…