Author: Pat Henry

I wanted to start a new series on the Prepper Journal called “Back to Basics”. I know many of the readers of this blog are already well along their own journey of preparedness so some of the content might be remedial. It has certainly been covered on our site before, but there are new readers every day. Millions of people visited the pages of our site last year and one of the most frequent questions preppers come to our site looking to answer is How to stockpile drinking water for emergencies. For me this Back to Basics series is a…

I am always refining my prepping plans and the associated tools and gear I think will help improve my situation if the worst should happen. Some people go through life believing that nothing bad will ever happen but that isn’t the audience of this site. You are here because you want to proactively take steps to ensure that if something bad does happen, you will have a plan for how to survive or even just cope better than people who do nothing. Coping without power is one area of my preps that I have a few different options but my…

Concealed carry is one way that people can keep protection, in the form of a firearm on their person at all times. I have frequently written about the merits of concealed carry and even the best way to carry concealed in my opinion for those who so choose. For the law-abiding citizen, carrying concealed is one way to provide defensive capabilities to yourself should you end up in a bad situation and your life is on the line. Recent events like the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino or any one of dozens of other examples of terrorism here in the…

It is finally December and for me and all of the other procrastinators out there, it’s time to consider Christmas gifts for those around you. Fortunately for me, my wife handles the lion’s share of gift selection and acquisition for our family and children. I get off relatively easy in that respect so long as I take care of paying the bills and her gifts of course, which I would rather do any day than shopping. Speaking of shopping, I am not a person who doesn’t like to be around other people, but I would just about rather take a…

As part of my preps, water is high on the list of items I strive to ensure I have options and redundancy for so when Tony from Gunslinger Well Pumps contacted me to review his Quick Draw hand well pump I was very interested. We have water stored in our home and rain barrels that can hold hundreds of gallons as well as a fairly large pond directly across the street from our house. But in addition to all of those potential sources there was one more that I hadn’t tapped into for years that I had been meaning to…

I am always looking to learn skills that can improve many facets of my life. A chief aspect of prepping I believe is to continually learn and increase your ability to survive. This education can come in many forms from training courses, real-life exposure, videos, lectures and books. For me though I don’t learn from books as well as I do with hands on exposure to the core aspects I am trying to learn. The more complicated the subject, the less likely I am going to learn from a book and at a certain point no matter how compelling the…

I went hunting for the first time this year earlier in the week. I have been waiting for deer season to open up in my neck of the woods and finally got my chance to get out there and try my luck at bringing home some meat to fill my family’s freezer. The weather didn’t want to cooperate, never does really, but regardless of the conditions not being ideal to the deer hunting experts, I decided to trudge out to the stand anyway and see what I could get. Over the course of the next few days I had several…

One of the most diverse prepper considerations from the standpoint of a long-term disaster is heath. By health I am not specifically referring to the risks to your health from the disaster itself. If you are living through a hurricane or earthquake, there are natural risks to your health that you need to mitigate in the moment. Prior planning helps you with identifying the risks in this type of scenario and developing a course of action to take. If there are violent mobs approaching your city, that is another risk and those subjects are just one piece of the health…

The cooler temperatures in the air remind me of the approach of winter and with it many of the things I take pleasure in. Colder days give me excuses to wear my big warm coats that have been stuck in a plastic bin all year. I get to break out a completely new set of hats to keep my head warm and my closet has undergone a revival, albeit a pretty pitiful one where my short-sleeved shirts are now replaced by warmer garments. Hunting season preparations are well underway and this weekend I will be sighting in all of my…

A growing number of people are planning for bad things to happen. We take care to study the threats we see around us including those both very likely and some not as likely. We do this so we can try to be prepared for events that put ourselves or our family or friends in danger. Our preparations require some study of the potential events you see affecting you, the development of plans for mitigating the risks of these events and actions to place your readiness above where it is now. We prepare. Most prepping, when you look at the activities…

We talk about it all the time and it has been the subject of countless debates both on the Prepper Journal and other sites out there. The scenario goes something like this: TEOTWAWKI has happened. The causes could be any one of hundreds, but the reality you are living in has gotten so bad that all your planning and preparing are being put into action. This is no longer a hypothetical exercise, it is a survival situation. You, your family and closest friends are locked and loaded in your bunker/suburban home with all of your prepping supplies, plenty of potable…

How many times have you heard the question, “Who would want to bring a child into this world”? I can remember hearing this saying many times throughout my life both in my personal interactions with other people, usually after some disastrous or tragic event, and in popular culture like movies and TV. The implied rationale behind the question was that life was too hard, too messed up for us to foist that evil upon a poor defenseless child. Who are we to bring a new life into this world that seems so quick to devalue life? Why would you risk…

When you have something good, people want it and judging by the reaction on the internet, the free Tokyo disaster manual is a hit. Compiled by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, this free guide is over 340 pages long and addresses a wealth of preparedness and survival topics that could be useful all over the world not just in Tokyo. The guide, printed and distributed to every person living in Tokyo has generated so much interest for its pretty wide range of subjects that people have taken to selling it online. You don’t have to live in Tokyo, speak Japanese or…

The Sheepdog concept has been around in its modern form since 2002 from Dave Grossman’s book, On Killing. He later expanded on this concept in his follow-up book, On Combat. I own and still am working through both of these books and highly recommend them as sources of training material for those of us who have never killed or seen combat, but can anticipate the value in some knowledge and lessons from a man who trains our military, police and special forces. Many of us identify with the term Sheepdog and there are many different interest groups who proudly consider…

Do you have a prepper on your shopping list? The occasion doesn’t matter really. It could be Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas or Hanukkah, birthdays, or just because. But sometimes finding the perfect gift for the prepper who has everything can be tough. Why is that? Well, most preppers already have some of the gear (toys) they deem valuable and it may never have even crossed your mind that a gas mask would be something they wanted. Who knew how excited they would get over a hand-crank radio with a built-in solar charger? Well if you are looking for the…

Each year as the weather gets cooler and the leaves start to fall, I along with millions of other hunters prepare for hunting season. Each of us I am sure, has dreams of landing that elusive big game that we have so long studied, chased, and in many cases, been made a fool of to our general frustration. As the seasons change this year I will be headed back to the woods in search of food for my family and when I hunt, I frequently use a tree stand. Tree stands give the hunter certain advantages. For starters, they put…

There is strength in numbers when it comes to forming a survival community and the conventional wisdom is the more people you have on your side, the better. If you had an Army, you would want as many people as you could have in the ranks in order to be safer, to do more things, to expand your reach. This thought has led many people to search out online survival communities to join which brings a lot of mixed results and potential problems. You think to yourself, I really need to be around a group of like-minded people before the…

I frequently highlight the need for water when you are preparing for emergencies. This simple, yet vital element of life can’t be ignored for long, so I recommend a multi-faceted approach when it comes to making sure you always have enough to drink. As long as the tap is running and the source is not dangerous to your health, you should be fine. That works great normally, but we all know that stuff happens. Water mains break, sources become contaminated or the disaster can render the pumping stations inoperable due to personnel or equipment problems. Your job is to keep…

Prepping is always undertaken with the thought that you are “preparing” for something to happen. You prepare so you are ready. The reasons we prepare are all different, but if you are watching the markets or the global news while you stock up on food, water, security items and possibly precious metals, you are waiting for something to happen. Some might disagree with me and say they aren’t waiting, but want to be ready just in case. We could get caught up in the semantics of the definition of “waiting”, but you are waiting to use your preps or to…

Have you ever wondered what you would do for work after the end of the world as we know it? There are many ideas out there and we have even mentioned a few of them on the Prepper Journal in past articles. Most of the ideas seem to start with the view that there will be a total collapse of the grid. When that happens, anarchy will reign supreme for some undetermined time. After the chaos is over, we will go back to living like it’s the 1800’s or close to that with no authority or social control in place…

You may have heard of the increasingly prominent use and promotion of what is being called essential oils if you have read any prepping blogs or self-sufficient literature in the last few years. Essential oils are typically derived from plants and their uses in Aromatherapy or Naturopathy are numerous. You can buy individual oils for specific ailments or boxes containing hundreds of oils. I remember one Doomsday Preppers episode where the preppers planned to use small drones to send survival kits consisting of essential oils to fallen neighbors after some pandemic. I don’t know anything really about the usefulness of…

Prepping is something that takes time, some level of commitment and usually finds its roots in some motivating reason or lifestyle characteristics. Preppers intentionally work toward a goal or measurement that can be held up to life for comparison. By preparing to have food stored over the winter, you may have a measurement of how long you can feed your family with those foods you are storing away. Food storage is just one example, but being prepared to a level that most would agree is some measure above their peers, takes work and it is so easy to make excuses…

If you are looking into becoming more self-sufficient, one of the first places you can begin to impact your reliance on our modern systems is in how you get the food you eat. Most of us get our daily bread from the grocery store which as we have pointed out before, works pretty darn well if the grocery store is full of food, you can afford to pay for that food and you can get to the store. Fortunately for us, that is usually the case. Convenience is a great thing, but we are reliant on a lot of systems…

There are conventional buzzwords that many preppers know and spout off about more often than other terms in the course of our conversations about the reasons for certain plans and preparations. “SHTF”, is probably the most commonly used and widely known of these terms even outside the world of prepping. The “Grid going down”, is likely a close second due in no small part to its use in many areas of society, most commonly when we are talking about the electric grid; as in If the electric “grid goes down” you are screwed. The Golden Horde theory is much less…

When planning for disaster, we run through scenarios in our mind and those scenarios give us a visual baseline for which we make plans. As preppers we talk a lot about the steps you can take right now to get prepared so that you will have a plan, supplies and options for when that disaster may strike. Often preparedness deals with the immediate effects of disaster like having a vehicle to bug out or having plenty of food and water to deal with shortages. The next logical step from that is a longer term plan, but those long term prepping…

The last census results in 2010 showed that a total of 80.7 percent of Americans lived in urban areas, up from 79 percent in 2000. That should tell anyone reading this article a few things about survival. If something does happen, an overwhelming majority of us will face whatever happens in an urban environment. The prepper mantra is to get rural, get out of the cities and find land far away but the reality is that is simply not practical for all of us. For the concerned prepper, living in an urban environment isn’t a death wish, but it does…

For reasons known only to you, the subject of prepping has, up until now, been one that you either outright mocked as sheer paranoid lunacy or a dismissed as a tremendous waste of energy. Who needs to prepare for the end of the world you said to yourself and smugly snickered at the people on Doomsday Preppers and their tales of impending destruction. Something is different now. Maybe it is the news you hear almost daily of problems. No meteorites falling from the sky, but simple, regular, commonplace problems that people have. You hear of flash flooding, refugee crisis, wars,…

If you are currently or have ever been in a relationship, I would bet money you have at some point had a disagreement with your significant other. Usually these disagreements can be pretty benign and are laughed off at some point when things cool down. When you are dating, the argument might be over which movie to go see or some improper communication with the ex girlfriend. Sometimes disagreements form into arguments, major confrontations that can pit the two of you in a virtual battle of wills. How you two handle arguments and more importantly, reach resolution after the augment…

The anniversary of the events on 9/11/2001 that killed thousands is just barely in our rear-view mirror. This day, fortunately, passed without any incident. That day in our past saw so much death, chaos, and confusion many of us haven’t experienced in our lifetimes and hopefully never will again. It was a historical day for all manner of reasons beyond the tragedy of lives lost through terrorism or sacrifice. It gave us a glimpse into the very definition of pandemonium live on TV – played out in real-time before our unbelieving eyes. As a nation, we watched in horror as…

Preppers have become known for a lot of things in the media, but until recently it wasn’t for any prepper skills. We are known for underground bunkers, stockpiling tons of freeze-dried food and weapons. Preppers are frequently portrayed as preparing for the end of the world (on more than one occasion) and we generally get lumped into a very large classification of people who seemly panic and overreact to everything. For many years, if you were someone who considered themselves a prepper you could expect to be the butt of many jokes. But somewhere along the way, that perspective started…