Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gear – Outdoor Research (OR) rain & sun hats

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Many years ago I got turned on to the Outdoor Research (OR) line of rain hats. They were basically big GoreTex boonie hats. What was appealing to me was that they were available in somewhat military colors (forest green), were waterproof, and could be crushed into a small baseball-sized bundle that could be stuffed in a bag or BDU pocket. I bought a few of them and when they made a multicam versionI bought that too. I’ve found them to be excellent for their intended purpose.

I spent a week in Puerto Rico last month. While the rain hat was useful for those days when the rain blew in off the ocean, most of the time was bright sun and clear days. Unfortunately, I had no suitable hat for the occasion. I decided that when I got back to Montana I would order up a suitable hat for those sunny days.

As it turns out, Outdoor Research makes a sun hat that is basically a non-rain version of the rain hat I love so much. ( Helios Sun Hat, Multicam)

The main differences between the sun hat and the rain hat, obviously, are construction. The rain hat uses different materials with an eye towards waterproofing. The sun hat is geared towards being lightweight and providing shade. Could the rain hat be used to shade your head and face? Absolutely, but if its suny and hot enough to need to do that then its also sunny and hot enough that the hat will make you sweat like a hooker in church.

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(L.) Sun hat, (R.) Rain hat

I suppose that you could pick up a ten dollar no-name boonie hat somewhere and be set for the sunny outdoors….thats what I did for a number of years. I had some woodland boonie hat that I could drag through a creek and plop on my head to keep me cool during a day of fishing, etc. But..now that Im a bit older…I like nicer things, and a lot of my newer gear is moving in the direction of multicam, soooo…….

The rain hat, though, I highly recommend. I actually recommend both hats but folks are more likely to cheap out on the sun hat and thats fine. But the rain hat…you wanna spend the extra bucks there and get a nice one like this.

Article – Science finds the best place to hide from zombies

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The “I told you so”s will be long and loud……

Farmhouses, fenced-in compounds, even the thick concrete of a penitentiary. Post-apocalyptic zombie fiction has taught us that these are good options for hiding out to protect your delicious brains from the undead, but eventually the zombies typically overrun the walls.

Fortunately, science has now provided a better long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction.

Things I shoulda remembered

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Scene: my house
Setting: Half-awake, stumbling around in bathrobe
Event: Sound of someone letting themselves into house, security cam footage showing unfamiliar vehicle parked out front
What actually happened: Me forgetting that a contractor was coming by today
Now trending on Twitter: #IsThatAnUzi

Fortunately the contractor is pretty laid back and no one’s feelings were hurt. Most folks seeing a guy in a bathrobe holding an Uzi at port arms wouldn’t have been as cool about it.

Prices

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After a little bit of a spike, silver has dropped back into the low $16 range. While I think the odds of things ever hitting the stage of bartering for your life with a couple Silver Eagles is pretty slim, I still like having a little box full of tubes of them on hand. It’s some sort of primitive lizard-brain thing, but I just like the feeling of having them even if, from a pencil-and-calculator standpoint, it doesn’t make sense.

Speaking of prices going down, it’s been a long time since I saw gasoline for less than $2. I’m no economic expert but, to my uneducated eye, it appears this is a simple price manipulation by the oil producing nations to make domestic oil production economically unfeasible. If they make oil cheap enough, folks will just by it from them rather than dig up North Dakota and Canada. Simple business economics….undercut the other guy. An unfortunate side effect is that all those guys that were making bank out there in NoDak are now fearing for their jobs. A good reason to always tuck a little something aside when youre doing well…you never know how and when the fat times are gonna come to a screeching halt.

One thing prices have not been going down on is food. Meats are pretty high these days. Even buying in bulk it can add up quickly. We’re buying half a beef from a somewhat-local ranch next month and thats been, in our experience, the way to go. It’s the same price per pound regardless of cut…ground beef or t-bone…its all the same. It’s been a good way for us to buy meat but, obviously, you have to have the freezer space to pull it off. My experience, which you can read about if you search through the blog, has been that you can stuff a properly packaged piece of meat into a deep freeze and have it be just fine five years later.

On paper, its tough being a survivalist…you sink a lot of money into things that, arguably, you might never need. I’ve seen guys die with thousands of dollars tied up in things they owned ‘just in case’. The outside observer might think its a waste of money or ‘misallocation of resources’ but there’s a non-tangible benefit. It’s very much the same benefit you achieve from that other ‘waste of money’ – insurance. It buys me peace of mind and a general feeling of security which, in my opinion, does have a financial value. Still, it’s a hard thing, sometimes, to spend money on ‘just in case’ stuff when what you really want is a WarCraft subscription or a new iPad.

Of course, once the zombies rise it’ll be a whole different story and that money will look like a brilliant allocation.

Article -10-story missile silo for sale outside of Roswell

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“It might be the safest home for sale in all of New Mexico. I say come out and look, make an offer, and you can have your underground castle right away,” said realtor Jim Moore.

40 feet underground lays an old missile silo in Roswell with a lot of history. It’s a home where you don’t have to worry about curb appeal.
All you can see from above ground is a door to the stairwell. From there, it’s straight down four stories in pitch black.
“If the lights happened to go out, you can’t see anything beyond your nose,” said Tom Edgett.
Once at the bottom, there’s a series of tunnels. Then, it finally opens up into a big room – an underground cave.

Its my understanding that these things are, in the unfinished stages, a mass of stagnant water, toxic byproducts, and endless hours of repair and restoration….but there is still something just really, really cool about them. How cool would it be to have your quaint and cozy ‘tiny house’ of 200 square feet and trapdoor in the floor leading to your zillion square foot basement?

But, yeah, unless its already been done for you, turning it into habitable space is gonna be an adventure.

Scope arrival

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As you may recall, I’ve been slowly putting together what can only be described as an experiment in how much unrecoverable value you can add to a .22 rifle. The base gun was the Savage MK I I FVR rifle. The next step was to throw away the horrible stock that came with the gun and replace it with a very nice and not cheap Boyds Tactical laminate stock. Next step?  Optics. Wound up with the Nikon P-22 BDC 150 2-7x scope. A couple things about this scope that really appealed to me were the target turrets and the very nice ballistics calculator that nikon has on their website. It has all the ballistics data for the Remington subsonic ammo I’m shooting and it even offers the option of printing a little data card to tape on the stock.

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The scope itself is okay. Made in the Philippines, so the quality is hopefully better than Made In China. The target knobs are resettable once you get dialed in. Took it to the range the other day and was quite pleased. Zeroed it for 50 yards since at longer distances that slow subsonic bullet is going to have the trajectory of a trench mortar.

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All that’s really left to do is drop a small Harris bipod on the front of this thing and it’s going to be ready for whatever task calls for a small, quiet bit of ballistic mischief.

Squatters II – The gear edition

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So what does the 22-year-old ‘screw the system’ parasite carry with them to ease their travels and accommodate their worthless existence? Glad you asked:

Lets start with the basic package…the backpack.

20150125_121111My wife, who has dealt with the kinds of people in her worklife, tells me that there are two classes of critter: ‘rubber tramp’ and ‘leather tramp’. The difference is that one lives outta their car, the other lives on foot. After that, there is a subspecies of ‘hippie homeless’ which are the younger crowd who are just, like, y’know, doing their own thing, man. A separate subset of the usual Sterno-guzzling, brushed-their-teeth-with-a-hammer, career homeless you see laying in puddles of urine.

Open the top flap of the pack and we get:

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Lets see..a couple space blankets, nail clippers, tickets for being in the park after hours, orange pack cover, elastic bowtie (???), ziploc bags, playing cards, packet of oatmeal, a note from another hipster who crashed at his place before he got evicted (name.Facebook redacted), and a few other small items. Interesting to note that there’s some signs of thinking ahead here…some food, matches, waterproofing, etc.

Lets move on to the side pockets…..

20150125_121748A rather extensive sewing kit, a plastic box full of safety pins and dental floss (the only personal hygiene item found. Probably used as extra-tough seewing thread), a cheap multitool, some paracord, river shoes, and markers for the ubiquitous “Need food. Anything will help. God bless” career enhancer.

In the body of the main pack:

20150125_122445Dog treats, a burner phone instruction book, a very cheesey but sharp sheath knife, some electrical tape, toilet paper, and a stunning collection of summonses/tickets and court proceedings that tell the story of our missing waste of skin. Apparently, at the tender age of 22, the lad was sacked from his job. In a fit of rage, he proceeded to trash a hotel room to the tune of $2800. While that would be enough for most people, he also acquired tickets for drug paraphernalia (wow, that was not spelled the way I thought), sleeping in the park, and a whole bunch of failures to appear. Sadly, it caught up to him and he spent a week or two as a guest of the county. He lamented that no one would take his calls from jail and that all his friends and family didnt seem to care 🙁 Boo hoo, right?

After early January, he falls off the radar. Im guessing he split town in a hurry to avoid restitution of re-arrest for his chronic failures to appear. Nonetheless, whats interesting about all this is the things that this wretch carried in his pseudo-post-apocalyptic travels. There are a few more items that I have to cart off to the dumpster, like his sleeping bag and some clothes, but this is the most ‘gear’ portion of this stuff. Apparently, being able to sticth together clothing was very important as well as keeping warm. There was absolutely no first aid gear of any kind, nor any kind of personal hygiene gear…no soap, no toothbrush, no razor, nothing.

Of course, I suppose your needs are easily met when you freeload by crashing in peoples apartment buildings uninvited.

Do I have sympathy for this guy? Nope. If he were homeless and it was five below zero out, and he said “Dude, I’ll shovel out your sidewalk around the building if you’ll let me sleep in your basement for the night” that would have been one thing. If he had left a note apologizing for his trespass and acknowledging his crime that woulda been another. But instead, he’s a drug-using hipster who crashes in the basement, drops a deuce in a nonfunctioning toilet, and leaves his gear and food waste behind. So..no sympathy.

Squatters

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Ugh…’real life’ has intruded lately, making my posting a little more sporadic than usual. I’m doing a sort of ‘property manager’ thing for my landlord. In exchange for a deal on the rent, I’m keeping an eye on the building, vacuuming the common areas, showing apartments to prospective tenants, etc.

The other day a tenant told me that the lock on the front door of the building was not working. Sure enough, the deadbolt would work regardless of the entry code you entered. The tenant mentioned that he had encountered people in the basement of the building where the laundry room is who did not belong there.

The basement of the apartment building is a rats warren of storage spaces, closets, not-up-to-code living spaces, and generally a great place to hide. So…grab the 870 and a flashlight and lets go look for squatters.

As it turns out, while I did not find any squatters I did find their nest:

20150121_201942A backpack, sleeping bad, spoiled food, and some personal belongings. All of which smelled horribly of body odor. In addition to the gear, there were a couple notebooks where the parasite had written about his hitchhiking and riding the rails across the US. The food labels were dated around Christmas so this guy left his gear and never came back, apparently. I’m guessing he either got tossed in jail or did something that made him leave town in a hurry.

The fact he was chronicling his journey leads me to believe he’s more of one of these 20-something hipster-homeless guys rather than some Sterno-chugging genuine homeless wretch.

So..if you’re going to go on a grand adventure, what does the parasitical traveler take with them? Theres a decent but no-name backpack, a Slumberjack sleeping bag, some clothing, a bag of small rocks, a small metal tin full of ‘slogan’ patches you’d sew on clothing, some smoking materials, snack wrappers, and not much else. Im guessing the truly valuable things like money, ID, a knife, etc, are things this guy kept on his person.

So what to do? Well, this crap goes in the dumpster. (Although I’ll keep a couple carabiners that are clipped to the pack.)

Clearly what is going on here is that someone discovered that the basement was nice, warm, and relatively unoccupied. When the temperature got too cold, they hid out in an out-of-the-way room in the basement. Rent-free. This is why we can’t have nice things.. because there is always some idiot who thinks that their need for something trumps your ownership of it. The landlord pays taxes on the building, pays for repairs, takes the financial hits of irresponsible tenants, tries to keep the place running, and some waste of skin decides that since its a cold night, perhaps that basement should be made available for those who need it.

This is the problem with the world today. Too many people figure that because they need something they are entitled to have it, at the expense of others. The most annoying case of it I see now are people who owe money on student loans and because they can’t pay them back (usually due to spending money on a course of study with no real financial future…Gender Issues In Renaissance Art, for example) decide that those loans should be ‘forgiven’. Geez, man..I’d love to have the .gov cut me a check for $50k and then have them forget about it when I claim it was predatory lending.

I’m probably feeling bitter because tax season approaches and, as a self-employed person, I get the full treatment.

Unfortunately, people like this are going to be exceptionally pervasive during any true crisis. They’ll demand that you ‘do something’ on their behalf because you have ‘all that [food/fuel/water/medicine/clothing]’ and they don’t. Never mind that their deficiencies could have been easily remedied if they’d actually done more thinking about the future and less pot-smoking down at the park with their buddies. Worse, they convince their fellow-travelers in .gov to give some legal standing to these demands for ‘fairness’.

These squatters are just symptomatic, but extremely emblematic, of the greater issue. Sadly, it is one that I don’t think I’m going to be able to resolve on any level greater than the immediate surroundings of the building I’m maintaining.

Folks you meet at CrossFit..or..How To Survive In The Woods

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More CrossFit. Behold, a sweat angel:

20150109_184915This is what happens when after the workout you flop down on your back on the floor to try and get your breath back. This is also what it looks like, I would imagine, after the paramedics peel you off the floor and ship your carcass to the hospital.

But, more interestingly, the fella instructing the class had his own ‘lost in the woods’ survival experience that I was curious about. He got turned around while out hunting and wound up having to spend the night in the sticks as it dumped 13″ of snow on his position and the temperature clocked in around 0 degrees. He survived with no apparent injuries and was helicoptered out the next day. I asked him what happened:

Him and his hunting buddy drove up a forest service road way back into the boonies, they then parked and rode their mountain bikes further in, they then parked the bikes and hiked in on foot. They then split up, one guy heading up one ridge and one guy heading up the other. After a while he broke for lunch and as he was eating he spied a mule deer out of the corner of his eye. He chased after it and by the time he came up for air he realized he had gotten turned around. He wandered for a while, back tracking, climbing up and down the hills, before realizing he was well and thoroughly turned around.

The weather was starting to change and daylight was fading fast. He built himself a big fire , broke out his mylar blanket, and settled in for the night. He would alternate between getting wood for the fire and sitting on heated rocks to stay warm. His cellphone was dead and had minimal signal. At one point he tried it and it had just enough charge for him to get a GPS coord and to text those coords to his wife. But…he would have to make it through the night before help could get to him. The next morning he tried wandering towards what he thought was a road and as he did so the rescue ‘copter flew right over him on its way to the coords of his campsite. He was sure he’d screwed the pooch but they circled around again and he waved ’em down with his space blanket. The recovered him and got him to safety.

1383305_10203834820924062_7193706435147102802_nI asked if he had carried any special survival gear and he said it was just the mylar, nalgene bottle, celphone, firestarter, and the usual hunting gear….no extra clothes. He said he normally would have carried a spare cellphone charger with him but it was in his truck and they had taken his buddys rig to go hunting. What he did do, which made all the difference in the world, was once he realized he was well and truly lost he made camp while there was still light to see what he was doing and got a big fire going. He did mention that he will make sure to take his GPS along next time. (I’d go with map-n-compass as a backup, but Im not going to armchair quarterback this guy to his face.)

As you know, even when cell reception is too spotty for voice, text messages can often get through. In his case it made all the difference.

It was an interesting conversation, mostly because this is the first time I’ve actually gotten to talk to someone who had one of these experiences and it was quite interesting to hear the first-hand account. He also says, by the way, his subsequent hunting trips have not been as deep into the sticks as that one. His wife keeps him ‘on a short leash’, as he says.

My own experiences hunting and getting caught in bad weather tell me that while it is very easy to go overboard and encumber yourself with too much gear, there’s definitely a possibility of undergearing yourself as well. Its a tough balancing act to keep things light enough for tromping up and down mountains all day and having the gear you need when things go sideways. Something to think about.

 

Back to the gym

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Had an interesting, although brief, conversation the other day that I thought might be worth repeating.

For reasons that don’t need going into at this juncture, I have signed back on to CrossFit. After the last session the instructor asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to work on in the sessions. I said that I wanted to work on stamina and endurance so that at the end of the class I’m not laying on the floor gasping for air (which is usually how I end a class). He then asked, ‘what about outside class?’ I misinterpreted the question and thought he was inquiring how things were in general in m life. No, thats not what I meant. he said. Then it dawned on me what the real question was. “Oh. I get it. Well, I need to work on things like being able to carry heavy objects over distances..things like water and fuel cans, climb over obstacles, run distances with gear, pick up people and things and move them around…you know, your basic end-of-the-world survivability stuff.”  He nodded his head and said that was pretty much what he was shooting for as well.

That’s pretty much what made me interested in CrossFit, the notion that it wasn’t about being able to do one thing – like running, or lifting a record-setting weight – but rather that it purports to promote ‘functional fitness’. That is to say, the things you do in the real world…jumping up onto things, climbing things, running with weights, pushing/pulling things.

The way I figure it, no matter what flavor of apocalypse youre expecting, you’re going to need to do things like carry a spare tire a couple hundred yards to a vehicle, lift heavy debris off a roadway, unload a dozen 5-gallon fuel cans off a truck and then into another one, run distances while carrying stuff, etc, etc….all those physical things that are going to make the apocalypse such a pain in the butt. Thus far, CrossFit seems to support those sorts of physical tasks. So…back to CrossFit for a while.

I metnion it because it is so easy to get wrapped up in all the other sexy stuff in preparedness and ignore things like physical ability. And Im the first one to agree that it’s a lot easier and more fun to order preparedness gear off the internet and consider yourself ‘prepared’ than it is to do the really crappy, annoying, loathsome things like exercising regularly.