Winter, Jericho, battlezero

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Drove to Helena Friday and ran into a patch of hideous weather. Was heading east on I-90 and sailed right into a horribly intense storm of sleet and slush. Even with the wipers at full tilt the visibility was almost nil. I thought about pulling off to the side of the road and waiting it out, since in Montana the weather changes about every fifteen minutes or so, but figured if I was careful I’d make it through. As it turns out, I was fine. Several other drivers, however, did not fare as well and interestingly all the cars I saw in ditches were of the four-wheel-drive kind. This confirms the fact that 4WD does not make you invincible and tends to make many people overconfident. There is no substitute for caution.

Since the weather hasn’t been truly winterlike I hadn’t thrown anything in the back of the truck to give some weight over the tires. That’s gonna change this weekend. Also, I hadn’t really left any dedicated winter gear in the truck. Oh, there was a blanket and a parka but that was about it. Fortunately, I had my Bag O’ Tricks with my everyday gear in it so I’d have had water, light, first aid, a radio, spare batts, and the other essentials. Nonetheless, I need to go and put together another just-in-case box like I set the girlfriend up with last week. She’d been getting rides back and forth to Helena with a classmate. However the classmate has no emergency gear in the vehicle and has on one occasion let the gas gauge get dangerously low. So, I threw together a Rubbermaid tote with some MRE’s and heaters, water, sleeping bag, flashlight and batts, lightsticks, and a few other goodies for her. Also a Blitz can with five gallons of stabilized gas. Ideally, I’ll get all of this stuff back when classes are over in December and maybe by then the other gal will have her own gear together. In the meantime, Im a little bit more relaxed knowing the girlfriend can sit out the night by the side of the road if things get just too undriveable.
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My theories about Hawkins are narrowing down. The uber-survivalist theory looks pretty slim now that we see he’s got an American Express Centurion card and a portable satellite uplink system. And he can access .gov webstuff. Theories are now down to three:
a) he’s a .gov agent who saw what was coming and got out with some buddies before things went terminal
b) he’s a .gov agent emplaced there by the .gov to help rebuild the town (This theory is falling fast)
c) he’s in cahoots with the folks that started the attack

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Took the AR out the other day and sighted it in ‘the military way’. This meant the whole 25m-batlesero method. Seemed to work pretty fair. In theory this means that things are dead on at 25m and again at 250m when the bullet again crosses the line of sight. The mid-range trajectory cant bemore than a coupleinches, if that, so a dead-on holdout to 300m should result in hitting somehwere within, what?, a 5″ circle?

15 thoughts on “Winter, Jericho, battlezero”

  1. Am I wrong, but were some of the websites he was accessing in Russian?

    One more item for the emergency vehicle box – big garbage bags. Slice three holes in them and put them on next to your skin under your clothes, and they provide a vapor barrier that keeps the skin humid enough that you don’t lose heat through sweat. It works. Bread bags will do the same job for hands and feet.

    If you have a monument maker in town, a box of coarse granite chips work really well for getting emergency traction. My mother carried a box for years in Minnesota. It works much better than sand. She used a cardboard box that would come apart in a heavy crash, but you couldn’t do that in the open back of a truck without it disintegrating pretty fast.

    I can’t remember how we zeroed our Garands in basic, but we used a 25 meter Canadian bull to zero our Carbines, and that was good enough for me to shoot Expert with them twice. We didn’t shoot long-range paper targets, so I have no idea what kind of a group I could shoot, but when faced with Trainfire pop-up targets, it was more than good enough.

  3. Most people are using the 50/220 yard zero, which keeps the bullet at + or – 2″ all the way out to 250-270, depending on the ammo. If memory serves, the drop at 300 yards is around 6-8″ with that zero.

  4. Water

    What are your thoughts on potable water? I’ve got a family of 5 (plus a dog). We have a generator, stored fuel, a month of backup shelf-stable food, batteries, sheltering-in-place options and a camper for the get-out-of-dodge option. What we don’t have is much water.

    I keep maybe 100 half-liter bottles of water that we rotate through as we use the water bottles during workouts and while on the road. I’ve also got a 7 gallon plastic water jug filled with water. What I don’t know is how often I ought to replace the water in the plastic water jug or how long the plastic water bottles will keep (which would relate to how much I can stockpile/rotate through.)

    I’d like to have two or three weeks worth of water stockpiled. A month would be dandy. What do you suggest?

    What do you do about water?

  6. Re: Water

    I like the 15-gallon ‘blue barrels’ for storage.
    http://www.ne-design.net/water-barrel.html

    Link with nice pics: http://arizonabarrels.com/

    I’d love to have one of thsee bad boys:

    But they are far from man-portable. Since water weighs 8# per gallon. I like the 15-gallon barrels since they max out at 120#…pretty much the limit of easy handling. Ive been paying between $20-$30 for new 15 gallon blue barrels.

    Between the barrels, the stored water in 20 oz/1 liter bottles and a couple of water heaters that can be isolated and drained, we’ve got around, oh, about 150 gallons around here which is pretty good for two people. Theres a river a few blocks from here and we have water filtration as well.

  7. Am I wrong, but were some of the websites he was accessing in Russian?

    You are correct, sir. In fact I kick myself now for reflexively deleting the DVR file after the program ended. I should have gotten a freeze-frame, brought it into work, and asked one of our Russian-born engineers if he could translate. Something tells me there was a clue in there.

  8. It went by pretty fast, so I didn’t even get a good mental image of the screen. I just can’t figure how Russia would come into the story line. Now if we were still in the cold war, but these days?

  10. I just can’t figure how Russia would come into the story line.

    Well, it’s difficult to be sure, because we really don’t know if the writers know what they’re writing about, or if they’re just pulling it out of their butts as they go along. However, if the phone were to ring right now and it’s the producers, frantically screaming that their head writer just got run over by a bus and he was the only guy who had the Russian angle worked out…and please please please could I come up with an idea…here’s where I would go.

    If Hawkins is supposed to be a good guy, you could create a plot development that the US and Russia had developed mutual assistance pacts so that in case of emergency, operatives from one side could access certain websites on the other side in order to get information. (This assumes that what Hawkins was looking at was a site not accessible to typical web surfers like us.) It’s also possible that some of our operatives were simply trained that in case of a widespread attack that included the destruction of US info sources, they should turn to other nation’s websites to look for info about what happened. Hawkins went to one in Russia, another might check a site in China, a third might check one in Germany, etc.

    If Hawkins is supposed to be a bad guy…well, then it starts to look like the Russians are behind it. Perhaps there was a coup, and things turned ugly again, and Hawkins was a covert operative.

  11. Hawkins did kill that guy with the terminal radiation sickness, after berating him for not doing what he was supposed to do and leave (his loved ones??) to die. Mercy killing or assassination?

    So far I’m on the fence with this one. I can’t see where they can take it that’s all that interesting in the long run. But I’ll hold out for awhile. The Hawkins angle is the most interesting one so far.

  13. Re: Water

    Thanks for the response. I found enough odd interests in common with you that I added you, I hope you don’t mind. For example, I deal with church music issues as well as water storage issues. Do I know you from body recomp?

  15. Re: Water

    check out your local power plant. these 275 gallon containers are used to ship in distilled water for replenishing the steam plant for the turbines, and the large backup battery arrays. once empty, most times be discarded. nice thing is the bottom valve for discharging the tank. have two of them for rainwater storage, so got plenty of emergency water. have fun, Wildflower 06

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