Minding my own business the other day, and I ran into someone at the post office. He’s an LMI, and rather serious about it, but for some reason we interact very, very infrequently. I probably haven’t seen him in about a year. So I ask him how he’s doing and how tings are coming along vis-a-vis the whole preparedness thing.
Sadly, he told me some meth-head broke into his bugout cabin and, with privacy and time on his side, took a hatchet and managed to whittle through some concrete to get to his stash of guns and ammo. Also tore open a couple Stack-On gun safes cabinets. And that he destroyed what he couldn’t take…tossed a buncha guns in the river. Then the useless tweaker dragged himself to his campsite to get his nod on and thats where he was, gorked out of his mind, when the cops and the very annoyed cabin owner found him.
The LMI in question mentioned that the whole thing sorta soured him a little on the idea of preparedness. Makes sense…you invest time and money and some waste of skin sets you back to square one.
Thats yet another one of the Great Survivalists Quandaries – how to have a remote location that is secure enough to be left alone and unattended. The easy answer that I would imagine 90% of the blogosphere would come back with is something involving large waterproof containers and a backhoe. Mind you, I’m not asking what you think the ideal solution is. Already I know the comments are going to be filled with people saying “He should do this….”. My point is that when it comes to stashing goods away at those lovely remote locations you should always expect that it ain’t so remote some piece of trash can’t get into it when youre a hundred miles away.
Its also a pretty good reason to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Sure, it’s entirely possible that when The Day comes and you have to leave now, now, now you may not be able to grab as much gear to throw into your vehicle as youd like. Maybe you’ll be leaving straight from work ,or the supermarket, or the ball game, and have no chance to return home to grab your gun cases and gear. Thats why you pre-position your gear, but you don’t pre-position all of it.
I know folks that keep a storage rack system bolted to the ceiling of their garage. It holds several storage containers full of gear and supplies. In a crisis, their plan is to back the pickup into the garage and just lower those ready-to-go containers into the bed of the truck and be out the door in about five minutes. But their arrangement of gear is such that if they load the truck and can’t get to their secondary site, the gear will keep them safe…and if they have to leave without their gear, they have enough gear at the site to keep them going. Its when the possibility of having to leave without their gear AND not make it to their secondary location comes up that the problems start.
The fella I mentioned is pretty bummed, and he’s a bit disillusioned, but I have a pretty strong feeling he’ll stick to the program and continue his journey in preparedness. I suspect he will make some very big changes at his cabin in terms of construction, concealment, contents, and countermeasures. It’s unfortunate that it had to happen to him, but it’s incidents like those that remind us that just stacking AR15s in the closet might not be the best idea for long term solutions.
An old timer I used to work with constructed panels of drywall over 2×6 studs in his shop and kind of friction fit them into place with the baseboard and chair rail holding it all in place. Kept all his expensive machinist tools and guns in between the studs and behind the drywall. If you didn’t know to look they would never be found unless some tweaker randomly started bashing holes in the drywall.
The point being, if they don’t see it they can’t see it they can’t steal it. Like Hannibal Lechter said, people covet what they see. I would also lean toward a bunker hidden in a 10-12′ culvert pipe buried horizontally out in the boonies with hidden entrance but nothing is fool proof. I feel bad for people that work hard for their stuff only to have it taken by some human debris.
Man that sucks AND blows. It’s really difficult to ensure the integrity of a remote unattended site no matter how well protected from folks who have too much time and too little respect for the property of others. What I take from this (besides the validation of Murphy’s Law) is that it’s a good teaching point about how things can go South quick if that SHTF moment ever does occur. As you noted, dispersal of assets is probably the most effective strategy here.
Regards
That sux!
But, it is a learning point, expensive tho it may be.
Stack on cabinets are not safes.
Hope he stays with the plans and improves things.
Low Maintenance Individual? Laplander Meditating Intensely?
Old dude need help with this….
Have you tried entering “LMI” into the search bar at the top of the page and seeing what comes up?
Sorry, I see a lot of LMI references but I can’t find it spelled out. It’s ok – there’s a lot of things I don’t know.
Like minded individuals … It took me a bit as well
Thanks for that! Can I still be an LMI if I was too slow to figure that out on my own?
My sister and I inherited a little cabin in the woods. We couldn’t sell it fast enough.
Tweakers and other useless dregs were already an issue before the relative that owned the cabin, and lived near by died. We were living a tank of gas worth of driving away from the place and were worried about someone burning i, and the woods around it down.
All 3 times I visited the place while we owned it someone had either broken in or had been camped out on the property. I found a bunch of stolen mail on one of my visits.
Without someone living on the property I wouldn’t feel comfortable with going in on a remote cabin.
I think a remote place needs a caretaker, but even then I’ve heard of problems due to the kind of people that remote places attract… A good compromise is to be out of town far enough to be self supporting but close enough to live on your property full time. That also helps you integrate with the neighbors and know locals before troubles start.
That’s just an execution fail.
And anyone that didn’t know most locks are simply “honesty” locks, and not actual security, isn’t doing this right. Ditto for anything concrete that could be defeated by a hatchet.
But we knew that when you mentioned “Stack-On” anything.
I’ve never heard of remote cabins – anywhere – that weren’t routinely broken into, repeatedly.
If you have a site left long-term unattended, and you think you’re going there On The Day, contingency A is for its breach while unattended, and B is for its prior occupation by non-owner scumbags.
If someone is not prepared for that, and re-occupation of contested territory without recourse to outside assistance, they haven’t thought about this long enough.
This is the prepping equivalent of going for a day hike with no food, no water, no map and compass, no shelter, and no warm clothes.
What could possibly go wrong?
And I cannot imagine why someone wouldn’t buy an old wallhanger .22, leave it somewhere obvious (yet moderately secured) in such a location, and weld a plug in the barrel beyond the chamber. Or file the firing pin flat and short.
The real weapons (and everything else) ought to be dispersed, and much better secured. Not least of which well-hidden. Nothing less than a platoon of engineers should be required to locate and unearth caches without certain proprietary information.
But thanks for yet another cautionary tale.
“I’ve never heard of remote cabins – anywhere – that weren’t routinely broken into, repeatedly.”
Yep, we used to own a concrete block ranch house along the Texas-Mexico border. Illegals often broke in looking for water, matches, other useful materials for their journey. We learned to leave the door open, rather than having it kicked in fixing the damage.
One thought: you could easily hang a $100 game camera pointed at the main entrance of the property. Doesn’t stop crack-babies from breaking in, but at least you could establish some evidence.
I’m reminded of the Affleck movie The Accountant in which he kept an Airstream trailer loaded with gold, guns, collectible art, etc. in a storage unit, ready to hook to the hitch and go. If only something like that would work in real life….
Some years back the family had farm property in (location redacted) which became empty and that I visited every week end and it turned out that about the only growth industry in that county was burglary. Anything of value was pilfered – plumbing fixtures, porcelain doorknobs, the oak baseboard trim and door casings, light fixtures, a 12-year-old water heater, you name it. One Saturday I discovered someone had rolled up the 40-year-old linoleum on the pantry floor and tied it so they could carry it out more easily. When the property became empty I used my tractor post hole digger to put lengths of utility pole in the driveway to keep vehicles out, so everything stolen had to be carried by hand 75 yards to vehicles left next to the highway. Didn’t matter.
There’s no “one answer” to the problem; Aesop, I think, comes closest. Even if we keep our “stuff” at home base to support bugging in, with pre-packaged containers to support bugging out, it’s possible for someone to attack home base and clean us out, or at least severely compromise our preps.
I’ll agree with Aesop: Stack-On? I think that may be what’s called “a clue.”
There is a answer but “theft deterrents” have been criminalized under the rational that “public servants” accessing your property without your permission or knowledge may suffer the same fate as criminals or you might forget your preparations. The real question is are you ready to clean up after some scum falls into a punji stake pit,gets a whiff of a nasty smell(that might burn a little) or step on a little party popper? How might your neighbors react to a “accident” of local or travelling ner’do wells? family and friends of those who might of been offended? These questions should be considered before SHTF as security is at the top of Maslows hierarchy of needs and local security will be a full time occupation that needs to be done and some of these are tools to make it easier.
no man is an island…..that said, cache under a junk car sitting on the axles, or under a brush pile.
My grandpa had a cabin 90 minutes from the big city. Time after time it got vandalized. Then one time someone drove a pickup next to the kitchen window, tied a chain around the big old fashioned wood stove, and yanked the stove right through the wall. Grandpa never went back to the cabin. Too heartsick.
A sad tale for sure.
Maybe twenty years ago, one of my brothers lived a few miles outside a small town in Indiana in a 100-year-old, well-maintained farm house. (The most interesting thing about it was the gas well that existed on the property. The gas it produced had become reduced to the point that the commercial production had ended long ago, but it produced enough gas to heat his home for free, and in Indiana, he needed a “whole lotta” natural gas to heat his home.)
Whenever he left home, he told me that he never locked his front door. I was shocked when he told me this. From my perspective, that was pushing small town values way too far. His perspective? His nearest neighbor was well over a half mile away. If someone wanted to get in, they would simply break the glass in the door or bash in the door, and no one would ever hear the incident. More damage would be done in the process.
I didn’t agree with him, but he did have a point. The same thinking would apply to remote cabins, and the chances of break-ins have skyrocketed in the last twenty years, given the fact that the drug culture has only gotten worse with each passing year.
Of course, in normal times, it is commonly the drug culture scum that takes advantage of opportunities like this. In “spicy times” we can expect to see this sort of behavior by a significant portion of the population, a portion that will increase in time as a societal meltdown continues.
This is exactly the sort of behavior that motivates us “LMI.”
Better to be prepared a couple of years too early than a couple of days too late.
It’s a universal rule that tweakers and crooks will break into an unoccupied building anywhere on the planet.
The bigger issue worth contemplating is whether any remote bug-out site can ever be secured against even those who are honest under normal circumstances. Put another way, on that day when you REALLY need your bug-out location, what’s to say someone else won’t already be set up there, enjoying and defending it (from you) before you arrive.
Plenty of people who would never break in to steal copper pipe may not hesitate to break in and take over a remote cabin full of supplies if they truly think their lives and the lives of their family members depends on it.
You may have the nicest, best equipped bug out location in America, but all that only matters if you manage to show up there first.
Robert A. Heinlen said it best when he wrote: “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them to obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life”. This viewpoint, along with the 10 Commandments, are really all the laws civilized people need to co-exist on this planet. Welcome to the cultural and moral disintegration of America…. I’m afraid it ain’t gonna get any better folks, not until someone somewhere pulls the last straw and starts the burning process. The straw pile is looking mighty thin these days…..
A friend had a connex on-site at their semi-remote location, welded the lock with a cover that permitted no easy access. Not perfect but kept the amateurs away…remote sensing is a lot easier now. Consider some RFID tags, a solar rig, and prepaid cell to send your data when motion is detected…high tech solution, yes, but possible.
That’s why I prefer to live in a small town – at least the neighbors can call the sheriff, sit back and enjoy the drama (will the sheriff arrive before the bad guys leave?) and I might get to keep some stuff.
A friend had a cabin about an hour from his place. Year after year, it was broken into. Harden the door, then next year harden the windows, etc. Finally the bad guys took a chain saw and cut out a wall. After all, a log cabin is just logs.
just be glad it wasn’t THE day when he found out!
Your LMI should probably also be aware that his new tweaker friend now knows that there are valuables to be had on the property. So does anyone that talks to the said tweaker.
Most people leave a hunting cabin, fishing lodge, or what have you virtually empty of actual valuables. A drug addict recently released from prison (or on pre-trial release) won’t have much to lose by starting with a place where the good stuff is.
Really, I’m not getting the whole philosophy of use for a remote bug out location like this. For a generation fearing a particular sort of atomic attack maybe there was some value. Duck inside your fall out shelter when the air raid sirens sound, then hit the road for someplace upwind and off the beaten path when the Geiger counter settles itself down enough in a couple weeks.
Natural disasters, financial collapse, or even civil war 2.0 don’t seem to give you this same combination of a burning desire to leave your home and head to the least populated area you can find. In a natural disaster or financial melt down you won’t be anywhere near a steady income (growing your own vegetables and poaching deer doesn’t provide much income and it ain’t steady). I’m sure a lot of people have ridden out civil wars by hiding on a mountain, but I’d bet a mortgage payment that way more people have ridden them out by leaving the country.
For the price of LMI’s cabin he could easily have packed enough into a bank account (or accounts, and not necessarily one in the US) to set up somewhere a good deal safer. And the bank account usually earns a little interest. Don’t trust banks (that much)? Precious metals, bitcoin, even cash in a coffee can under the bed. None of those are guaranteed to be safe, but an unoccupied cabin is guaranteed to be broken into.
this happens in small communities as well. the small town 2nd homes in CA/NV Sierras getting broken into all the time, mostly the gangster and tweekers form the central valley. back in the day, how many of us knew not to go somewhere because the owner would shoot you full of rock salt? now today you’d be red flag and striped of everything including your freedom over it. maybe it is time for some Charles Bronson justice. the police/sheriff/governments do not care, if you haven’t got it yet, the homeless and tweekers are just excuses for bigger budgets, federal grant money and new toys. things will not change until the badguys think you’re the crazy one. similar to “looters will be shot on site”
A little planning might go a long way in setting up a resistant location. On the cheap, a build with shipping containers welded into a nice place would stop +90% of unwelcome entrants. Another method might be “hurricane” type construction where reinforced slabs of concrete are tied together with the rebar ,some roll up shutters and really stout entrance doors would put you in a class near bank vault. There was also the concrete log home recently mentioned that with stout doors and shutters would make a stylish and secure retreat. Of course any of these should have a tertiary egress to a securable place -think 200yd-300yd of concrete culvert pipe from a closet to a out building or maybe a “tree stump” ala “Hogan’s Heros” to allow access if occupied or needed to be evacuated.
Why didn’t your friend have insurance? My renter’s insurance covers my storage unit… it costs $25 a month thru USAA and covers the first $40,000 of things ruined or stolen. I would be upset if someone stole my storage unit supplies, but I would be able to replace them at least, that is the idea of insurance.
Another reason not to keep everything at your remote cabin is you may not make it there. I know we all assume we will be smart enough to get out ahead of the hordes but its possible when the time comes either we will say “let’s wait just one more day because if I’m wrong I might lose my job etc.” or the event will happen so quick that you’re not driving that sweet bug-out-mobile anywhere so having a portion of your things at home makes sense even if no random meth heads get into your BOL.
As an Addendum, my GF’s family land is across the river and about 12 miles from where I live in. It’s close to a highway but still pretty remote except for a tiny spot of a town nearby. In a far corner of it by the Indian mound is a 1920’s concrete blockhouse that used to house a big pump to irrigate cotton before the Boll Weevil killed off cotton farming in this area.
There’s a 6 foot drop as soon as you step in the door because the wooden floor over the pump pit has collapsed. It’s a real hazard and the family for DECADES has tried to secure the place (did I mention the riveted industrial age iron door on it?) Locks, welding, danger signs, even PICTURES of what it looks like inside has not deterred constant break ins and the structure is too solid to tear down without a huge cost. They also can’t just leave the door open because of liability.
Because people want to sneak out there to see the mound there are quite a few trespassers regardless of all the posted signs. The cattle operation on it is also dangerous to people if they run into the wrong cow or the bull but yet they still come, make a mess, and tear up anything that hasn’t already been torn up. One nice thing if there IS such a thing in a post TEOTWAWKI situation is an air defense term: “Weapons Free”
Regards
Friends. That’s why you have friends buddy!
I know if some LMI showed up at my place I’d have enough gear and food to spare them some. It wouldn’t be like their own stash I’m sure, but enough to get by and hopefully get them through until they could retrieve their own supplies.