Survival Trip

Bell's Canyon Trailhead

I spent quite a bit of time debating what I should put in my 72-hour kit. Originally, I wanted it to be the One Survival Kit To Rule Them All. :) But the thing about that is it becomes quite large and quite a bit more expensive.

Being large was really no problem for me except for the fact that it would take up half my car trunk.

Being expensive was undesirable because I want to be able to make a kit for each member of my future family and it would be good if other people could benefit from my experiments.

Nevertheless (and notwithstanding :) sorry couldn’t help it) after doing the survival weekend I realized what the best approach was. Basically, you create a core survival kit that has things that would be applicable to pretty much any situation and then supplement with items appropriate for the season. For instance, if you were going backpacking in the winter then you would want to take an emergency snow shovel and waterproof snow gear etc, in addition to your core survival kit.

Boulder Field

Anyway, on the last weekend of April Chris Smemoe and I hiked up Bell’s Canyon to the first campground near the creek. This campground sits right next to a large boulder field. The boulder field has some enormous granite slabs in it, it’s kinda surreal. I searched around for a while for the best place to sleep and found a nice ledge right near Smemoe’s tent. Smemoe wasn’t participating in the survival aspect of the trip so he brought a tent.

As night descended Smemoe started making himself dinner while I watched. I had eaten before I came so I wasn’t too hungry, I did eat an energy bar right before bed though.

There was a little mouse that appeared, and was quite brave. It was after Smemoe’s food and was very cute. I didn’t blame him, the food smelled really good. That was my fear actually, that the food would attract more than just Mr. Mouse.

Mr. Mouse

Soon it was too cool for me to stay up and I retired to my spot under the granite boulder. I had purchased a silver emergency blanket sleeping bag from Emergency Essentials. It is basically just like the emergency blankets you commonly see except this was in the form of a sleeping bag. I was basically sleeping in a plastic bag, and as you can imagine, the inside got somewhat wet. I didn’t really realize it was getting wet though because I was wearing wool pants and a wool sweater so they didn’t allow any of the wetness to get to my skin. But I can see why they recommend sleeping in the buff when you sleep in one of those.

At about 3:00 AM I woke up cold. My feet were the coldest followed by my legs. My upper-body wasn’t ever cold because I had a shirt, light pull-over jacket, and a thick wool sweater on. Whereas my legs only had the wool pants (I had taken off my jeans, which I later put back on, and that warmed me a bit). At this point I decided it was time to break out my backup sleeping bag. I had brought backup gear in the event my survival gear didn’t cut the mustard.

Sleeping Area

Once I got inside my sleeping bag I realized I could take some of the hand warmers I had in my survival kit and put them in my socks to keep my feet warm. I did this and it worked like a charm. If I had thought of this when I was still in the emergency blanket sleeping bag then I might have been able to make it through the whole night. But once I was in my regular sleeping bag, there was no leaving it. :)

I woke up pretty early the next morning and began preparations to make a fire. I had a little bit of mostly dry kindling but all the other wood I had was completely soaked and some of it was covered in snow. This particular weekend a storm had rolled in and it was beginning to snow again. It was perfect conditions to test my fire starting kit.

I began by cutting a 4″ solid oak (I discovered later) log into to pieces that I could use for the fire. I then pulled out my fire starters and put what tinder and kindling I could find on top. It took a while, but the fire eventually took hold and I was able to get a solid blaze going with coals and everything.

This was a triumph, because I’ve had a very hard time in the past getting fires started with wet wood.

After I got the fire started to a pretty substantial level I put it out and we packed up and headed home. I had originally planned to stay up there until 6:00 PM on Sunday but Smemoe was taking off and I didn’t think it wise to stay up there alone during a spring snow storm.

All in all, I learned what I wanted from the trip. That is all, the end. :)

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