The right to bear arms…against bears

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So, went up to the Beta Site after work to check out the new cargo container. They did a good job and even levelled it as best they could. However, I still need to jack it up and get some concrete blocks under it because I want it higher off the ground. That’ll be something to do tomorrow. While I was up there, I also wanted to put in some more game cameras for security for the new container and to record the increased traffic of predators up there.

This morning, I was awoken to my phone alerting me that there was activity and pictures were available. Allow me to sum it up with this:

Yeah, it was a bear-centric 24 hours. First of all, this morning gave me this bruin:

That light in the background is the flash going off from the other game cam I set up there yesterday. The bear in the picture? Did not come alone:

That’s right, guys. Its a family affair up there. Whats that you say? You wish there were better pictures? No problem, man…here you go:

Mom and cub? That moves the needle a little bit on the threat-o-meter. It’s a veritable Wild Kingdom up there.

Its looking like my larger security threat is the bears rather than humans (for now). Wasn’t expecting that. I have a couple game cam pics here that show me in the truck putting up the game cams….and the previous pic shows the bears walking through seven minutes earlier.

I’m not going to call it a bear problem, but its certainly a ‘bear diverse’ area.

An interesting side note…on the way back from dinner last night I managed to get pulled over by some young buck on the police department. (Failure to signal for the right turn at the light, I am told.) Mind you, at the moment I had a Winchester 1200 and an AK sitting behind my seat, and the big Glock 10mm sitting on the dashboard. He asks for my license and proof of insurance. No problem, I say, and hand over the license. Insurance, he asks? Thats gonna take a sec, I gotta dig around for it, I reply. He says “Yeah, theres a lot of guns here I don’t think I want you digging around in there.”. My response? “Dude, there is a shitload of guns in this truck.” Got off with a warning. I wonder if he’ll mention the interaction to some of the older officers there who will say “Oh him? He’s always like that.” Good times.

Paratus approaches!

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Paratus is approaching, guys! In fact, at this point it is less than a month away.This year Paratus falls on September 18, 2026.

You can read all about Paratus, the holiday by and for survivalists, here at the Paratus FAQ.

This will be my first Paratus with the Beta Site. So…if you guys wanna get your buddy Zero a nice Paratus gift this year, well, an Amazon gift card code will go a long way to defraying the cost of power tools, sentry guns, and Swiss Navy.

I’ll be getting this years Paratus cards shortly and its not too late to get your name on the list. How do you do that? As deatailed:

How do I get on the Paratus card list?

It’s pretty simple and blatantly selfish. If you’ve signed up at Patreon, sent me a gift of any kind, are someone I know ‘in real life’, are an ‘internet friend’ with whom I’ve exchanged many emails, or otherwise have interacted with me on more than a casual basis…and you’ve provided an address…you’ll get on the list.

Simply emailing or commenting with your address and “Please send me a Paratus card” will not work.

A collection of previous Paratus cards can be found at the Paratus FAQ.

Candid Camera XII

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Yogi showed up 90 minutes after I was standing in that same spot. My two greatest threats up there are humans and griz, in that order. Black bears bears of color aren’t exactly harmless but I put the risk of going mano-a-bearo way down on the list. Sure, I won’t turn my back on one but I’d bet if I yelled and waved my arms at him he’d run like the wind. And if not….:::shrug:::…things happen.

 

Filtering

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So one of the the issues at the Beta Site is that to pull water from the creek you have to, obviously, drop one end of a suction hose into the creek to allow the pump to pull water in. Creeks are, by their very nature, rather open to the environment and get all sorts crap in them…dust, dirt, small bugs, pine needles, etc, etc. And thats in addition the stuff thats on the bottom of the creek…dirt, silt, degraded organic matter of all sorts, etc. Sucking anything up into your pump that is not water is usually a bad idea. Some stuff you can get away with if its small enough, but you really want to keep the pine needles and dead bugs outta the impellors. Pretty much any plumbing supply store will sell you one of these to help keep crap out of your intake:

But thats still a bit coarse. And I need to keep as much crap out of that water as possible so I don’t gum up the internals on the water heater. So, whats an effective solution I can DIY while standing in the plumbing section of the store? The answer, as it turned out, was this:

Its an inline filter used for irrigation systems. Unscrew the bulbuous part and theres a 75 micron screen in there. As it turns out, Rain Bird also sells screens of other size. Obviously this is not something that makes water potable…its for filtering solids, not Giardia and other biologics. So I hooked this up to one end of my intake hose and tried it out. Worked awesome. When I checked the filter there was plenty of small tiny bits of sediment and gunk that the filter had kept out of my pump and, by extension, out of my water tank. For fun, I also put one on the output hose from my storage tank so that if there is anythign that works its way into the tank, it doesnt get transferred into anything I don’t want it in.

Cost? Shoot, man…the filter and a couple 3/4 adaptors was less than twenty bucks. I decided to buy the next larger size, meant for 1″ pipe, and use a couple 1″-to-3/4″ adaptors to give myself a larger setup so flow wouldnt be restricted if things got muddy.

TPIWWP, so:

Its important to note that the 3/4″ thread on the filter is not the same as the 3/4 thread on your garden hose. You’ll need a 3/4fpt to 3/4fht adaptor (the brass thing in the picture) to get them to work together and you can find that easily in the plumbing section.

Its worked out quite well for me and I keep a couple spares in the box with the transfer pump. The more crap I can keep out of the water storage tank, the less frequently I need to powerwash it’s interior with bleach.

Again, this is not something that turns untreated water into drinkable water. That should be pretty obvious. But it definitely helps when its time to purify and treat water.

Workplace LMI

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Finally got a good amount of rain here today. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is, after weeks of heat and smoke, to finally get some relief. The Pacific Northwest is an awesome place to be but sometimes theres a price and that price is paid by your lungs.

I seem to have stumbled across another LMI at work this week. Theres a fella working in our delivery/shipping/warehouse section who came up to me and said “I hear youre a real gun guy”. We chatted about guns and, of course, out came the cell phones to show favorite guns. His collection of guns, plate carriers, and strong opinions about gear readily paints him as, if not on the same team, certainly in our division.

Today he came by my desk to show off some Ferro Concepts stuff and some other things. One of which impressed me enough that I jumped onto my work computer and ordered some stuff up from these guys. (As an aside, this is often how I discover awesome gear. I see or encounter someone with it and I think “Holy crap, thats awesome. I need that!”)

He was wearing some Kifaru gear today, and we chatted about Kifaru and some other gear makers. He knows his stuff. I haven’t trickled into end-of-the-world stuff, but we did exchange some morale patches that leaned in that direction. I think he was excited to meet someone who he could geek out with over all this stuff.

This is, by the way, the organic way that you wind up meeting like-minded individuals. In my experience, in Montana anyway, you get yourself and five other guys in a room it’s pretty good odds that one of them is a ‘gun guy’ and theres a pretty good chance there’s a ‘prepper’ type in there as well. If you work in an environment of about twenty people or so, I’d be surprised if  there wasn’t at least one guy like that.

While I can certainly chat over the water cooler at work with this guy and compare notes, I don’t think I’ll be bringing him ‘into my world’. I’ve a tiny handful of people I freely share information and access with, but I’m really not keen to bring anyone else into the fold right now. Thats probably a little short-sighted since there are, no doubt, people out there who would be great to have in my tight little circle, but its always a risk. And, its not only a risk to me, its a risk to the others in that circle. But…I’ve done it in the past so I guess we can’t say ‘never’.

 

 

The Box

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Got a bill from the conex people today. Soup-to-nuts, $5295. That includes delivery along the goat trail that passes for a road. I went up there last weekend and marked off where I’d like them to drop it. Next Wednesday is the scheduled delivery day.

This will be one of the more expensive additions to the place this year. But, I am hoping it affords me the convenience of leaving some stuff up there in a reasonably secure environment.*

The geegaw to let me use a bottle jack to lift the corners will be arriving today. So next weekends plan is to pick up some concrete block and some flat scrap steel and jack the bloody thing up off the ground a foot or so. And, of course, fix it so nothing tries to make a home underneath.

Ideally, this will let me avoid renewing my lease on a storage unit where I keep the side-by-side and some other small odds and ends.

However, this is all contingent on these guys getting it up there, in the right place, pointed in the right direction, and on time. We’ll see.

* = Yes, I know nothing is ‘secure’ when someone has all the time in the world to break into something. But, you know what? It’s more secure than it not being there.  And, for now, theres not going to be anything more valuable than a few power tools in there and some assorted odds and ends.

Milwaukee Transfer Pump

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I’ve mentioned it a time or two but never really expounded on my opinion on the Milwaukee Transfer Pump that I’ve been using lately to move water around the Beta Site. The TL;DR version: buy it.

My primary uses of it to date  have been to a) move water from the creek, uphill, to a larger water tank and b) transferring water from a smaller tank to a larger one. In both cases, this thing did an outstanding job. It’s pretty quick at 8 gpm, and creates enough pressure that when I feed the output to a garden hose with a spray nozzle on the end I get a good 20-30′ of range.

The pump runs off the Milwaukee batteries and accepts all of the M18 series of batteries. I usually use the 6.0 battery although if you remove the spacer in the battery compartment it will accommodate the larger 12.0 batt. I ran the 6.0 battery today and moved 200 gallons of water before the battery called it quits..that was a 50-gallon fillup, transfer to the main tank, another 50-gallon fillup, transfer that to the main tank. Thats a total of 200 gallons of throughput.

The pump is fairly quiet…from about 30′ away all  you hear is a quiet whine. I has two hose faucet male threaded ports..one for input and one for output. I just cut some how, got an assortment of connectors, and make my own specific connections as needed. Sometimes I need female threaded end of the hose, sometimes I need male threaded end…having an assortment of fittings and hose clamps really opens up a bunch of possibilities.

There are, of course, larger pumps out there that will pump higher and further, but for my needs thus far this thing has performed quite well. It ran water uphill to the tank in the back of my truck with no problems, and it’s light weight makes it easy to haul around the fairly primitive (for now) environs of the Beta Site. You dont have to be a genius to see how something like this can have quite a few applications for we of the survival mindset. Pumping water from your bathtub to your toilet tank, filling jerry cans from a creek or other water source, impromptu showering, keeping handy for firefighting when doing a slash or barrel burn, watering a garden from a water storage tank, etc, etc. It has been the key to having high water pressure for my portable tankless water heater…it makes a strong hot stream of shower water possible. Don’t undersell that.

When I originally bought this I only had a vague idea of how useful it would be. Now that I’ve had it for a while and used if for several different tasks ‘out in the field’ I cannot say enough good things about  it.