Author: Pat Henry

Freeze-dried foods have a place in a lot of preppers pantry’s for a lot of good reasons. For starters, the food is prepackaged in one to two serving pouches. They only need hot water and a few minutes to give you a warm and tasty meal. Freeze dried food doesn’t take up a lot of space and it is relatively light – I use it when camping and lastly, it will keep for over 10 years! For these reasons and more, I have my own supply of freeze dried foods. Mountain House is the brand I am most familiar…

I was driving around the other day listening to a podcast that I enjoy. The host as usual was covering a wide range of topics and began to list for the millionth time a lot of things that I am personally concerned about. Without getting into too many specifics; events such as our economy, relationship with Russia, eroding freedoms, growing police state, the threat of Ebola, chemical bombardment of our bodies from our food and water, the open borders and a million other side topics seem to be coming at us constantly. The noise from all of these events, if…

‘When the SHTF I am bugging out man’! ‘If the SHTF you will be glad you have one of these’. ‘You won’t be able to do that if the SHTF’. ‘When the SHTF you better be prepared’! If you have been anywhere near prepping, survival, self-sufficiency, or emergency preparedness content, survival movies, TV shows, books or blogs, you have heard someone say a sentence that went roughly like one of those above. Do you know what everyone means by SHTF? If you do, how will you know when the SHTF? Just in case there are some of you out there…

If you believe that you are Rambo and plan to survive whatever the world throws at you with nothing more than a big survival knife and some weapons you pull off unsuspecting sheriff deputies who were foolish enough to follow you when you bug out into the woods… this post might not be for you. For a lot of the rest of us out here, there is an understood advantage to forming a larger prepping group. You can see the value in a team of people who share the common goal of survival and you realize the wisdom in pooling…

As preppers we strive to acquire skills, knowledge and yes tools that can assist us should we ever be faced with dire circumstances. The actual disaster that you might be facing and you own situation at the present time would necessarily determine what would be required of you to survive. For instance there might be a wildfire burning in the next county over with winds driving toward your house. With some time you could pack the family in the wagon and head out onto the highway to find a hotel or stay with friends a safe distance away. This is…

Have you ever needed to strap something down and went to look for a length of rope or bungee cord? When I do this it is usually to tie down something on the roof of my car and rope seems to be the best option in most cases, but in order to get a really perfect length of rope you need to cut your rope. This isn’t always what I have to do but if I needed to secure a tarp for example at various points over my vehicle I could end up needing 8 small pieces of rope. Assuming…

Knowing the potential for this type of disruption, do you have a self quarantine plan in place already? The news has been almost completely focused on Ebola for the last couple of weeks and information outlets are pouring out details by the minute. This type of event is what the 24-Hour news cycle was created for and pundits on every side are breathlessly announcing news, interviewing witnesses and experts and showing hour after hour of footage of hospitals, people in yellow gowns, nitrile gloves and face-masks. It is enough to make a sane person crazy and it is a sober…

Prepping as a senior citizen presents its own unique challenges and circumstances that may necessarily need to be addressed in a different way from person to person. Each of us should have some members of our family who could be considered as Senior citizens unless you are hanging out with your drinking buddies and don’t plan to encounter or care for anyone other than yourself if the grid goes down. For those who do or even if you are a senior citizen yourself, I wanted to write an article addressing what senior citizens should do to prepare for SHTF or…

A Prepper Journal reader, Andrew asked the following question on our Contact form the other day: I’m wondering if you guys could do a write up of the pros and cons of a fenced property as well as a gated driveway. It is something I have considered for some time but would be very much interested in what people more in the know think of these security options. If anyone else has any questions, please send them in, or comment on any post. Your conversations help everyone in the Prepper community learn and if anyone has additional feedback to what…

I am always very happy to receive comments and questions on the Prepper Journal. Our readers come from such a diverse background of experiences, knowledge and perspective and the comments allow anyone to have a dialog about issues that are pertinent to their own unique circumstance and share prepping tips with others in our little but growing community. Some of the comments are responses to the post itself but often I receive questions from our readers too and I wanted to share one comment from a reader named Nicole because she has some great questions that I wanted to share…

Many of us who are new to prepping become wrapped up in the things we don’t have. We scour the internet looking for prepper checklists and there are millions out there. We look for ideas on the best handguns to purchase or the best firearms to have. We look at bug out vehicles and survival bunkers and hidden retreats in the woods. It can be overwhelming. I know a lot of preppers including me in the beginning focused on the things we felt we needed to get at the beginning. The sheer volume of ‘things’ that make up all these…

It should go without saying that James Wesley Rawles has had a significant impact on the prepper and survivalist community. His daily blog www.survivalblog.com draws over 84 thousand unique views each month from the US alone and the years of information contained in its pages have informed millions. In addition to his blog, Mr. Rawles is a busy speaker sharing his knowledge and experience as a former Army Intelligence officer at prepper conferences all over the US as well as a writer. He has written 5 books already and another title is in the works. One of the very first…

Access to clean water means the difference between life and death in any part of the world. A solid option is treating water with bleach. In order to disinfect water preppers usually recommend bleach as a part of a broader strategy of stored water, filtration and boiling. Household bleach as long as it isn’t scented is a great method to disinfect water to make is safe for drinking so some people stock up on bleach for just this reason. There is a problem with bleach though in that it has a relatively short shelf life. Bleach will start to lose…

News of the recent Ebola case in Texas has a lot of people on edge. You may have felt the urgency yourself as you read the news and monitor the progress being made, or not made in controlling this virus. Events like this are what preppers for years have been planning for and if you are new to prepping you may fear that you are behind the eight ball at a crucial time. For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone should be panicked about the events in West Africa or Texas, but I do think they are something to…

You don’t have to work 86 miles away from home to need a Get Home Bag because the important supplies you have in there could save your life even much closer to home.

My wife came to me a few days back and asked me what I thought about Silencers. She had heard either ads or an interview on a radio talk show and was curious so she asked the local gun ‘expert’. I hope you understand that I don’t consider myself an expert on anything really, but when it comes to firearms I do have more experience than my wife for what it’s worth. She had heard bits and pieces about silencers and wanted to know what was so great about them and if they were so great, why didn’t I have…

If you are like me you don’t have the resources to afford a bug out retreat. My prepper ideal of a remote fortress located on hundreds of wooded acres, miles away from civilization and fully stocked with 20 years of supplies, flowing water, and established orchards for me and the rest of my extended family is sadly just a dream. I hope to one day have a location that I can fall back to if I need to leave my house, but the way things are going right now at least, my isolated retreat is just my simple suburban home.…

How many of you woke up to prepping before anyone else around you did? As I have shared on the pages of the Prepper Journal before, I started getting into Prepping back in 2008. There were no specific events that I can think of that made me start prepping, but the financial crash probably played into my overall concern. As I tried to learn as much as possible about the threats to our society that I had previously been completely ignorant of I became more and more troubled about how my family would fare if various disasters happened. I guess…

There has been some time that has passed since the latest “mass” shooting, although the news yesterday of a recently fired UPS worker killing two of his co-workers and eventually himself, reminds us that life is sometimes deadly. As a prepper as well as a strong advocate of the rights guaranteed by our second amendment, one of the things that I prepare for is a situation where a nut is going around killing innocent people. This could be some terrorist, a mentally deranged person, someone under the influence of psychotropic drugs or like in Alabama, someone with a grudge who…

Like many of you I started prepping with a huge sense of urgency and a lot of questions but not much in the way of guidance from anyone I knew and trusted. It is probably my personality for the most part because when I do get interested in something new I will dive right in at the beginning. This usually leads to some mistakes along the way as I go it alone and find out what works and what doesn’t. As a beginning prepper I didn’t really have anyone I could turn to for advice that I knew and relied…

As Preppers we take steps to plan for disasters that could force us out of the comfort and safety of our homes. These threats could range from regional weather incidents like Tornadoes, Earthquakes or Hurricanes to longer term disasters that might not be caused by Mother Nature. Even these relatively common regional weather events can cause massive damage in some places, but shelter and safety is usually within a short drive or walk from your home. To reach safety, it may be necessary to throw your Bug Out Bag into the car or on your back and get the hell…

We are fortunate to have an interview today with one of the leading voices in the Survival and Preparedness community, James Wesley Rawles. Mr. Rawles is the owner of the hugely popular website survivalblog.com and has also written 5 books. Two of his books are on our list of the Must Have Prepper Books because I thought that both for different reasons were such great sources of information for preppers. Survivalblog.com was the first prepper website that I really started visiting when I was new to prepping and the information in the pages of his site opened my eyes to…

Have you ever known someone who has a glum outlook on life? Maybe that isn’t the right term, how about fatalistic? I have some people in my life that I call ‘Eeyores’ from Winnie the Pooh. I don’t really call them that but you know what I mean by the term. Eeyore on the surface seems depressed and resigned to whatever fate brings his way. Rather than object to any of his circumstances, Eeyore says “its ok. I’ll learn to live without it” in a very somber tone that sounds as if he is half asleep. What in the world…

I have been a prepper for several years now and have been on both sides of probably every argument out there in some form or another at one point in my life. I don’t have the same perspective on life that I used to when I was 22. I would imagine that not many of us do still think the same way when we are in the midst of raising a family and can look back on our 20’s from a couple dozen birthdays. The music that rolled out of the radio when I graduated high school is now considered…

Most people would agree that it is good to have some spare fuel stored for the off chance that you might need it in an emergency. Extra fuel can be used to power generators and refill your car. Your extra fuel for your vehicle might be needed to keep your car running to power an inverter charging system. It could also be used to get you out of dodge if some event required you to bug out to a safer location. Fuel as we have seen most recently with the shortages after Hurricane Sandy is one prepper supply that you…

National Geographic has a show called Life Below Zero that I have seen probably a dozen or so times and it follows a lot of different individuals living in various remote locations in Alaska. The show appeals to me because I think Alaska is gorgeous and I would love to visit sometime, but the stories of these people are so much more intriguing to me than just about any episode of Doomsday Preppers. WHAT!??!?! Yes, that’s right. As much as I do enjoy watching Doomsday Preppers, I think that the people and situations portrayed on Life Below Zero are much…

This is the fifth and final article in a five part series on Neighborhood defense and security in a grid down scenario. In the first article, Neighborhood Watch on Steroids I listed some possible reasons and different types of threats you could see that would compel you along with your willing neighbors to take steps to prepare to defend your neighborhood. In the second article we started looking at beginning to think about your neighborhood from a tactical perspective and how you can take advantages that you already possess to give you as the defenders of your home turf advantages…

This is the fourth article in a five part series on Neighborhood defense and security in a grid down scenario. In the first article, Neighborhood Watch on Steroids I listed some possible reasons and different types of threats you could see that would compel you along with your willing neighbors to take steps to prepare to defend your neighborhood. In the second article we started looking at beginning to think about your neighborhood from a tactical perspective and how you can take advantages that you already possess to give you as the defenders of your home turf advantages over anyone…

In the previous article, I discussed concepts of viewing your neighborhood from the perspective of tactically defending it based upon the assumption of a national disaster that has rendered our nation in a crisis where there is no rule of law. This would be an extreme circumstance that we could only expect in the rarest of possibilities, but I do think it is an interesting thought exercise. My hypothetical scenario doesn’t necessarily depend on a complete government collapse, but we will assume there is no local law enforcement at the time. Assuming this was the case and you lived in…

Yesterday I wrote about forming the Neighborhood Watch on Steroids and described a situation where you might need to join together with others in your neighborhood to provide defense from people or groups looking to do you harm or simply steal what is yours