That is a great read.
I know several folks that got stranded last year. I put together a Winter Kit for my wife. I didnt include hand/foot warmers but i think i just might go get some for her tomorrow.
Thanks Brian
Thanks Phillip, I am not used to my wife being on someone else's time clock. I have always kept a small kit in her car but needed to expand it now.
Great article Brian, thank you.
Thank you sir, glad you enjoyed the post!
Thanks for the post Brian. We keep a kit in the cars but I hadn't thought of the warmers either for thawing out the frozen water bottles. Good stuff.
Thank you Nathan. Yes I noticed when I was up north that almost everyone had an emergency winter kit in their vehicles. I certainly put a couple together for us.
This is another great blog post Brian. I like the urban perspective that applies to more situations than the ultralight minimalist backpacker scenario that most people write about. Beside the addition of hand warmers that others have commented on, I appreciate your reasoning for including a mirrored compass. Good stuff all the way around.
Thanks and Happy New Year!
Phil
Thank you Phil. I think people are quicker to think of survival situations happening on foot in the middle of nowhere than they are to think of them occurring in a vehicle in a large city. Yet the fact remains that we all spend much more of our time in urban environments than we do in wilderness environments. So odds are that if and when things go wrong, there is a better chance of it happening in the areas we frequent the most.
Great write up Mist! I need to do the same for my wife she has a 30 min commute one way and in her line of work she has to go in come hell or high water! My Granny was an OG prepper she always told us growing up to make sure in the winter that we have spare jackets and blankets in the truck when we went out cause as she said you never now when something bad might happen. Maybe we could all show of the bags we have made up for our spouses!
Thanks Adam. My wife had taken the last few year off of work to stay at home and raise our daughter. Though since she does travel around with that I had put a small kit in her car early on. But till now she was free to come and go as she pleased or not go at all if the weather was bad out. It was her choice. Now that she has to leave before sun up and comes home after sundown, and is on someone's time clock again I re-thought her kit and expanded it. I actually put more in her kit than I showed because her shift and my son-in-law's shift overlap most of the week and she has him with her all but two of her five workdays a week. He is a ggod kid, but has little to no experience with survival situations.
Regarding the hand / foot warmers, I have had some personal experiences with living rough and being caught out in the snow and extreme cold. I have experienced hypothermia myself, and I have seen the affects on others. I had severe frost bite and gangrene at age 17, a thousand miles from what had been home. So I had the experience of listening to two doctors, two complete strangers, standing there looking at my feet discussing which parts of my body they would most likely have to remove in order to save my life. It was a most unpleasant experience that had a profound impact o my life and I have spent a great deal of time studying ways to keep warm or get warm again. Cold weather injuries are not something that one should take lightly. They can be very bad, and they can be very scary. More than once while I was in Michigan I would come in tired and forget my pack in the truck and my water would be frozen, so since I always kept the hand warmers in my kit, I have used them to thaw my water bottle a couple of times to see how well they worked. I find the larger longer lasting ones better for all applications I have used them in.
As for the mirrored sighting compass, I have used mine more often for removing suicidal gnats and mosquitoes from my eyes in forests than I have for finding direction. So I have kept one in my kit for years as much for removing objects from my eyes as I have for the purposes of navigation. They cam also be used to signal for help, and the magnifying glass can be used for reading fine print if you are far sighted. Personally I prefer the larger mirror of the Suunto MC2G that I carry because I am a bit far sighted.
I am also putting a tow rope in her car because before I switched to 4x4 vehicles years ago, I was told more than once by someone that they would pull me out of my predicament if they had a tow rope, but they didn't. That was a large part of why I switched to 4x4 vehicles, because I am so often in the middle of nowhere or traveling on desolate roads.
It was crazy for me to be living in Michigan in the winter of 2013-2014 and out in a winter wonderland but seeing everything flow very smoothly because the people there were used to it, the terrain was relatively flat, and the roads were essentially straight lines in a grid pattern for the most part. Then to watch the news in horror as two inches of snow and ice turned a daily commute into a survival situation in Atlanta and I spent the next several hours getting in touch with friends and hoping the ones I couldn't get in touch with were ok. It just further illustrated to me that we just never know what may happen, or when so better to just be prepared with the basics one might need any time of the year. I am certain many who watched and / or lived through Katrina learned the same lesson.
