The Pre-Position

by Jim Long | PREPPINGANDSURVIVING.BLOGSPOT.COM | June 10, 2015

I never depend on just having all my eggs in one basket.  Thus, I pre-position in several different areas my extra gear and food.

A lot of us when we started being prepared bought gear.  Many times we upgraded our gear and still have the old stuff laying around.  Most of it is very functional stuff, but we have found something that works better.

This is what I do. I take this gear and find a place I want to put it.  This involves wandering the forest or foothills finding good spots to store it.  I usually build a debris shelter on the spot so that I can have shelter ready made.  The places I choose must not have water running through them or be swampy.  They must be far away from roads and skid trails.

I put my gear in 5 gallon buckets.  These seem to be the most impervious to contamination and water.  I find a spot not far from my shelter that has some kind of identifying feature that would be visible above a snow pack and I bury these.

As time goes by I take in more items.  I love to cruise the second hand stores (Goodwill) and buy pots, pans, silverware, old sleeping bags, etc. I bucket these up and bury them in my stash.  This saves considerable weight in my bug out bag.  I only need the bare essentials to get me to my stash.

I also make improvements on my camp.  I like to make a more permanent shelter by notching small logs and building a makeshift cabin / dugout. I sometimes cable the logs and the roof together with thin cable to help them stand the snow pack.

I locate these stashes in different areas. I like to call them my “seasonal camps”. One that is good for winter, lower elevation and southern exposure with a good source of wood for heating.  One for spring a little higher up that allows me to catch the animals migrating back to the high country after winter.  Summer is in the high country where less contact will be made and fish and game along with edible plants abound. Then as temperatures cool, I go to Fall.  In my fall camp I have the necessary racks (old Refrigerator racks work well once the finish is burned off) to smoke and dry meat and fish to store for a winter food source.

When I lived up north and cowboy’ed in the 80’s, this was a method we used to not have to pack as much gear or as many horses into the high country. Year in and out, we would pack in with mainly food and stay longer because of our extended resources due to pre-positioning our heavy gear.  We washed the pots and pans well, put them back in the buckets and buried them again ready for our next trip.  Honestly, I haven’t been to the camp in over 20 years, but I bet it is still there and usable.

If TSHTF and I was caught off guard, I would have a fighting chance of getting to one of these stashes and surviving….. I NEVER want to be Naked and Afraid !!

Source:

http://preppingandsurviving.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-pre-position.html