Reggie Bennett, Survival Instructor and High Tech Survival Tools

In my mind's eye I see a person surviving in the wilderness as a short term venture. A person spending all day working on survival tasks such as repairing or improving a lean to or dug out shelter; procuring fire wood; checking and setting traps and snares; maybe laying in fishing lines; repiaring gear or clothing; procuring edible or medicinal plants; constructing hunting weapons and tools.

Again, all of this is short range survival - very few people can do this for even weeks on end, let alone year in and year out, through all sesons and weather conditions. But this does not mean that the well prepared Survivor should discount these wilderness survival skills. Perhaps the main objective of these skills is to give a person confidence for all situations and to orient the survival mindset or what Reggie Bennett calls the positive mental attitude.

I stumbled across this article on Reggie Bennett, Virginia based wilderness survival instructor, from a Yahoo! article by Marc Istook:

If you want to learn survival skills, be it low or high tech, Reggie Bennett is the man. Friendly and unassuming, at first glance you may not realize that he is the quintessential survivalist. But with U.S. military training that taught him how to brave some of the globe's harshest conditions, and his time spent instructing Air Force pilots on how to survive, he is uniquely equipped to teach others at his Mountain Shepherd Wilderness Survival School in Catawba, Virginia.

On a sprawling 100 acres, Reggie and his wife Dina host everyone from housewives to schoolkids, CEOs to active-duty armed forces, and one lucky Yahoo! News host — yours truly. You don't mess around with Reggie.

The open spaces in Virginia make a great location for this kind of training. It's close enough to Roanoke that it's easy for guests to fly in. But it's remote enough that you feel at one with nature — even if that does mean I spent hours searching in vain for a cell phone signal. To sum up Reggie's vast knowledge in one training session would be impossible. So he makes his survival tips simple, boiling them down to seven key priorities. They involve the basics, like finding food, water and shelter.

A bit more complicated — starting a fire, signaling for help and providing first aid. But the most important aspect according to Reggie: maintaining a positive mental attitude. It's a perspective that's accessible to anyone braving the elements. And without it, he says, surviving becomes significantly more difficult. Reggie's training taught him how to make it out of the wilderness with nothing but the most primitive tools.

But with the help of a little technology, we can increase our odds of survival in almost any situation. Modern water purifiers use advanced filtration methods to keep us hydrated. Cell phone and GPS technology can help us find our way, or help rescuers locate us more quickly than ever. Today's compact, efficient batteries and solar power units keep our gadgets charged, long after the power — and cell phone signal - has gone out.

Don't forget to keep a positive mental attitude! Low tech or high tech, Reggie has found a way to make the idea of surviving fun. His school takes all comers, from those wanting to learn simple camping tips to mountain men looking to conquer the wild. I highly recommend meeting Reggie and checking out his survival school. Maybe I'll even see you there… just keep your eyes peeled for the slightly lost Yahoo! host, desperately seeking a cell phone signal.

Planting Survival Crops

Anonymous wrote UrbanSurvivalSkills with these comments: ”The last couple years I have been planting some vegetables so supplement our food supply. I find the Farmer’s Almanac a very good source of information. I don’t have a very green thumb so I am sure I can do much better but I am grateful for having the past couple of years practice to refine my gardening. I have saved coffee cans with plastic lids and now have eight cans full of seeds for my post-chaos survival garden. Wanted to let you know about the Farmer’s Almanac.”

UrbanMan reply: Mr Not So Green Thumb, join the club. I suck at gardening too. I make every attempt at growing vegetables every year and about half my effort is thwarted by something or another. Even then there are some vegetables that are pretty easy to grow. Squash and Cucumber is high on my list as being easy to grow. My Green Beans, Carrots and Corn did poorly last year, however Egg Plant was a marginal success.

My team’s survival plan is roughly the same for the eight families we have on the team. Each family grows some type of vegetable at their home. To learn and practice these skills; to supplement their own food supply; and to harvest what they could when they need to Bug Out to my place or our backup site. Best case scenario, as the pre-collapse events get denser, we would begin to re-locate some items before it becomes dangerous or impossible to do.

Most of our families are planting in containers which can be moved, so I am expecting many more containers to fill up the back yard at our primary and secondary Bug In sites, virtually becoming a large garden. But, again I suck at gardening. Which brings up another point…having a well skilled grower on your team.

Two of the ladies on our Survival Team are skilled gardeners with earnestly earned green thumbs. In a perfect world if all of the families make their way to one central location, we will have two primary tenders of our survival garden. That frees up 14 other adults for other survival tasks such as guard, procurement patrols, security patrols, radio watch, general fabrication, maintenance and repair. …and of course I am reminded to help in the garden.

We are looking at a solar powered and re-charged pump for our rain barrels in order to irrigate our gardens automatically rather than the time consuming by hand method, although by hand allows for a targeted amount of water per plant enhancing our water conversation.

We all have collection of seeds. Some of us have the heirloom seed kits in vacuumed packed #10 cans or in sealed ammunition cans. We all have a robust supply of hybrid seeds for initial planting at the Bug in site, saving the heirloom seeds in case we have to Bug Out, as well as using the hybrid seeds for barter.

Lastly we have a green house kit with thick mil clear plastic. We only have one, but are thinking about buying another kit. Out intent is to take these kits with us if/when we Bug Out, but if it looks like we are staying on site, Bugging In, we’ll erect the green house in the fall to produced some vegetables for our consumption and barter. Our general idea is to mostly use vegetables for barter because if we use packaged “survival” food for barter, people may get the idea that we have a lot more – which we do…..just trying to minimize risks.

The Farmer's Almanac is a good resource. I have a couple of them, but the newest one has got to be 4 or 5 years old, so I'll take your e-mail as a reminder to pick up a newer copy. Thanks and prepare well.

Solar Power Comments

ALEX has left a new comment on "Survival Chronicles of Jim - Chapter 24 Dry Run": "Ever think about a small solar panel like the ones you can plug into a car that is going to be sitting to keep the battery fresh? I'm thinking about getting one along with a small sealed 12v battery like the ones inside of a portable jumpstarter. They can both be found on eBay or Amazon fairly cheap.

This way anything you can charge from your car you could charge from this setup and recharge via the sun. My plan is to have this in my B.O.J. (Bug Out Jeep) so the portable battery can be charged from the jeep until I need to continue on foot then I could put the battery in my BOB with the small solar panel on the outside of the bag to charge the battery if need be. I found a 5w panel I like for around $40 on amazon and I kinda think that should work to charge the battery in a full day of sunlight. as for the weight of the battery its not that heavy but ounces equal to pounds and pounds equal to pain. but if you want to charge batterys cell phones gps flashlights run a cb or ham radio or any other thing like that it could be a nice setup.......unless theres an EMP and all your shit gets fried....but at least you tried lol."

UrbanMan replies: Alex, I have several solar panels from a 62 watt folding panel for my BOB up to larger ones for my Bug In site that I can rapidly disassemble and pack for a planned Bug Out. On the vehicles, most of us have solar trickle chargers. I don't know how long how long or even if one of these would charge a fully discharged battery or even one with a substantial reduction of charge.

I have several re-chargers for AA and AAA rechargeable batteries that I can run off my vehicles 12v system, as well as charging for cell phones. I think that post-collapse, cell towers will be up for awhile due to many of them having solar systems themselves as well as fuel generators for power outages.

On my larger solar panels, I can charge 12v vehicle batteries. From which I can run a power inverter to convert the battery power to 110v.

I actually have three sets of mobile solar panels, each with three panels and a simple framework of 2x4 lumber so I can move the panels throughout the day to acquire the best angle at the Sun. I recently saw pictures of where a gent mounted solar panels on a dolley type cart to make moving them around much easier. Great idea, we are considering that now.

One of the members of my group has a solar generator from MySolarBackup, which is a 1800 watt power generator powered by a 90w solar panel. We have cross loaded some of our major equipment and this unit is staying at this families house, which is our backup Bug In site, just in case.

And speaking of Jeeps, have you seen the new Jeeps being offered? I really like the cab over especially with the enhanced ground clearance. I would love to have one of those!

Book Review: Holding Their Own

Bottom Line Up Front - "Holding Their Own" good book,..I am waiting the publishing of the second book continuing the story. If you haven't read the book then don't read the remainder of the post,.....I don't want to ruin the story for you, .....as I am going to re-call some of the story line and using it as a lessons learned review.

The setup story of how the United States pluges into collapse and chaos is entirely plausible,....many of the factors in the book either exist in whole or are real and potential threats to this country.  In fact, the author said as much.

The main subjects in the book, Bishop and wife Teri, hunker down in their 'off the main path' suburb, organizing with their neighbors.  It is not only possible but necessary for a small community to organize to meet the threats. As the federal government starts to regain control and require people to rally at locations that will basically become camps to control the population, Bishop's community starts to unravel as people have different views on what is best for their family.  The situation of dimishing food stocks not to mention security concerns also impact on decisions to leave. This is probably what will happen when a community, organizing for survival, does so after the need becomes real and in their face, as you can't pick your neighbors.

Bishop and Teri, who had prepped to a small degree (mainly for Hurricanes) load their truck and start out for West Texas where Bishop owns some land and had a trailer pre-positioned in a remote area co-located next to a year round natural spring. So basically you had the situation where Bishop had a planned Bug Out location, with the scenario where Bishop waits, Bugging In, at his suburban home to wait and see if the situation will straighten out.  This is a probable scenario for most of us.  The trick is to Bug Out in an organized fashion and not under pressure or an environment that will make it too dangerous to get to our  pre-planned and or prepared Bug Out location.

It is human nature to stay where your home, belongings and friends are. Indeed the lesson here is to develop some factors or guidelines before hand that would trigger the Bug Out. As in Bishop's case they waited too long, expending precious food, water and fuel while Bugging In.

Fuel and water play a large issue in this story. To be fair, the story had Bishop stocking and rotating fuel pre-collapse, but he got lazy and the collapse found him with several empty five gallon fuel cans.

The water issue is huge as we simply can't live without out. The idea of having a once a week water service delivering a 5 gallon jug of water, and the one time order to ten additional jugs would give a urban/sub-urban household 50 gallons of drinking water at any time a collapse would hit. Smart people would combine this is additional storage including the main collapse event when municipal water sources are still probably flowing for a short time to come. Bathtub water bobs, spare jugs, 55 gallon barrels and even kitchen
pots now become storage.

I am going to end this review with storyline of Bishop and Teri transiting secondary roads across Texas, mainly at night using night vision goggles - all smart things to do, but a survival group or team, even a small one would have made the trip safer. The lone survivor concept just kind of freaks me out....there will be way too many of these individual or duos anyway.

Again, bottom line - good book. I look forward to the story continuing.