Minimum Survival Kit | Hacker News Reader

Minimum Survival Kit

dragosroua.com

22 pointsedragonu14 comments

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 :)

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

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.

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?

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.

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)

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) :-)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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/>..., if you wanna know more...

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com