
Minimum Survival Kit - edragonu
http://www.dragosroua.com/minimum-survival-kit/
======
StudyAnimal
I'm glad the comments here reflect what I was thinking.

As a boy scout I survived on less than that for 6 days! As a 13 year old kid!
And we didn't steal food either, we were nowhere near any gardens. we pulled
rabbits out of rabbit holes and ate them.

And we didn't have any Pepsi either.

No wonder they lost the revolution :)

~~~
edragonu
It's not always about physical survival. As for loosing the revolution, it's
the other way around ;-)

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stcredzero
Here's a somewhat scattered, but very sensible and low-cost minimum wilderness
survival kit:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2721455542891667646#>

Here's what I remember:

    
    
        * Aluminum foil - can be used for many, many things, 
          like water collection.  It's fragile but lightweight 
          and compact.  I would include 3 or 4 sheets.
        * Signal mirror
        * Twine
        * Cyalume Stick(s)
        * Ace Bandage
        * Mylar Emergency Blanket
        * Chlorine - swimming pool chlorine - it tastes bad, but 
          it's cheap, and it's much harder to poison yourself 
          with it than iodine.
        * Razor Blade or xacto knife - much lighter and more 
          compact than a pocket knife
        * Epi-pen - injection for anaphylactic shock
        * Duct Tape - Just a bit and not a whole roll, though!
        * Compass - something really small and cheap but sturdy.
          You should be able to score one as swag. Beware 
          leaking oil
     

You should be able to gather the materials for cheap and get this into a very
small and light package. One of those disposable plastic food containers comes
to mind.

~~~
nooneelse
About the twine. A few months ago I got a 200 foot reel of twist-tie for use
in the garden, but it has very quickly taken over every job that would have
otherwise gone to one of my several twine or string spools. As is, it is too
bulky for my bug out bags, but something smaller could be easily devised or
found (and it would spool onto other tools too, though not as well as twine
and paracord). At this point I'm wondering, assuming the bag has paracord and
lots of twist-tie, why still include twine?

~~~
stcredzero
For a minimalist survival kit, you'd just include a little bit of twine,
probably wrapped around something else, like a couple of cyalume sticks.
Alternative: dental floss.

The main purpose for the twine is as a night-time rescue signal. Put the
cyalume stick on the end of a piece of twine. Twirl it in a circle. If your
twine is long enough, what you have is a perfect glowing circle about 8 feet
wide. This will be highly visible for many miles to aircraft or to search
parties at an elevation. It is also an unambiguously artificial signal.

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ErrantX
Uh. That is not a survival situation - in the slightest..

The ones he mentions here: _I’ve been through many survival situations. Some
of them involved violent financial crisis, others involved personal
relationships breakups and others were related to my career choices._

Sound more relevant to his point!

It almost put me off the post... (which did end well)

~~~
edragonu
he he, glad it didn't put you off the post completely. Point is that during
the army I was in a much more violent survival situation, although a little
bit different than the exercise described. There's a link at the beginning of
the article about that specific situation. The exercise made more sense for
this specific article...

happy it did end well for you (the post, I mean) :-)

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bombs
If you're interested in what a lot of survivalists pack in their survival
kits, they're often referred to as "bug out bags", e.g.
<http://www.aussurvivalist.com/bugout.htm>.

~~~
ElliotH
Not exactly minimalistic - though obviously it deals with a different scenario
to the one the author describes.

In a survival scenario where you can only take a few items then your
priorities would probably be (this taken from a survival course I did about a
year ago):

\- Warm Clothes

\- Water cleaning system of some kind. (Puritabs)

\- Something to store water in (ideally x2)

\- Knife

\- Something to light a fire with

In the 48 hour scenario the blog post describes then that should handle the
bare requirements for survival. The fact that everyone in the scenario
described prioritises food shows that they were really quite ill-prepares. For
a 48hr survival period food shouldn't really be entering into your mind until
you have everything else sorted.

~~~
edragonu
Quite close to what they taught us in our own survival course. But keep in
mind that we were doing this during a communist regime. Maybe you don't know
much about a communist regime, but food was the most important thing at that
time. Although we were also identifying shelter and other necessary stuff,
like the closest human presence, food was our number one unconscious priority.

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sliverstorm
Maybe I'm missing something, but...

No offense to the author, but what kind of survival experience is a 6 hour
stint? Even the full 48 hours only requires you find your way. Perhaps if I
was deep in enemy territory, getting enough food would be more important than
traveling quickly, but in this exercise I would have simply started hoofing it
and gone hungry.

The points he makes are valid, but the anecdote seems lacking in survival
challenge. (though, again, maybe I missed something)

~~~
edragonu
The survival exercise in itself was much easier than I expected, although I
was preparing for something really nasty. The point is that, for most of the
time, what we're perceiving as being frightening is much more easier to bare
in the end. I intently leave this contrast in the post and I'm happy you
spotted it. It wasn't a real survival situation.

There is a much more frightening experience which I described <a
href=[http://www.dragosroua.com/the-sun-always-rises-at-
dawn/>...](http://www.dragosroua.com/the-sun-always-rises-at-dawn/>here</a>),
if you wanna know more...

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d0m
I thought the author would have said an iPad. But I was wrong, it was a
serious article.

~~~
edragonu
Well, that's an interesting suggestion, though ;-)

