Lightening the Load

Not actually Erin.

Picture by KJ Photography

& is used with permission.

Last year my prepping mission was to lighten and reorganize my Get Home Bag, and I succeeded in that task. My task for this year has been to do the same to my Bug Out Bag, and I while I'm not finished with that, I am definitely making progress. 

As I believe I've said before, my biggest problem when it comes to prepping is that I over-pack. This is the result of the entirely-reasonable-to-my-mind thought process of "Well, if I'm bugging out, then I'm probably never coming home again, which means I'm a refugee, which means it'll be a long time before I have anything stable in my life, so I need to prepare for all sorts of contingencies." Unfortunately, that's how I end up with a BOB which I can't carry, and that doesn't do me any good. 

How does one slim down a BOB? I did it by defining what I needed my bag to do:

• It had to be something I could not just lift, but wear for an extended time and walk at least a mile while wearing it. 
• It needed to be able to provide me with shelter, light, heat, and clothing. 
• It needed to carry food and water for at least three days. 
• It needed to charge my cell phone. 
• It needed first aid capability.
• All of this needed to fit into a single bag.

I admit, I'm still working on all of this. The biggest breakthrough I had was when I reflected on something I've said since the beginning of this blog -- "If you have camping gear, you have preps" -- and I realized that I was so focused on long-term disaster that I neglected the short term to the extent that I was unprepared to go camping. Yes, that's correct; I would have needed to unpack and then repack my bag for a weekend camping trip. This, I decided, Would Not Do. 

With that philosophy in mind, alongside the other realization that packing my BOB for camping would fulfill all of my requirement, I stopped thinking of it as a Bug Out Bag at all and started thinking of it as a backpack suitable for a weekend of camping and hiking. I have no catchy acronym for such a thing, so I'm just going to call it a rucksack. 

I'm still at the "Magic: the Preppering" stage of packing my rucksack. I have the essentials handled, although it's just not possible to physically carry three day's worth of water (using the formula of "one gallon per person per day", that's twenty-five pounds. Not going to happen!); I do however have ways to filter and boil that water, and store it for drinking later, so while it's not perfect it's the best I can do barring magical advancements in dehydrated water technology. 

Ahem. Everything else is taken care of, however, and now I'm in the stage of "Do I really need this, or do I just want it? And if I only want it, how badly do I want to carry it, especially at the expense of other things?" Right now I'm still debating on whether or not I want to carry a hatchet and a camp shovel, because while they are both useful they're also rather bulky and heavy.

I don't know when I'll be ready to unveil my new rucksack loadout, because once I get my current dilemma sorted out the next step will be "What can I add, without being ridiculous or going over weight, to easily extend this beyond a camping weekend?" This is a process which may never end, if I'm being honest, because the urge to tinker is strong with me and I lack the willpower to abandon the quest for the perfect in order to be satisfied with the merely good enough. 

I wrote this article as much for personal accountability as for blog fodder, and I hope that later in the year I can show you what I packed and why. Until then, I have plenty of things I can talk to you about, including some more product reviews of things that I think you all will like. 

Wish me luck, and spare a thought for my aching back.