OFFGRID Issue 23

PREPARATION SURVIVAL MOBILITY DEFENSE MEDICAL GEAR

Mykel Hawke’s Tips Will Empower You

OFFGRIDWEB.COM ISSUE 23

To Persevere When The System Fails

TORCHES AND LIGHTERS FOR YOUR EMERGENCY PACK P. 52 LEARN EXPERT ROPE RESCUE TECHNIQUES P. 72 IMPROVISED KNIFE SHARPENING METHODS P. 32 CRAFT YOUR OWN FIGHTING STICK P. 60

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CONTENTS

ISSUE 23

FEATURES 32

Edge of Disaster Improvised Knife Sharpening Methods

46

That’s the Spirit The Power of Survival Comes From Within

52

32

Turn Up the Heat Six Lighters and Torches to Keep Your Fires Burning This Winter

60

Stick it to ’Em Crafting and Using a Survival Stick

66

Predator’s Pack How to Assemble Tools to Fish, Trap, and Hunt in a Survival Situation

72

Rope Rescue 101 Whether it’s for Supplies or People, Rope’s Uses Are Infinitely Practical in an Emergency Situation

78

Have Spork, Will Travel

46

52

66

72

60

Portable Utensil Bring a Torch Civility to Any Situation

Cover photo: Q Concepts HadelProductions@iStockphoto.com ParkerDeen@iStockphoto.com

Recoil OFFGRID, February/March 2018; Number 23, is published bimonthly by TEN: The Enthusiast Network, LLC, 261 Madison Avenue, 6th floor, New York, NY 10016. Copyright 2017 by TEN: The Enthusiast Network Magazines, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Periodicals postage pending at New York, NY and additional mailing offices.

Subscriptions US and US Possessions: $49.97 per year (6 issues); Canadian, $55.97, Foreign, $61.97 (including surface mail postage). Payment in advance. US. Funds only. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5): NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address changes to Recoil OFFGRID, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235.

CONTENTS

ISSUE 23

DEPARTMENTS 10

Editor’s Letter Fear Not the Unknown

14

Gear Up The Latest and Greatest Products

20

Pocket Preps One-Piece Tools

24

What If? A House Fire Breaks Out During an Ice Storm?

38

Survivalist Spotlight Survival TV Star and Combat Veteran Mykel Hawke Speaks the Uncomfortable Truth — Whether or Not You’re Ready to Hear It

86

Health Physical Preparation With Limited Space

90

Hands On Review of the IN-CASE Water Filtration System

94

Debunked The Myth of Subsisting on Nothing More than Wild Plants

96

On the Grid ’Tis the Season to Survive

98

The Last Page Review of The Backyard Homestead

Product Disclaimer Prices and details for products and services featured in RECOIL OFFGRID are set by the manufacturers, retailers, and agencies, and are subject to change without notice.

Throughout this issue you will see certain images are labeled as being 100% Actual Size. This designation is for the print edition of this issue. Because of the various screen sizes on different tablets and computers, we cannot always provide actual life size images in digital versions. We apologize if this causes any confusion and thank you for your understanding.

78 38

24

The all-new Yamaha Wolverine® X4 offers four times the proven off-road capability, comfort and confidence…to deliver four times the fun and excitement on your next outdoor adventure. Boasting room for four, the ultra-versatile Wolverine X4 includes adjustable rear seating to provide additional cargo capacity, a new, supremely quiet and smooth 850-class twin engine, and a compact, nimble chassis with self-leveling rear shocks for a plush ride even in tight, rugged terrain.

The all-new Wolverine X4: designed and engineered in the Real World to help you REALize your Adventure.

FOUR TIMES THE ADVENTURE. FOUR TIMES THE fun.

REALize your Adventure: visit YamahaOutdoors.com Always protect the environment and wear your seat belt, helmet, eye protection and protective clothing. Read the owner’s manual and product warning labels before operation. • Professional riders depicted on a closed course. Models shown with optional Genuine Yamaha Accessories. ©2017 Yamaha Motor Corporation, U.S.A. All rights reserved.

ISSUE 22

010

EDITOR’SLETTER

Fear Not the

Unknown

By Patrick Vuong

T

o paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, don’t let the fear of the unknown hold you back.

You probably know someone who’s oblivious, rarely considering potential threats in times of peace, but the first to panic when the smallest problem arises.

Conversely, there’s a good chance you’re reading this magazine because you want to dispel any fears by absorbing a healthy dose of survival information. That difference is what separates a proactive survivor from a reactive victim.

I was reminded of this dichotomy recently when a wildfire threatened to destroy my neighborhood.

That day, thick smoke billowed high into the sky as helicopters circled overhead. The blaze seemed unnervingly close to my house, and the growing wail of fire engine sirens told me it was only growing. But I didn’t let fear take hold. Instead, I took action. Thanks to some preplanning, I had vital documents, my go-bag, and my dogs in the car and ready to go within three minutes. We evacuated without incident.

Unfortunately, the inferno destroyed two dozen homes, damaged 55 other structures, and burned more than 9,200 acres.

Many panicked people didn’t have a plan. Broadcast reports showed them scrambling at the last minute to gather clothes, pets, photos, and documents. The fear in their eyes was evident. If they had prepped a bug-out bag and had a response plan, they could have taken action long before the firefighters initiated mandatory evacuations, as I had done.

It’s not that I’m smarter or better than some of my neighbors. It’s just that I’ve benefited from the knowledge shared by many subject-matter experts who have contributed to RECOIL OFFGRID over the years.

Take for example this issue. We have the privilege of featuring Mykel Hawke and his wife, Ruth England, on the cover. From 2010 to 2012, the couple partnered onscreen in Man, Woman, Wild, a Discovery Channel reality TV show that focused on Hawke, a former Army Special Forces captain and survival expert, showing England how to thrive together with limited supplies in the most inhospitable locales on Earth. In this edition, Hawke and his wife share how families can increase their survivalist I.Q. together.

We have other knowledgeable contributors with real-word experience, too. Check out wilderness survival expert Kevin Estela’s feature on how to build your own “predator pack” so you could feed yourself

no matter if you’re stranded on land or near water. Meanwhile, Andy Schrader, a structural engineer who specializes in search-and-rescue consulting, explains how you can master ropes to save someone who’s trapped or fallen. And knife expert Michael Janich shows you how to sharpen a dull blade if you can’t find a conventional sharpener in a post-SHTF world.

I’ve always felt tremendous pride in the fact that we continue to attract the industry’s top talents to contribute to or be interviewed in our publication. So that’s why it’s with such a heavy heart that I announce I’ve resigned to spend more time with my family. This is my last issue as the head editor of RECOIL OFFGRID. And I’m grateful to have learned a lot along the way, from our expert contributors, fellow staffers, and most importantly from all of you, our loyal readers. So, thank you! I’d love to stay in touch and see how you’ve incorporated info and gear from RECOIL OFFGRID stories into your own preps over the years. So hit me up on Instagram: @calmbatives.

Ultimately, I don’t see my departure as bugging out. Instead, I’m taking Roosevelt’s advice. I’m not afraid of the fear of the unknown. I’m viewing this as an adventure along an unfamiliar path … one that I’m ready for thanks to RECOIL OFFGRID.

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TLE II (Tactical Law Enforcement) pistols are ideal for duty carry, tactical applications and personal protection. Aggressive styling, multiple configur ations, calibers, and sizes; the TLE II family of pistols is the quality you demand.

Ready for the Fight Tritium night sights, front and back strap checkering and aggressive G10 grips. Stainless finish provides added protection from moisture, wear and tear.

New for 2017 External magwell models are now offered as the Custom TLE II (EM), Custom TLE/RL II (EM), and Pro TLE II (EM).

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©2017, Kimber Mfg., Inc. All rights reserved. Information and specifications are for reference only and subject to change without notice.

(888) 243-4522 kimberamerica.com

Editorial.

Advertising.

Editor/ Patrick Vuong

VP, Group Publisher/ Mark Han

Executive Editor/ Rob Curtis

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National Sales Offices.

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Art Direction & Design.

Senior Art Director/ Gene Coo Art Director/ Sarah Lampert

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REPRINTS For high-quality custom reprints and eprints, please contact The YGS Group at 800-290-5460 or TENreprints@theygsgroup.com EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTIONS Editorial contributions are welcomed, but editors recommend that contributors query first. Contribution must be accompanied by return postage and we assume no responsibility for loss or damage thereto. Manuscripts must be typewritten on white paper, and all photographs must be accompanied by captions. Photo model releases required on all persons in photos. Recoil Offgrid reserves the right to use material at its discretion, and we reserve the right to edit material to meet our requirements. Upon publication, payment will be made at our current rate, and that said payment will cover author’s and contributor’s rights of the contribution. Contributor’s act of mailing contribution shall constitute an express warranty that the material is original and no infringement on the rights of others. Mail contributions to: Recoil Offgrid Magazine, 1821 East Dyer Road, Ste. #150, Santa Ana, CA 92705.

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Printed in the USA Copyright © 2017 by TEN: The Enthusiast Network Magazines, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

CYANE™ DYNAMIC PACK MAX STORAGE IN AN ULTRA-SLEEK DESIGN

MISSION CONFIGURABLE W/ S.T.R.I.K.E WEBBING CAN BE WORN LIKE A BACKPACK OR ATTACHED DIRECTLY TO PALS/MOLLE ARMOR CARRIERS AND VESTS DESIGN OPTIMIZED THROUGH YEARS OF OPERATOR INPUT TO SEE MORE, VISIT BLACKHAWK.COM/CYANE

In 1990, a Navy SEAL was navigating a minefield when his pack failed. As his gear tumbled to the ground, he vowed if he made it out alive he would make gear the right way. Today, this obsession with quality applies to everything we do. We are constantly researching, refining and perfecting every detail to provide gear that will not let you down. Because we are not just making stuff. We are honoring a vow. © 2016

ISSUE 23

014

GEARUP 1

MAKE & MODEL

LifeStraw Universal

2

MAKE & MODEL

Crescent Moon EVA All-Foam

FILTER LIFE

WEIGHT PER PAIR

Up to 264 gallons (1,000 liters)

3.5 pounds

MSRP

SIZE RANGE

$35

Womens 7 to Mens 14

URL

MSRP

lifestraw.eartheasy.com

$159

NOTES

URL

Outdoor enthusiasts rejoiced a few years ago when LifeStraw released the LifeStraw Go, a water bottle with a two-stage filter integrated in its mouthpiece. It lets you use the bottle to scoop up pond or river water and filter the H20 as you suck it up through the mouthpiece. The company breaks ground again with its LifeStraw Universal, the first bottle adaptor kit with a two-stage filter. It transforms your favorite bottle — be it a Klean Kanteen, Hydro Flask, or Nalgene — into a convenient water filter, which removes 99.9999 percent of bacteria and 99.9 percent of protozoan parasites.

The kit comes with a standard cap, wide-mouth cap, standard mouthpiece, sport mouthpiece, two-stage filter, and a carry bag.

crescentmoonsnowshoes.com NOTES

You don’t usually think of the snowshoe industry as a hotbed of high-tech development.

But, this season brings the next generation of deep snow mobility. Crescent Moon’s EVA All-Foam is a massively simplified, lighter and faster snowshoe ideal for grab-and-go use. There’s no hinge or lifter to adjust (or break), they’re light, and offer more traction than most framed snowshoes because of the continuous, treaded sole that’s similar to a football cleat.

When it gets deep and cold, the foam not only offers a cushioned stride, but it also provides a bit of insulation from the snow.

Although these are a lot lighter and easier to use than traditional snowshoes, the EVA All-Foams won’t stand up to the abuse an aluminum-framed shoe can take.

They’re best suited for use by people under 200 pounds.

3

MAKE & MODEL

Kelty Trail Ridge 8 with Footprint

4

MAKE & MODEL

Cabelas Covenant Tactical FFP Riflescope

DIMENSIONS

TUBE DIAMETER

150 by 115 by 77 inches

30mm

MSRP

MSRP

$490

$250

URL

URL

kelty.com

cabelas.com

NOTES

NOTES

Shelter is essential to survival. It can be as simple as the clothes on your back or as sophisticated as the 70-acre bug-out property.

But for most of us, a tent was our first example of a backcountry shelter. And for those who now have young children of their own and want to share both survival skills and the majesty of Mother Nature, tent camping is often the way to go. As the name implies, the Trail Ridge 8 can house eight people in a spacious freestanding design that’s easily accessed from two D-style doors.

There’s also small but smart features, such as a gear loft and a lantern/flashlight pocket. Setup is easy thanks to a color-coded clip-and-sleeve construction, but the Trail Ridge truly shines after dusk when you can undo the Stargazing Fly to enjoy the night sky with your loved ones.

Whether you’re looking for varmints wreaking havoc on your property or hunting for dinner in a post-SHTF world, a firearm with an optic can make all the difference. But not everyone can shell out two grand for a highend scope. After all, we all need to pay the rent, let alone save up for a food cache and supplies.

Enter budget scopes such as Cabela’s 4-16x44 Covenant Tactical FFP Riflescope. The FFP in its name refers to first focal plane — meaning its reticle size changes as you zoom in. This allows ranging a target with the scope set at any magnification. It has a wide magnification range, turrets with 1/4-MOA adjustments, and a nitrogen-filled tube for waterproof, fogproof, and shockproof performance.

2

3

4

1

GO AHEAD, TAKE THE LONG SHOT Unlock the full potential of your Remington 700 with the ergonomic comfort and accessory-mounting freedom Magpul brought to the AR-15.

The adjustability and stability of a good benchrest stock...that’s light enough to carry all day. And it won’t cost a month’s salary

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ISSUE 23

016

GEARUP 5

MAKE & MODEL

DPx Gear HEST/F Urban Ti OAL

6.7 inches MSRP

6

MAKE & MODEL

SOG Specialty Knives & Tools Field Knife OAL

8.5 inches

$469

MSRP

URL

$40

dpxgear.com

URL

NOTES

It’s always a bonus when your everyday carry (EDC) knife can do more than cut an apple and open up the occasional Amazon package. The HEST/F Urban Ti is a versatile utilitarian tool disguised as a slick daily carry folder. The S35V stainless steel drop-point blade can slice and pierce like a lightsaber, while offering outstanding corrosion resistance and toughness. On its spine is a tri-gauge wire stripper disguised as jimping for added grip. It also has a bottle opener that (with some practice) you can snag on your pant’s pocket to open the blade as you draw the knife.

The titanium handle is ergonomic in its simplicity and has an integrated 1/4-inch hex driver and glass-breaker for those “oh sh#t” moments. The deep-carry pocket clip is reversible and sturdy.

Made in the USA.

sogknives.com NOTES

If the DPx HEST Urban is too small or expensive for your tastes, consider the Field Knife.

It’s a minor investment at just 40 bucks, but has all the features most outdoor adventurers look for. The 4-inch-long, clip-point blade has a sizable belly for slicing but a tip that aligns more closely with the spine for greater piercing power. The included sheath comes with a belt clip but has numerous secondary attachment points so you can latch it to a pack or wherever you see fit. It even has a notch that exposes a small portion of the blade for cutting paracord or a fishing line without having to unsheathe the entire knife.

Of course, the lower price tag means lower-quality materials — Chinese 7Cr17MoV stainless steel instead of U.S.-made 154CM and a soft thermoplastic rubber handle instead of G-10 scales. But for $40, you’re getting plenty of bang for your buck.

7

8

MAKE & MODEL

Outdoor Edge Para-Claw

MAKE & MODEL

Small, medium, large

GATCO Shapeners 10005 Edgemate Professional Knife Sharpening System

MSRP

DIMENSIONS

$30

9.5 by 6.5 by 1.63 inches

URL

MSRP

SIZES

outdooredge.com

$60

NOTES

URL

When paracord bracelets became all the rage in the tactical/ survival world a few years ago, it seemed like everyone and their mother was coming out with the “latest and greatest” model even though it truly wasn’t that much different from the last. Well, Outdoor Edge is looking to slice through the status quo with the new ParaClaw, a paracord bracelet that features a 1.5-inch hawkbill blade that nestles into a patent-pending glass/nylon sheath that’s integrated with the cordage.

The knife is easy to deploy, with the paracord doubling as the knife handle and jimping on the blade’s thumb ramp providing positive traction. While a 1.5-inch knife won’t seem like much at first blush, the Para-Claw packs plenty of punch as a last resort when you’ve lost or can’t access your primary blade. Available in black or camo colors.

bearandsoncutlery.com NOTES

Having a dull blade is like have a firearm with an empty magazine. That’s why it’s important to keep your knives sharp, especially those that you’ll use in emergency or post-emergency situations. GATCO’s 10005 Edgemate kit lets anyone sharpen like a pro, whether their knife is for sport, utility, or the kitchen.

It features five sharpening hones with aluminum oxide abrasives: fine, medium, coarse, extra coarse, and one for serrated blades. The easy-touse system also comes with a GATCO-exclusive clamp/angle guide, honing oil, and a custom case for convenient storage and portability. Made in the USA

6

7 8

5

ISSUE 23

018

GEARUP 9

MAKE & MODEL

& MODEL 10 MAKE Zippo

11

MAKE & MODEL

12

MAKE & MODEL

Mag Strike

Ecōthst Trace Pant

DIMENSIONS

COLORS

HEAD SIZE

Black, Castlerock, Chocolate Chip

Medium to large

9.1 inches by 1.6-inch diameter

2 inches by 0.31-inch diameter

MSRP

MSRP

MSRP

MSRP

$79

$80

$18

$15

URL

URL

URL

URL

niteize.com

zippo.com

aventuraclothing.com

wileyx.com

NOTES

NOTES

NOTES

NOTES

Nite Ize has built a reputation for bringing subtle yet innovative updates to tried-and-true designs.

Take for example the Radiant. As its full name implies, it has three types of illumination with seven modes. The most obvious is the 250-lumen flashlight, which might not seem like much in a world where 1,000-lumen torches are quickly becoming the norm. But pull up on the head, and it’s instantly transformed into a lantern, providing a much-needed diffused glow inside a tent, backyard, or garage. On the other end, there’s a red safety light that has glow, flash, or SOS modes, all of which retain our natural night vision.

It can stand up on either end, is housed in a durable aluminum body, and works off of three common AA batteries.

Few brands make you think of lighters like Zippo. Thanks to portrayals in books, movies, and TV shows, the company’s products are practically synonymous with sparking a flame. But these days Zippo is more than just metal lighters. It makes all kinds of tools, including the Mag Strike. This firestarter unleashes a shower of sparks when you scrape the 420C stainless steel striker along the magnesium ferrocerium rod, allowing you to ignite your tinder with ease. Both the striker and the ferro rod have triangular-shaped ABS plastic bodies, maximizing traction and leverage with less force. Plus, the rod fits inside the striker’s handle with a snap-lock closure, shielding them from the elements and increasing portability.

Attachment points on each lets you connect them to your belt, keychain, or go-bag.

We’re not gonna lie. When women started wearing jeggings, we got jealous. Why can’t men’s jeans be flexible and comfortable, too, instead of just heavy and rigid? Fortunately for guys who like to stay on the move (either on the trail, the range, or just about town), Ecōths’s Trace Pant is a blend of 98-precent organic cotton and 2-percent Lycra.

This means it’s rugged yet soft, with just enough stretch so that it doesn’t pinch at the crotch, knees, or waist like traditional denim would. It has two deep front pockets, two rear pockets, a coin pocket, and a slit pocket behind the right leg for your smartphone, pocketknife, or multi-tool. On a side note, for every Ecōths garment purchased, a minimum of three meals is provided to regional food banks across the USA.

Whether you’re enjoying a sunny 65-degree F winter day in Arizona or fighting snow blindness in Minnesota, you’ll need to protect your peepers. After all, unless you’ve practiced bug-out runs while blindfolded, you’ll need to see where you’re going if you’re fleeing a disaster. The Wiley X Nash shields your eyes in a variety of situations. Its Shatterproof Selenite polycarbonate lenses provide 100-percent UVA/UVB protection while also meeting ANSI Z87.1-2010 and U.S. Federal OSHA 1910.133(b)(1)(1) standards.

Its T-Shell lens coating resists scratches and reduces glare without color distortion. The Nash comes with a zippered case, leash cord with rubber temple grips, and a microfiber cleaning cloth.

Nite Ize Radiant 3-in-1 LED Flashlight DIMENSIONS

Wiley X Nash

12 9

11

10

Let’s face it … conventional media outlets are censoring the kind of information that freedom-loving Americans have enjoyed for years. That’s why we’ve stepped up to the plate and created a resource for everything firearms — RECOILtv. Just as RECOIL magazine gives you no-holds-barred insight on firearms, we’re bringing that same trusted expertise to video.

From testing the latest guns, giving in-depth product reviews and expert tutorials, showing you top-notch vehicles, sharing user-generated content, and lots more, RECOILtv is the premier source for the content you want and deserve.

As the climate of political correctness slowly censors online informational choices out of existence, RECOILtv will give you the scoop.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

sigsauer.com WATCH

AT RECOILWEB.COM

PRESENTED BY:

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fnamerica.com

freedommunitions.com

kimberamerica.com

ISSUE 23

020

Pocket PREPS

One-Piece Multi-Tools

By Daniel Jackson

T

hink of a one-piece pocket tool as a sidekick to your knife.

At first glance, they’re often just a funny-shaped piece of steel small enough to slip on a keychain or drop in your pocket. They might not look like much, but they’re designed to shrink a handful of tools into an easy-to-carry package that keeps you running light and always prepared.

Even though a knife is the No. 1 tool you must carry in a survival situation, a blade has its limitations. A knife can chip, bend, or snap if used as a pry bar or screwdriver. And yes, if there are no other tools available, there may come a time to push your trusty blade to breaking point. But pocket tools are designed to pick up those tasks and then some, like turning hex bolts. Additionally, many pocket tools, because they don’t have sharp edges, can travel with you as you board planes, drop your kid off at school, or otherwise go where a knife is viewed as a weapon.

The result? For an ounce or two of weight, you’ll have more tools at your disposal than most college students can find in their dorm room.

How’s that for preparation? Here, we examined seven tools to see how

1

they navigate modern life.

2

MAKE AND MODEL

SOG Specialty Knives & Tools MACV Tool

OVERALL LENGTH

2.25 inches

2.5 inches

WEIGHT

0.6 ounces

0.917 ounces

MATERIALS

3Cr13 stainless steel

Stainless steel

MSRP

$14

$5

URL

sogknives.com

kikkerland.com

1

2

Kikkerland Design Inc. Triangle Multi Tool

7

5

4

6 3

Nite Ize Financial Tool Multi Tool Card

3

4

Kershaw PT-2

NDūR Survival Tool with Compass

Cu Healthy Products The Copper Shark Utility 2nd Generation

5

6

7

Griffin Pocket Tool XL

3 inches

3.25 inches

3.3 inches

3.375 inches

4.3 inches

0.6 ounces

0.8 ounces

1.5 ounces

1.45 ounces

1.16 ounces

420 stainless steel

8Cr13MoV and glass-filled nylon

Stainless steel and a hardplastic casing

Antimicrobial copper

Titanium

$6

$10

$6

$60

$70

niteize.com

kershaw.kaiusaltd.com

proforceequipment.com

thecoppershark.com

griffinpockettool.com ISSUE 23 OFFGRIDWEB.COM

021

ISSUE 23

022

Pocket PREPS

SOG Specialty Knives & Tools MACV Tool SOG packs 12 functions in a 2.25-inchwide tool that resembles the beretwearing skull that was the emblem of the Vietnam War-era Special Forces unit Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), after which the knife company is named. The tool passes the scrutiny of the TSA, SOG says, and comes with four hex wrenches, three screwdrivers and a pry bar/ nail puller, bottle opener, cord cutter, and knife sharpener. Made in China.

Pros: The skull design is cleverly integrated without impeding functionality.

You can get a lot of torque because the screwdrivers are at the edge of the tool.

The pry bar is thin enough to pull staples.

Cons: The cord cutter is ground at too high an angle. It can’t cut.

A pull-through knife sharpener isn’t the best way to sharpen a prized blade.

The tool can’t lie flat because of the bottle opener.

Kikkerland Design Inc. Triangle Multi Tool In this keychain tool, Kikkerland brings nine tools wrapped up in one equilateral triangle. The tools include a ruler, bottle opener, screwdriver, four hex wrenches, and two cutting tools: Kikkerland ground one corner to be a box cutter and the scalloped edge of the triangle serves as a “box saw.”

Made in China.

Pros: It has a comfortable weight The brushed steel is stylish and the triangle shape makes for clean lines.

The six-sided hex wrenches have good contact with bolts.

Cons: It’s a bit wide to fold neatly into a ring of keys.

Do you really want to stuff an unprotected box cutter in your pocket where you hand could “find” it later? Or go through security with it?

We certainly don't.

Why do you need a box saw when you have a box cutter?

The ruler divides the inch into 10ths, not 16ths like the rest of ’Murica.

Nite Ize Financial Tool Multi Tool Card In the age of computer-aided designs and drawings, Nite Ize goes analog by adding a drafting compass, protractor, and ruler in its Financial Tool Multi Tool Card. The tool gets its name from the fact it’s about the size of a credit card and easily slips into a wallet. It also packs five hex wrenches, two screwdrivers, a bottle opener, and a scraper into the two-dimensional space.

Pros: Dimensions make it practical to carry discreetly in most wallets.

Thanks to its thin profile, it turns smaller screws The screwdrivers are also slender enough to cut tape and open packages if needed.

Cons: It feels too slim to forcefully bear down on the tool.

It’s not much to look at, and the symbols explaining some of the functions betray a less-than-intuitive design.

Kershaw PT-2 It’s clear how to use Kershaw’s PT-2: Hang it from your key chain with the key ring and when duty calls, hold the tool by pinching it in the middle between thumb and forefinger. The cutout in the center of the tool drives three sizes of hex bolts. A bottle opener, pry bar, and Phillips screwdriver are at one end of the tool; a flathead screwdriver and scraper are at the other. Made in China.

Pros: Its long and thin shape falls in neatly with a bundle of keys.

The jimping and the nylon-scaled center provide an intuitive and secure place to grasp the tool.

8Cr13MoV is a popular stainless steel commonly used in knife blades — no mystery metal here.

Cons: The metal in the hex drive hole is rough and unfinished.

The pry bar would have more utility if it were thinner.

We would've preferred a rougher texture than the Kershaw “K” pattern for the nylon scales.

Cash

Carry Considerations

NDūR Survival Tool with Compass NDūR’s Survival Tool has 12 useful functions. The portion of the tool encased in yellow plastic contains the sharp bits, such as a box cutter and can opener. It also boasts a four-position wrench, a butterfly wrench, three screwdrivers, a file, and a magnifying glass. To top it off, it’s got a compass to get you home and a bottle opener to help you celebrate. Made in China.

Pros: Small Phillips and flathead screwdrivers are small enough to fix eyeglasses Putting sharp edges in a hard-plastic case reduces the risk of accidental cuts.

The yellow color makes this tool hard to misplace.

The can opener is a nice feature, which the other tools in this guide lack.

Cons: The miniature compass isn't as effective as a full-size model.

The removable plastic cover may be lost or broken while using the other features.

A mirror or whistle for signaling would make this tool even more wellrounded.

Cu Healthy Products The Copper Shark Utility 2nd Generation Thanks to pure copper’s documented antimicrobial properties, the Copper Shark is said to provide a barrier between your hand and the germs that can make you sick. Besides a bottle opener, ¼-inch hex wrench, and flathead screwdriver, the tool is designed to push open doors, flush toilets, and generally help you avoid meeting germs. Wash with soap and water to keep it smelling like pennies and killing the buggers. Made in the USA. Pros: Its bacteria-fighting properties can keep your hands clean and slow the spread of germs.

Because copper is soft, it’s also nonmarking.

The shark shape looks great on a key ring, and its fin works well as both a screwdriver and pry tool.

Cons: There’s a reason why most tools are made from steel. Copper isn’t as hard or durable.

There are only three tools on this shark, limiting its versatility.

It feels a little small for those with bigger hands.

Griffin Pocket Tool XL A big brother to the original tool, The Griffin Pocket Tool XL runs 1.3 inches longer and comes in stainless steel or titanium. It’s hard to miss the large pocket clip feature running down its center, allowing it to slip onto a pocket hem or belt loop. Seven hex wrenches line the center of this tool. A ¼-inch bit driver, an unsharpened bevel for scoring, a bottle opener, ruler, pry tool, and flathead screwdriver round out the ensemble. Designed and partially made in the USA.

If you read our Survivalist Spotlight on Les Stroud in Issue 21 you’ll remember how critical he said it is to carry cash as part of your EDC. However, we often overlook the importance of the tools we use to carry our money, credit cards, and IDs until they’re lost or stolen. Ask anyone who has experienced that headache and they’ll tell you it’s no laughing matter, particularly if you’re away from home.

For more ways to integrate one-piece tools into your EDC gear, check out our OFFGRIDweb-exclusive review of three metalframed minimalist wallets and a leather key fob bottle opener from Trayvax. www.offgridweb. com/?p=7033

Pros: The titanium gives the tool an airy feel.

The longer the tool, the more effective the pry bar.

This tool is likely to fit the hex screw you need to fiddle with.

Cons: The clip is so wide that it feels like the tool could slip free and be lost.

If you want to slip this on a key ring, you limit how easily you can use the ½-inch hex wrench.

At $70, it's nearly twice as expensive as the stainless steel version.

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WHAT I IF? A House Fire Breaks Out During an Ice Storm?

Story By Tim MacWelch Illustrations by Cassandra Dale

wasn’t exactly sure what woke me, and I didn’t even remember dozing off. A strange scent stung my nose and the cat was acting weirder than normal. The tubby feline was making some very odd noises — peculiar even for that psycho of a cat. I lifted my head, and my groggy mind started to process the information that was streaming into it. That scent was smoke.

And the room was far too warm. A jolt of alarm shot through me.

I was fully awake and something was very wrong. There was a haze in the air and a crackling sound coming from the room behind me.

I stood up and coughed a bit, then turned around to find the room behind me in flames. My God, I thought, the cabin’s on fire! And with the ice-covered roads, there’s no way the fire trucks can get to us.

This installment of RECOIL OFFGRID’s What If? marks a change in the formula. It’s an alteration that many readers have requested, and we hope that everyone will see it as an upgrade. Rather than recounting a fictional tale about fictitious characters, we’ve been asked to explain what we would personally do if we found ourselves in the given survival situation. From preparation to the execution of skills and survival tactics, we’ll be sharing our own plans and reactions to the upcoming survival scenarios. We hope you find this feature to be an enjoyable read, and we hope it provides you with even more valuable information than it did before.

The Scenario SITUATION TYPE Short-term survival YOUR CREW You and your fiancé, Candy LOCATION Acadia National Park, Maine SEASON Winter WEATHER Cloudy; high 32 degrees F, low 13 degrees F

The Setup: Your goal is to turn this Christmas vacation into the most romantic marriage proposal ever. After a roughly one-hour drive from your hometown of Bangor, you make it on December 20 to a gorgeous lakefront cabin in Acadia National Park that you booked through Airbnb. With no one but Candy’s cat tagging along, you’ve planned an unforgettable weeklong getaway that’ll climax with you surprising her with a 1-carat diamond ring on Christmas morning.

The Complication: On the fifth morning, Christmas Eve, darker clouds roll in. Then, the freezing rain starts to fall — water droplets that freeze upon contact and cover everything with sheets of ice. Hours

later, the lights go out. Total blackout. You check your smartphone for an update, but data and reception are almost nonexistent. Fortunately, you find a battery-powered radio and turn it on. Reports confirm a massive ice storm has moved in, and authorities urge people to stay indoors. Realizing you’ll have to hunker in place indefinitely, you start up the fireplace and try to assuage Candy’s fears.

After she finally falls asleep, you light a candle so you can find a place to secretly set up a GoPro camera to record your marriage proposal the next morning. Exhausted, you end up nodding off at the kitchen table. You wake up at some point later to Candy’s cat making all manner of strange sounds. You find that the candle you lit has tumbled over and the flame has spread from the polypropylene floor rug to the Christmas tree, the drapes, and the couch in the living room. A quarter of the cabin is in flames and filling up with thick smoke!

The New Plan: If you were at home, you’d call 911 and grab your fire extinguisher. But you’re at a rented cabin, you have no idea if there’s an extinguisher, there’s no mobile phone reception, and the steps and sidewalk outside look like a skating rink (let alone the roadways!). So how do you deal with the fire? And if you’re successful, how do you vent the house, survive the power outage, and endure the rapidly dropping temps?

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FIRE AND RESCUE EXPERT:

Prep If we were to be honest, it’s safe to say the majority of people — preppers included — would not bring much in the area of “supplies” to a romantic getaway. Even though there are some who would bring survival provisions, if there’s any chance for success, the focus on packing would more likely be comfort and romance.

So, let’s assume that not much was brought in terms of survival gear. But, like any good traveler, I did a little bit of homework on the cabin, the weather forecast, and the surrounding area. Acadia National Park is a secluded but popular island destination. Visitors can expect mountains, miles of shoreline, and plenty of wildlife scenery. Any supplies brought from home would likely be a basic survival kit kept in the car (food, water, knife, rope, first aid, flashlights, etc.) and items for warmth: blankets and fire starters.

Knowing that sketchy weather is in the forecast, I’d ensure the car is as full of fuel as possible when we arrive and contains the aforementioned basic survival kit. Anyone who has endured any type of dangerous weather knows that running out of fuel, when it’s desperately needed, is a stressful and potentially deadly scenario.

On Site Hotels have specific requirements that are dictated by municipal life safety codes such as working smoke detectors, sprinklers, and posted egress paths. Airbnb is different. Their policy is that the homeowner shall meet all local safety requirements, meaning they’ll vary from location to location.

Being safety-minded, any time I stay at a rental, I identify the presence and location of a few things: smoke detector(s), carbon monoxide detector, fire extinguisher(s), and utility (gas, electric, water) shutoffs. I also check egress paths, determining the safest ways out of each room, particularly any rooms above the first floor. I would also make sure the egress paths are clear. Being startled in the middle of the night by an emergent situation and needing to quickly leave a structure

Scott Finazzo’s Approach

can be greatly hampered by clutter between you and an exit. These steps take only a few minutes and equip me with peace of mind and a few critical emergency plans.

My girlfriend and I would discuss the importance of staying together. Because of the ominous weather forecast and the potential isolation, neither of us should wander away from the cabin alone for any reason. We’d agree to keep cell phones charged and turned off, but near us at all times. No one wants social media notifications distracting them from a romantic getaway. But, in the event of an emergency, a cell phone can be invaluable, and I consider it part of my vacation and emergency preparations.

I also believe it’s important to keep car keys, shoes, and a flashlight nearby when I sleep. Any type of unexpected event can occur overnight (fire, tornado, earthquake) and you will be at a serious disadvantage if you’re barefoot and cannot see. And if you need your vehicle to escape or to use as shelter, digging through pant pockets isn’t feasible when there’s an imminent threat.

We’d also establish a meeting place. If we become separated for any reason, there should be a mutually agreed-upon location where we’d meet. I’d say the cabin itself is a meeting place, but if something were to happen to the cabin, we’d determine a nearby landmark (a distinct tree, rock, a boat dock, etc.) to reconvene at.

Crisis The first and foremost priority in any emergency is life safety. In the fire service we have Incident Priorities: 1. Life Safety, 2.

Incident Stabilization, and 3. Property Conservation. Human life should always be the most important consideration in any crisis. The order may change, but the priorities don’t.

For example, one may stabilize the incident in order to achieve life safety. In the case of our cabin fire, the most important factor is our lives. Getting out is a priority. Regardless of the perilous weather outside, it’s a far better environment than the firestorm building inside.

The absolute first thing that must be done is to wake my girlfriend. She should grab her shoes and flashlight while I locate the cat.

Hand her the cat and car keys. Instruct her to go get in the car, start it for warmth, and call 911. Even if we have “no service,” network providers must transmit emergency calls, whether we use their network or not. So, there’s a chance. If possible, she should back the car a safe distance away from the house. In icy conditions, that may not be possible, but as long as the car isn’t inside the structure, it’s the safest alternative. Pet owners never like this next statement, but if I can’t quickly and easily locate the cat, it’ll be left to fend for itself for the time being. The good news is that pets have instinctive survival skills, and, at the very least, will attempt to rescue themselves.

As soon as I direct her to the door, it’s critical that I turn my attention to the fire.

Based on over 20 years in the fire service I’ll tell you that a nonprofessional extinguishing a fire of moderate size or greater is nearly impossible. It requires quick action, a good understanding of fire, and more than a little luck. First, a little bit about fire.

There are four factors necessary for fire to exist: oxygen, fuel, heat, and a chemical reaction. Without getting into too much chemistry, heat is applied to a fuel (wood, paper, cotton, plastic, etc.), which causes it to release vapor. The oxygen in air acts as an oxidizer allowing the fuel to burn and the chemical reaction brings them all together.

By removing any one of these factors, fire cannot exist. So I’ll need to eliminate at least one of those elements.

A common theory is that fire doubles in size every 30 seconds. Obviously this will depend on several factors, but the bottom line is the fire in our cabin is large and getting larger. I also know that fire is only part of the problem. It’s releasing superheated deadly gases, such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, which can instantly be lethal.

If the fire hasn’t broken out the window near the burning drapes, smoke will be filling the cabin. I need to act fast! The window may soon rupture, which will allow some

WHAT IF?

The best chance for success in this scenario lies in the preparation and taking some basic fire safety precautions. At all times, particularly when you’re snowed-in and utilizing open flames for heat or ambiance, extreme caution and care must be taken. The flame must be in a safe location and monitored.

When we’re finished with the fire, it must be fully extinguished and the firewood, candle, cigarette butts, etc., left in a non-combustible container or area.

This scenario combines several extremely dangerous situations occurring simultaneously. The ice storm is a major factor until the fire occurs, then

becomes secondary. I’m forced to prioritize.

When a fire develops, regardless of the ambient conditions, it must be dealt with as quickly as possible. The reality is that when there’s as much fire as in our scenario, it’ll be extremely difficult to overcome. Heat is measured in British Thermal Units (BTUs), and as the fire grows exponentially, the BTUs become so great that they’re difficult or impossible to overcome with the tools at our disposal. But considering all the factors, I have no choice. My life and the life of my girlfriend (and her cat) depend on it. I must be prepared and act quickly.

Even if we have “no service,” network providers must transmit emergency calls, whether we use their network or not.

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heat and smoke to escape (good), but will also feed the fire. The cool, ambient air will likely bank the smoke down, and, depending on wind direction, could blow it right toward me (bad).

There isn’t enough accessible water to fight a fire of this size. For the sake of this scenario, let’s assume a fire extinguisher isn’t available. I need to reduce the fire to a manageable size. I grab a blanket, preferably a heavy one, and squeeze one end together like I’m holding a club. I beat it against the leading edge of the fire. Remember the fire tetrahedron (seen right)? This action removes the necessary oxygen.

Making sure I hit the fire firmly helps to avoid creating a counterproductive fan effect. The fire won’t fully extinguish until I get to the seat of it, but snuffing out the leading edge will buy critical time. I should be very cautious to not draw the products of combustion back toward me as I draw back the blanket.

If I act quickly enough and some things go my way, I can reduce the fire to a point where water can be utilized.

Then, a sink sprayer (if it’ll reach) would be a great tool, or pots/buckets of water from the sink can be employed to finish the job.

Applying water to the seat of the fire will aid in rapid extinguishment, and then I can continue to apply water to any embers or smoldering objects.

Once the fire is out, ventilation is critical.

I must get the poisonous gases created by the fire out of the house. The best way is to determine wind direction and open windows and doors at opposite ends of the cabin, in the direction of the wind, creating a flow path through the cabin. This will let cold air in, but that is an unfortunate necessity. Without proper ventilation, carbon monoxide (odorless, colorless, tasteless) can accumulate in fatal concentrations. Finally, I’ll locate the electrical panel and ensure the breakers associated with the affected parts of the cabin are turned off.

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SURVIVAL EXPERT:

Prep Do Your Homework: Before travelling anywhere new, I like to study the area, research the accommodations, and try to uncover anything else that might be relevant.

A paper map of the area is an excellent resource to acquire and study. I can even bring it with me, and it works whether there’s power or not. I make note of important sites, like police and fire stations, and even jot down extra information on the map, like nonemergency phone numbers for local police, fire, and rescue squads.

The map can be used to determine multiple ways in and out of the area, too. And

Tim MacWelch’s Approach

if I want to place information on the map that I don’t want others to see, I’ll use a UV marker. An ultraviolet (UV) marker is a pen whose marks are transparent under normal lighting, but glow under an ultraviolet light.

These markers can be purchased online or in specialty shops. To then read the invisible writing, I use a “pet stain finder” light, which is a little battery-powered UV flashlight commonly available in pet stores.

Check The Weather: This part of preparation is vital, since it can help me plan the gear I’ll bring and make decisions on my course of action. I probably wouldn’t find myself in a predicament as severe as the one

depicted here. I check the weather forecasts often, particularly during the winter. When any hint of ice is mentioned, I go home and stay there. Ice storms are fairly predictable events, and we wouldn’t have gone to a remote cabin in the northeast — we’d have gone home. But let’s say that the weather guessers got it wrong. They might have predicted snow, and I would certainly view a little snow as nice backdrop for an amorous getaway.

Bring the Supplies: For a weeklong winter vacation in a private cabin, I’d bring enough supplies to last more for than a week, just in case we had to stay longer. This is in addition

WHAT IF?

to my normal vehicle supplies. I like to treat each of my family’s vehicles as a rolling warehouse of survival supplies. There’s always extra food in there, along with a full-sized fire extinguisher, a first aid kit with commonly used OTC meds, an assortment of handtools, and a solar charger for my mobile phone. On top of that, for the stay I’d bring plastic bins filled with the following: Food (both fresh and shelf stable) Water (bottled water, 16-ounce bottles for easy rationing) Lighting (non-flame preferred, LED flashlights can run for days on one set of batteries)

Batteries Extra winter clothing and outerwear A battery-powered mobile phone charger, or a car charger if the vehicle stays nearby

While On Site Once I reach the cabin with my lady and her feline friend, we’d naturally take a look around inside and outside of the cabin, checking out the amenities and the features.

I’d pull the vehicle close and unload all of our things. As we settle in, the food would go in the kitchen, the flashlight would go on the nightstand, and the fire extinguisher would come out of the vehicle and go into the same room as the fireplace (but not right next to it).

In the given scenario, a big emphasis of mine would be the firewood supply. Not only useful for a romantic fire, that firewood represents a source of backup winter heat (also a backup light source and a way to cook food).

I’d make sure we had an ample supply, and that it was covered to stay dry.

After settling into the cabin, we’d check the weather periodically to stay aware of changing conditions. When the phones stop working and the power goes out, we’d use a radio to stay informed (even if we had to sit in the vehicle periodically to listen to the car radio).

Crisis

own firefighter if the fire is small with minimal smoke. Make sure you check the gauge on your extinguisher seasonally to make sure the pressure needle is in the “green.”

In the event that we had successfully killed the fire, but had no vehicle or any other place to get out of the ice storm, we would have to vent the smoke and fumes from the cabin.

Despite the frigid temps outside, every window and door would need to be opened, and we’d need to stay out of the dwelling for as long as we could, ideally several hours. During this time, the burned materials could be removed to lessen the smell and the fumes in the cabin. The rug, drapes, charred Christmas tree, and burned couch cushions would have to go. The smoke and invisible gases of a house fire are very dangerous to breathe, and these would need to be fully vented before occupancy is resumed. Of course, this “open house” would remove all warmth from the cabin, and with the power out too, running a fireplace or woodstove would be the only practical option for warmth (unless we had cold-weather sleeping bags).

Jump forward to Christmas morning, after a frightening evening with little sleep, warmth, or holiday cheer — we’d have to wait for the salt trucks to hit the community before we could get out of the cabin and head for home. This could be hours, or days, depending on the severity of the storm.

Thankfully, we’d have a fire for warmth and cooking, with plenty of food to eat since I always overpack.

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Holy crap, the cabin’s on fire! Once I spot the fire, the first thing I’d do is yell for Candy and try to get to her. Ideally, she’d wake up, yell back, and be able to crawl out of the cabin with me — toting her cat and at least one of our mobile phones. But I’d have to be prepared to drag her out of the structure, if she had lost consciousness. Why drag her? Because I can crawl while dragging her — keeping both of our faces in the clearer, cooler air by the floor. If I scooped her up and carried her, we’d both be breathing more smoke. Once outside, we’d use the vehicle for shelter, continuing to try 911 on our phones and running the engine for warmth.

But what if we were dropped off at the cabin, and there was no vehicle or any

neighboring cabins for shelter? Then we may have no choice but to deal with the fire ourselves. There may be a fleeting moment when we could stop a small fire with a handheld extinguisher (or even a kitchen sink sprayer). Everyone should know how to use a modern fire extinguisher and which type to have. Class A extinguishers are the most practical for household fires, as they put out fires involving paper, plastics, cloth, wood, and rubber. Spray the extinguishing dust at the base of the fire, sweeping back and forth — this would be done after you’ve called 911. Again, you’d only try to act as your

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Conclusion Sorry extremists — no volcanoes, pandemics, or zombies in this edition of What If?, just a very dangerous and disturbingly common emergency — a house fire. We did, in RECOIL OFFGRID style, however, make the situation a little trickier. With the added complications of the ice storm, the power failure, the impassible roads, useless phones, and the remote location of the cabin, the basic house fire protocol of “get outside and call 911” doesn’t seem as clear cut.

Since every emergency is different, you’d have to weigh the pros and cons of fleeing a dwelling or playing firefighter if you’re caught in a house fire during dangerous weather conditions. When a fire breaks out under normal conditions, get out and stay out unless it’s a very small fire that you know you can extinguish. Of course, every home should have smoke detectors with fresh batteries to assist in early fire detection.

Furthermore, every house that uses combustion-based heating (fire places, wood stoves, oil furnaces, and gas heat) should also have a carbon monoxide detector. And just be careful folks! Frayed holiday lights and deep fryer cooking can spark a raging fire inside your home while frigid conditions exist outside. We hope that this What If? scenario reminds you to heed all fire prevention warnings during this winter season. Stay safe and happy holidays!

About the Authors Tim MacWelch has been a survival instructor for more than 20 years, training people from all walks of life, including members from all branches of U.S. Armed Forces, the State Department, DOD and DOJ personnel. He’s a frequent public speaker for preparedness groups and events. He is also the author of three New York Times bestselling survival books, and the new Ultimate Bushcraft Survival Manual. When he’s not teaching survival or writing about it, MacWelch lives a self-reliant lifestyle with his family in Virginia. Check out his wide range of hands-on training courses that are open to the public at www.advancedsurvivaltraining.com

Scott Finazzo has over 20 years of experience as a firefighter. He is a member of his department’s technical rescue team and has served as an instructor since 2000. Scott has written five books, including the national bestselling The Prepper’s Workbook and The Neighborhood Emergency Response Handbook, as well as his narrative of a kayak journey through the Virgin Islands called Why Do All the Locals Think We’re Crazy? Follow Scott at www.scottfinazzo.com.

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EDGE OF DISASTER

Improvised Knife Sharpening Methods

By Michael Janich

A

knife is the most quintessential of all survival tools. Whether you’re stranded in a desert, inundated by floods, caught in a snowstorm, or stuck in any other potentially life-threatening situation, having a reliable cutting tool is a must.

While opinions on what constitutes a proper “survival knife” will always vary greatly, the defining quality that makes a knife a knife remains the same: it must cut. It must also continue to cut until your emergency situation is over and life as you know it returns to normal. To make sure it does that, you need to know how to sharpen your knife, if necessary, with improvised means.

Cutting-Edge Basics A knife essentially functions as a miniature saw or a miniature ax. When properly sharpened, its cutting edge terminates at an acute V-shaped angle. Depending upon the

grit size of the abrasive used to finish the edge, the size of its microscopic teeth varies from relatively coarse (great for cutting rope and other fibrous materials) to extremely fine and polished (for scalpel-like cutting, usually in softer materials).

In its saw-like mode, the edge cuts when it’s drawn longitudinally through the material while constant pressure is applied. This slicing style of cutting takes full advantage of the edge’s tooth pattern and typically cuts with maximum efficiency.

As an ax, a knife’s cutting edge works like a pure wedge.

Rather than drawing the length of the edge through the material, it meets it at a right angle. The force of that contact — either ballistic (chopping or batoning) or sustained pressure (whittling) — sinks the edge into the material to separate it.

Either way, the key to a knife edge’s performance is the acute V shape at its terminus. The exact angle of the V depends upon the blade’s grind (i.e. flat, hollow, saber,

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Like a barber’s straight razor, knife edges can be touched up to cut more smoothly by stropping on a piece of leather — like this gun belt.

If you want to have any hope of sharpening a knife on an improvised abrasive, first learn how to do it with a traditional flat stone. After determining the proper angle, start with the heel of the edge closest to the handle and draw the entire edge across the stone as if trying to slice off a thin layer. Repeat on the other side and keep going until you’ve achieved the desired degree of sharpness.

convex, Scandi), its thickness at the beginning of the terminal cutting edge, the steel the blade is made from, and the hardness of that steel at the edge.

When a knife gets dull, the tiny teeth at the edge become mangled and ultimately the acute point of the edge’s V is worn away, broken off, or bent over. When this happens, the cross-section of the edge looks more like a U than a V and your knife’s defining function — cutting — is compromised until you sharpen it again.

Staying Sharp In simplest terms, sharpening is the process of maintaining or, when necessary, recreating the V shape of your knife’s edge. Since prevention is always better than a cure, let’s start with keeping your knife sharp.

First of all, let’s assume that when your specific balloon went up, you started the party with a sharp knife. Sharp, unlike pregnant, is a relative term, and some knife geeks have taken its meaning to crazy extremes. Assuming you have a life and don’t spend all your time literally splitting hairs with your EDC folder, let’s set a simple baseline. If you can cleanly slice a piece of typing paper with your knife, it’s got a sharp, utilitarian edge suitable for most survival applications.

Based on that standard, let’s say you’ve cut a few things and you notice that your knife’s not as keen as it was when the emergency started. Rather than waiting for it to get duller, it’s much easier to restore the edge by stropping it.

Have you ever seen an old-school barber run a straight razor against a piece of leather? That’s stropping. It’s basically the action of drawing your edge across a mildly abrasive surface to realign the terminal portion of the V. To strop a knife, hold it in a normal grip and place the blade flat on the stropping medium. Ideally, do this with an overhead light source so you can clearly see the shadow under the edge. Now, raise the back of the blade until the shadow disappears and the bevel of the terminal cutting edge is flat on the strop. Maintaining that angle and moderate downward pressure, wipe the blade across the strop, leading with the spine of the blade so the edge trails behind (just like spreading butter on toast). Flip your hand over and repeat the process on the other side of the edge.

Work from the “heel” of the edge (closest to the handle) to the tip so you strop its entire length.

Initially, maintaining the proper angle throughout each stroke will be tough, but with practice you’ll get more consistent. That muscle memory and understanding of angles will also come in handy when learning other improvised sharpening methods.

What materials make good improvised strops? The easiest and most practical is the stout leather belt that may already be part of your EDC kit. Take the belt off, hook the buckle to something or step on one end, hold the other end taut, and strop away. Purpose-designed leather strops are usually rubbed with jeweler’s rouge or polishing compound before they’re used. Doing the same with the inside surface of your leather belt ensures that you’ve always got a way to touch up your knife edge at all times. If you want to be an overachiever, you could even consider sticking a patch of fine (about 240-grit) adhesive-backed sandpaper to the inside of your belt for more serious improvised sharpening.

In addition to belts, heavy cardboard also makes a great improvised strop. Lay a piece of dry corrugated cardboard on a flat surface and use the same technique to touch up your edge. Ideally, it should be about twice the length

of your blade to make it easy to hold as you sharpen.

Sprinkling a little dry dirt or fine sand on it can replicate the abrasive quality of polishing compound and give even better results.

Stropping is very easy to learn, and keeping a knife sharp is simpler than making it sharp once it’s dull.

Iron Sharpeneth Iron If you watch a good butcher or chef in action, you’ll notice that he regularly touches up the edge of his knife with a long, wand-like thing called a steel. Drawing the edge along the hard, grooved surface of a butcher’s steel realigns its teeth and keeps it sharper longer. Like stropping, steeling is a maintenance strategy and won’t restore a very dull edge, but it’s still worth adding to your bag of tricks.

So where do you find a hard piece of steel with fine longitudinal grooves in it in the field? How about the spine of your other knife? In a survival situation, two is one and one is none. Carrying two or more knives allows you to have different tools for different jobs (i.e. one for tough jobs and one for fine work) and can allow you to use the back of one blade to steel the edge of the other. If your knives don’t naturally have a longitudinal groove pattern in the spine, create that pattern before you go afield by draw-filing the blade spine with 150-grit sandpaper.

To steel your edge, use the same overhead light and shadow method described earlier to determine the sharpening angle of your knife. However, instead of wiping the edge as if spreading butter, lead with the edge — as if trying to slice a thin layer off the spine of the blade you’re using as a steel. Use light pressure, work from the heel to the tip, and alternate sides with every stroke.

Knife Sharpenability Factors One aspect of knife selection that has a tremendous impact on sharpenability is blade steel. In recent years, the development of steels suitable for or specifically geared toward cutlery applications has exploded. The carbon steels and relatively simple stainless steels that used to dominate the production knife world have now been superseded by exotic, powder-metallurgy steels packed with ultrahigh levels of carbon, as well as vanadium, molybdenum, cobalt, niobium, and other elements.

These alloys can greatly enhance the wear resistance and toughness of blade steels, allowing them to hold an edge better than ever.

Remember, though, that there are tradeoffs to everything. Blades that are resistant to dulling in use are also notoriously hard to grind and therefore more resistant to your efforts to sharpen them. Some high-performance alloys refuse to yield to anything less than diamond abrasives, so you’d be hard pressed to sharpen them with improvised means.

Simple, traditional blade shapes are also much easier to sharpen than blades with complex grinds and multiple bevels. In most cases, they cut better and offer greater versatility, too. Don’t be fooled by hype or looks; focus on knives that look like knives, not something out of Star Wars.

Serrations are another controversial topic when it comes to survival knife selection. While well-designed serrations will hold an edge longer than a conventional plain edge and absolutely devour fibrous materials like rope and webbing, they are considerably more difficult to sharpen than straight edges and exceedingly difficult to sharpen with makeshift tools.

Back to the Grind Sooner or later, your edge is going to get dull enough that stropping or steeling it won’t be enough to keep it sharp.

In simple terms, the acute V shape of your edge has been dulled to a rounded U shape. To restore its sharpness, you’ve got to grind away steel on both sides of the edge to turn the U back into a V. Doing that requires two things: 1) an abrasive hard enough to grind steel yet fine enough to leave an acute edge angle, and 2) a steady enough hand to maintain a consistent angle as you remove steel on both sides of the edge. Let’s tackle the hard part first: skill.

Like using turn signals and saying please and thank you, knowing how to sharpen a knife on a flat stone used to be a common skill. However, as fewer people carry knives and old-school Arkansas stones are replaced by motors, angle jigs, and weird Rube Goldberg, crew-served sharpening contraptions, freehand sharpening is becoming a lost art.

If you have to sharpen a serrated blade in the field, your best bet is to use a rock or other abrasive to work the edge on the side opposite the grind of the serration teeth (serrations are typically beveled only on one side of the blade). This method restores the sharpness of the serration points and edge without trying to reach down into the concave of every tooth. Depending upon the size of your blade’s serrations, the rounded surface on the top of a car window may be able to fit the recesses, but it’s still simpler and quicker to sharpen the non-beveled side.

Bushcrafters and other survivalists have always preferred simple carbon-steel blades with zero-ground “Scandi” (short for “Scandinavian”) grinds that are easy to sharpen with any available abrasive. While modern steels, serrations, and other advanced features may offer improved performance in some circumstances, it often comes at the price of being high-maintenance — perhaps too high for SHTF-style sharpening.

Many old-school knife users sharpened their knives on the rims of crocks, bowls, mugs, or other ceramic vessels. The exposed rim of the bottom of a coffee cup, which isn’t covered by smooth glaze, will easily sharpen knife edges. Note the darkened area, which displays steel that’s been removed from the edge.

To steel one knife on the spine of another, draw the edge from heel to tip while maintaining the proper angle, then alternate sides.

When all else fails, even a smooth, reasonably flat rock can be used to sharpen a knife. Lightcolored rocks allow you to easily see when you’re removing steel.

Well, if you have visions of yourself bringing your knife to hair-popping sharpness on a river rock, I strongly suggest you find that lost art. Invest in a good bench stone at least as long as your longest EDC blade, break out your knives, and spend some time learning how to sharpen.

The basic technique, as described previously, is to lay your blade flat on the stone. With a light source directly overhead, raise the spine of the blade until the shadow under the edge just disappears. For most knives, this happens when the blade-to-stone angle gets to about 20 degrees. Do this repeatedly until you start to get a tactile feel for the proper angle. Then, maintaining that angle and applying firm (but not hard) downward pressure, draw the edge across the stone from heel to tip. If your blade has belly (i.e. upward curvature) near the tip, you’ll have to raise your hand a bit to maintain a constant edge angle.

To see if you’re doing it right, get a Sharpie marker and a magnifying glass. Color both sides of the edge bevel with the marker and take a few passes on a dry stone. Then, examine your work with the magnifying glass. If your angle is correct, you should be removing steel right near the edge. If your angle is off or inconsistent, the shiny spots where the marker is scraped away will let you know and help you adjust your technique. Once you get the hang of it, follow the stone manufacturer’s directions, using oil or water as necessary to keep the stone’s pores clean.

When You Can’t Get Stoned Armed with the skill to sharpen on a proper stone, you can now apply that skill to less proper, field-expedient

EDGE OF DISASTER abrasives. The exact abrasives you choose will depend upon your environment, but anything that’s hard enough to scratch your knife blade can work. In general, you want to look for relatively smooth materials that allow you to achieve finer teeth and a sharper edge. Light-colored materials are also preferred as they provide visible evidence that they’re actually removing steel.

In an urban environment, one of the best expedient abrasives is the top edge of a car’s side window. Glass is extremely hard and, when properly textured, will readily grind steel. The rounded, somewhat frosted surface at the top edge of a car window is just about perfect for this. Just roll the window down partway and use the same technique you use with a stone.

Many modern sharpening systems use ceramic abrasives. The very first modern sharpener of this type, the Crock Stick, got its name from the traditional method of honing knives on the rim or bottom of a ceramic crock.

A modern expedient for this is the slightly rough bottom rim of a coffee cup or bowl. Use the same stone technique, pay attention to your angles, and you’ll be cutting stuff in no time.

In wilderness environments, even ordinary stones can be used as improvised sharpeners. Smooth, flat, river rocks work very well, especially if they’re lighter colored so you can see the steel coming off and confirm your progress.

Larger stones are easier to hold or brace than smaller stones, and once your knife is reasonably sharp, you can always follow up by steeling and stropping the edge to refine it.

The only good knife is a sharp one. With the right skills and knowledge, you and your knife can stay sharp anywhere.

The rounded, frosted edge at the top of a car’s side window is an excellent improvised abrasive for knife sharpening. If you learn proper technique on a traditional stone, translating it to the car window should be no problem.

Sharp is a relative term, but in general, an edge that’s keen enough to slice typing paper is sharp enough for most chores.

The challenge is how to get it that way and keep it that way without purposedesigned sharpening tools.

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WAKE-UP CALL Survival TV Star and Combat Veteran Mykel Hawke Speaks the Uncomfortable Truth — Whether or Not You’re Ready to Hear It Story by Andrew Schrader Photos by Q Concepts

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Vegas shooting, and why one night a year spent camping in Ft. Living Room can make all the difference.

RECOIL OFFGRID: What was your childhood like?

Mykel Hawke: Sh*tty. You gotta remember, it’s the Vietnam era. My father was a soldier, and my mother was a waitress. My dad went off to Vietnam, decided he liked it, stayed there for two more tours. My mom and dad split up, he married a Panamanian lady to give us some sort of mother, but she was evil as hell. She beat us all the time.

You mean like … all the time?

MH: Oh yeah. It was a turning point in my life.

One Sunday morning, I was starving. She didn’t feed us much. But she did beat us with boards she had cut holes into and then rub salt into our wounds. One Sunday I got up, went into the cabinet, and saw a package of Twinkies. I took one of those and I ate it. Well, of course, she found it — she must have had a Twinkie count or something. When I admitted it to her, she beat me, locked me in a closet, and said, “You’re not gonna eat anything for 24 hours.”

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napologetic for his views on survivalism and television executives alike, former U.S. Army Green Beret Mykel Hawke has cut a unique and wide-ranging path through life. He first became famous for his work on the TV show Man, Woman, Wild, which featured him and his wife, Ruth England, being dropped into various real-deal (and at times too real) survival scenarios. He’s also taught survival classes for more than 20 years, earned the Combat Infantry Badge in Afghanistan following Sept. 11, was rated by the Army to speak seven different languages, and has somehow managed to stay humble about all of it.

“For me, the Green Berets was the poor man’s passport to the world,” he says. “Some people join because it’s a calling for them. For a lot of people the military is a way out of poverty. But people have to remember that it’s all of America that makes America great — it’s every teacher, every trash guy, everybody.”

We spoke with him in person at ALTAIR Training Solutions, an all-hazards tactical training compound located on the fringes of the Florida Everglades. We discussed how to introduce kids to survival skills, his thoughts on the recent Las

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she tried to beat me again. By this time I was bigger, so I grabbed the belt and took it from her, and I told her, “No more.” So she threw me out. I ended up spending a whole winter as a teenager sleeping on the streets.

Sleeping in stairwells, in dumpsters. I figured out that I could go behind grocery stores and sleep behind HVAC vents to get some heat.

I learned they throw away a lot of good food in grocery stores every day. I learned all of this survival stuff because I had to.

So I’m locked in the closet; I’m crying because I got beat. Finally, in the evening I’m starving, saying please give me some food.

So she knew I hated peas, and this … pleasant lady … opens up the closet. She says, “If you’re really hungry you’ll eat these peas.”

I looked at her, and in my mind I told myself that you will find my skeleton bones in this closet in the morning before I eat those peas. And I didn’t. When she opened up the door in the morning I could see the shock on her face. I took a pride in that and from that point on I knew. I said to myself, I don’t understand what she’s doing to me, but I know it’s wrong, and when I grow up I’m going to help other people who can’t help themselves.

How did that influence you going forward?

MH: Two things. First, that pea incident means that to this day I don’t eat peas, just as a personal political protest. Second, when I first learned about the Green Berets, I found out that their whole motto is De oppresso liber, “To free the oppressed.” And I decided, that’s who I am, that’s what I fight for. We fight bullies.

And that situation is what got me into survival. When I got to about 14 years old

Mykel as jungle doctor in El Salvador, circa 1993

Talk to us about your military background.

MH: I served for four years in the U.S. Army as an active duty soldier. After that I served in the reserves while putting myself through college.

I served in Afghanistan, worked as a country manager for special operations medics in Iraq, and got shot at on deployment in El Salvador, Turkey, and Thailand. Eventually I became a private military contractor where I worked in Colombia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Azerbaijan.

That’s four more contracts, and all of them I got shot at and people were trying to kill me.

What’s the difference between a soldier and a contractor?

MH: It’s like comparing a security guard to a police officer. A contractor can pick what they Hawke as combat commander in Afghanistan, circa 2003

WAKE-UP CALL want to do. They have a choice to quit. A contractor might have worked in a war zone — like they have Pizza Hut and Starbucks there now, but a soldier serves in combat by fighting. So for a military contractor to say he’s a combat veteran like a soldier is, they can kiss my d*ck. I call myself a combat veteran only because of my combat experience serving as a soldier in Afghanistan — not because of my military contracting I did in other places, even though I got shot at.

How did you get into the military and survival?

MH: Well, I got shot and stabbed before I ever joined the army. I was an honor roll student, and I was in the chess club. But because I was so poor, no one would hang out with me, so I started hanging out with the gangsters. And I didn’t do drugs, so it was real easy for me to just say, “Guys, if you just organize a little here and a little here, we can sell better here. So we started turning a profit, and we started kicking the other gang’s butts because we were unified. So the stuff that we did, I hate to say it, but we did some pretty cool stuff.

But when I had a buddy who got killed, and another one who went to jail for killing someone, I said to myself, this cycle of poverty is a one-way street to death or jail. The only way I’m going to break this cycle is to get an education, and the only way for me to do that was to join the Army. That’s why I joined — so I could go to college. So as soon as I turned 17 in 1982, they shipped me off to basic training and that led me to Special Forces.

As I got older in the military, I was really fascinated with all these old Vietnam-era guys who knew all these old survival things.

But when I went into SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) School, we only spent three days on survival out of a three-week course. I said to myself, this is all we’re going to learn? I realized that this is not enough. So what happens is that even the special ops guys don’t know primitive survival skills in a lot of cases. People just don’t know this stuff so I started teaching it to people. Long before it was a TV show, long before it was cool. I wasn’t a weirdo, and I didn’t want to teach weirdos. But things like

medicine, first aid, survival — these are things everybody can use and they’re applicable to everyday life. So it became my passion. One thing led to another, and I started a business doing it in 1994.

maybe do a special ops competition, and things went on from there. I looked at it like this: I didn’t give a rat’s ass about TV, but I liked teaching survival skills, and this was a way to reach more people.

How did you get your start in TV? MH: When Sept. 11 happened, I was living in L.A., still serving in the National Guard. So we watched those assholes fly the second plane into a building and I told my sons, “Hey, as a single father of two boys, I can get a compassionate reassignment and not go to war, or I can go to war because I’m Special Forces.”

And they told me, “Dad, go over there and go kick some ass.”

So I mobilized, and I went to war for two years. When I came back the Green Berets were all in the news, because we went in there on horseback and all that kind of good stuff. All my media friends didn’t really know any Green Berets except me. So they would ask me, “Myke, do you mind being a subjectmatter expert on this or on that?” I thought sure, what the hell.

Then finally they asked me, if you had your own show what you would end up doing? I said well, I’d take my wife out surviving, and

Are survival shows education or entertainment? What are your general impressions?

MH: Networks think that people are stupid, and production companies only want money.

It comes down to the people they feature and their core character. There are great folks like Ray Mears, Les Stroud, and Cody Lundin who care more about teaching. Then there are folks like Bear (Grylls) who favor entertainment, and then there are some who are just flat frauds and charlatans.

How about your experiences on the TV shows Man, Woman, Wild; One Man Army, and Lost Survivors. Does one stand out to you?

MH: We nearly died a bunch of times on Man, Woman, Wild. People don’t realize how tough those shows were and how real they were.

For the desert one, I told them, “Let’s not film in the day. Let’s film at dusk or at night with a full moon when we got better illumination.”

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But they made us film in the day, and they nearly killed us. My wife ended up getting heat stroke, and I grabbed the cameraman by the neck, looked into the camera because I knew the producers were watching from ½ mile away on their little screen, and I said, “If my wife does not leave this desert, none of you will.” That’s when they called the medic in.

America not only who we are, learning about our roots, but hopefully showing everyone that survival is in all of us. It’s from our forefathers so get back to it. The more self-reliant you are, the better everybody is because there’s one less body to be taken care of.

What do you think sets your shows apart from others?

MH: I feel as a Special Forces guy, I owe it to my brothers and to my people to be real about what I say and what I do. The networks will ask me, “Why don’t you be more like Bear Grylls and jump off some cliffs and do backflips into the water?”

I tell them, “I won’t do that because it’s stupid and it’s wrong, and it will get people killed. I will do stuff that is safe and has sound principles. I’m sure it’s not as sexy and as cool as you would like it to be, but it’s real.”

What do you have coming up?

MH: Besides the survival videos for kids we’re planning, I just did an episode of ABC’s The Bachelor, where my wife and I took them all out on a “survival date.” So Ruth and I taught these girls basic survival so The Bachelor could figure out which of the 12 girls he likes.

Ruth and I taught them shelter, food, water, and navigation. Also, I just did an episode of Valor for CW, doing background acting as a mission control officer.

We’re also creating an adventure race that incorporates not only obstacles, but also live-fire weapons and primitive weapons.

So you’re gonna get to shoot a pistol, rifle, shotgun, a sniper rifle, an automatic weapon, but also get to throw a spear, an atlatl, a blowdart, slingshot, hatchet, and a knife. So you’re gonna run, do an obstacle, then do a target with a modern weapon, then use a primitive weapon. And it’s for families as well as elite guys. We’re doing it all at the main AL-

It’s always a balance of trying to give the networks what they want versus doing what you believe is right for your teaching and your principles, and also for your brotherhood and your community. You’re always going to have people you can’t make happy, so I do what I believe is right. You can judge me all the f*ck you want. I live with myself, and I don’t regret sh*t that I do because I do what I believe.

TAIR Training Solutions facility in Immokalee [Florida]. We’ll break ground on the obstacle course in February and we hope to have it up and running by next fall.

But the coolest thing coming up right away is an eight-hour special for The History Channel called Frontiersmen. It’s made by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company who made The Revenant. I think it will reinstall in

not going to make it. I get people in my survival classes all the time who want to quit.

It usually happens in my Kill Class. We take a cute little bunny rabbit that sounds like a little baby when you kill it. It’s horrible. But I tell them, you have to learn to kill it because you might have to eat it someday. You can get more energy and sustenance off this rabbit than off three days of foraging out there. It’s

Do you think that survivalism is a skillset or a mindset?

MH: Mindset is important; you can’t do it without the mindset. But the mindset without the skillset will not serve you. Unless you practice survival you are not a survival guy.

For example, I can carry a gun because I have the mindset to shoot it. But if I don’t practice with the gun, I can’t depend on hope and luck to see me through a firefight. Sorry, but that’s poor planning. That’s asking mostly to get killed with your own gun still in your hand, and how embarrassing is that?

The mindset is a crucial component, because if you don’t have the will to live you’re

WAKE-UP CALL easier to get your energy from animals than from plants, plain and simple.

So I tell these people, you’ve got to go through this once in your life, and hopefully never have to do it again. And people always want to say, “I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to kill anything.”

And I respond, “OK, here’s a pen and paper.

Think of who you love the most in this world.

Write to them that, “I love you with all my heart, but I love this little bunny rabbit more than you, so I’m going to lay down and die so that this bunny rabbit can live, and I’m never going to see you again.” Usually at that point they say, “Give me the rabbit.”

What about teaching survival to kids?

MH: With my first boys I’d wake them up at 3 in the morning and do fire drills, make them crawl blindfolded on the floor to find the phone and dial 911, and get out to the middle of the yard. They hated me for it, but I taught them everything I could about survival. I was maybe too aggressive with them as a younger man, and I didn’t make it fun. And now, I try to make it fun so I take my boy out camping once a year with a sole mission: to learn survival stuff. If you can bring in humor, that’s where people’s minds are open. That’s why I don’t bust people’s asses in my class. I make it real easy and relaxed, and let them have fun.

So actually what I’m doing with my younger third son, because the internet is so different now, we plan to start making home videos where the wife and I are gonna teach him, and then he’s gonna teach kids. That way he can explain how he’s learned it from us and how thinks it would be better for kids to learn from him.

How can readers plan to take care of themselves before help arrives?

MH: You should carry 24 hours’ worth of survival supplies on your body at all times. Carry three days’ of survival stuff in your car or on your little pack, and keep seven days’ worth in your office, in your plane, or your little log cabin. Last you need to have a 30-day supply of everything you need in your home.

I always tell people that, once a year, they should have an indoor campout using just their survival gear. Turn off your power. Don’t run any water. Don’t use any gas. Live in Ft. Living Room without any of those things.

Then, open your sh*t. Play with it — let your family see where it’s stored and how it works.

You’ll find that some stuff doesn’t work! Some stuff breaks, erodes, or corrodes. Do you have a way to wash clothes for a month? Do you have a way to cook food, or get rid of your

trash for a month? When you do your indoor campout, you’ll figure lots of these things out.

Compared to the mental and physical aspects of preparedness, how important is your gear while you’re out adventuring?

MH: I will kid you not, gear is key. The better it is, the better everything is. It’s no substitute for skills, but without gear, skills can make substitutes! But too much gear can be as bad as too little — carrying too much can wear you down, and if you don’t know how to use it all, it can cause you grief in a critical moment of need. Like they say, balance is the key in all things.

What would you say is the biggest mistake you see rookie survivalists make?

MH: Thinking that they can make a fire quickly or build a shelter easily, underestimating the need for water, and overestimating their physical abilities.

What lessons, if any, did you personally draw from the Las Vegas mass shooting?

MH: Man, that is just a sad tragedy with no just reason for it. But that aside, in my time as a military contractor as well as my service as a OFFGRIDWEB.COM

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Are there any specific survival skills that are good to teach kids?

MH: Yeah, train your kids how to start a fire.

It’s not just as easy as lighting a match. You’ve gotta know how to make the tinder ball and then how to build it. I’ve seen people with fireplaces that don’t know how to get a fire going because they don’t know how to build it up from the base. If you can make it fun for your kids they will learn it, and they’ll be so

proud and confident. And then as a parent you’ll be confident too. You don’t have to be a weirdo prepper living in your basement and drinking your pee. The fact is that sh*t’s gonna happen, and the government can’t do everything for you, and it’s gonna take them a while to get there and help you.

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Mykel Hawke’s EDC Food: Breakfast bar, beef jerky, and vitamin pack Water Storage: condom, Ziplock bag with purification tablets Fire: Lighter and magnesium bar Shelter: Trash bag Signal: Dakota Watch Green Angler II Ana-Digi Clip Watch, phone First Aid: Cravat bandage and medications Multitools: Swiss Army SwissChamp Multi-tool (city), Leatherman Multi-tool (field), and Hawke Knives Tacti-Tool for EDC. Navigation: Compass

soldier, I’ve encountered many coups and rebel attacks. So, how I live and operate applies here too and maybe some can benefit from this.

First, I try to always pack heat and stay close to cover and an egress/exit whenever I go to public venues. I also try not to be in the middle or right on the edges — just close enough to escape, but not take the rounds if it comes from the edges. But in this case, my pistol would not have done anything to stop that guy from so high with long guns, so the best you can do is be calm, be brave, try to help others, and pray that God doesn’t wanna call you home just yet.

I’ve saved so many lives under fire, at times I just knew my brains were gonna get popped any second. But it never came, and I just focused on saving one man at a time.

We’re all gonna die, so go out doing good, and if you survive, you survive with honor.

Either way, you win, in my book anyway.

How can you tell when an individual you come in contact with is going to be a threat?

MH: Most threats are conveying their intentions long before they get to you. They are out hunting and targeting, so if you’re alert,

chances are you’ll sense it and then gear up your guard a notch or two. Situational awareness is vital, and it sure helps to always be ready as you can’t always sense it. Often we’re so busy with other things in the moment that we might miss the vital clues, but they are usually there unless you have been pre-targeted.

And in that case, things are going either too well or too many odd things at once should cue you up. I’m the kinda guy who when I hear gun fire, I take a second to look for the immediate threat, but then instantly look around to see if that is only the distraction for an actual larger operation or the start of an ambush. Bottom line: train yourself to respond, and stay in response-on-tap mode with situational awareness as your trigger mechanism.

What threats do you prepare for?

MH: On a daily basis I prepare for the threats of robbery, travel breakdowns, and security and safety on air, land, and sea. Then in the bigger picture, I prepare for natural disasters, as those also cover warfare both large and small, and even terrorism.

I don’t prepare for NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) attack for a reason. With nuclear

either you’re dead or not, ASAP from the blast or shortly after if you’re in the gamma ray zone. The fallout zone can be minimized and, to a degree, avoided.

The idea of preparing for the biological and chemical is funny to me. I went to the chemical warfare school. I know that most of the things man can make to kill his fellow man, we have no protections against. The NBC/MOPP suits and gas masks only stop about 3 percent of all the hateful things out there so they’re really just providing a false sense of comfort and confidence. If you are where they pop the canister, if it’s the bad stuff — and that is cheap and easy to make — then you’re nailed.

The hopeful part is this: Those things are hard to disperse on a wide scale, and we have amazing folks fighting to stop those buttheads from doing it every day. What we can’t ever predict or stop, sadly, is the rare radical homegrown monster like the Las Vegas killer. Humans are humans and as such, some things will always be unpredictable.

But that doesn’t mean we should give up our rights or give up hope. The best way to win is live well and keep fighting.

WAKE-UP CALL

Mykel Hawke AGE: 52 OCCUPATION: Teacher HOMETOWN: Louisville, KY BASE OF OPERATIONS: Tropical Southern Florida FAMILY: Wife, three sons, two grandkids EDUCATION: Master’s Degree in Psychology for Family Counseling, Bachelor’s Degree in PreMed Biology FAVORITE QUOTE: “I may have been on the losing side, but I am not convinced it was the wrong side.” — Captain Reynolds in Myke’s favorite TV series Firefly FAVORITE TV SHOW: Firefly FAVORITE FILM: Serenity LAST BOOK READ: A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge SCARS: Knife (left shoulder), bullet (right lower back), appendectomy scar FAVORITE KNIFE: Sparrow Hawke FAVORITE FIREARM: Glock 26 and AK-47 MILITARY BACKGROUND: U.S. Army Special Forces, Green Beret Combat Commander MARTIAL ARTS BACKGROUND: Blackbelt in Judo and Aikido URL: www.mykelhawke.com

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hen the proverbial excrement hits the fan, why might someone who's considered fragile or vulnerable survive, while the seemingly tougher one fails? Before training, gear, and prep, there’s something more foundational to our survival. That foundation is our human spirit.

Nine-tenths of survival is psychological. If you don’t have the willpower to persevere, all that great gear may as well be nonexistent. In reality, survival gear is meant to be an adjunct to your survival instincts. We’re here to help you hone those — lest you be in a situation like the following one experienced by a young John F. Kennedy.

He led nine survivors on a 3-mile swim to landfall, while

towing another who was badly burned using a strap between his teeth. Over the next six days, he swam dozens of miles to seek help. He sliced up his feet on coral reefs, risking death (or worse) by infection, currents, dehydration, capture, or attacks from oceanic predators.

Beyond physical and mental exhaustion, JFK said he drew on a spiritual strength, fed by his command responsibility for his crew. Eleven of his 13-member crew survived after a Japanese destroyer sliced his boat, PT 109, in half.

Warriors, artists, and healers have long recognized this power within ourselves. It’s described in metaphoric, religious, ethical, and transcendent terms. At the cusp of life and death, the human spirit can make or break us.

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If, in the face of our own death, our certainty of life and survival rises up from the spirit of our being, we can do miraculous things. But if we believe it is our time to die, that the odds are too great, then they are … and we will. So, we must condition our spirit before the worst of the worst happens.

In a SHTF situation we won’t have time for hesitation, so it’s important we map out our emotional wiring so we don’t short circuit when we’re under extreme stress.

The Importance of Spirit

Human Spirit The spirit is the metaphoric stone tablet of the presuppositions of our being, and it drives our deepest emotional, ethical, societal, mental, theological, and physical responses.

One might say the spirit is the foundation from which we make choices. It includes: What drives us: our goals for this lifetime What is most important to us: what we’re willing to die for Our convictions: what we’ll live for Our code: what we’ll stand up for Our sense of the transcendence: what we believe about “the big out there” When our spirit is troubled and things happen that shake this foundation, it manifests itself in powerful emotions. For example, two police officers could be confronted with an armed suspect; identically trained, each officer draws their weapon and stops the threat, killing the suspect. In the aftermath, one officer processes the emotions, embraces the lessons learned, and moves forward. The other officer suppresses the emotion and begins to have recurring stress, bad dreams, and is eventually diagnosed with PTSD. This is deep emotional territory, life and death. If, in a survival situation, a life is taken and we come to terms with that choice, we can move forward. But if we get emotionally jacked up, we can suffer from an invisible injury that can make the rest of our life spiral out of control.

As depicted in the film 127 Hours, your spirit will determine your willingness to go to extreme measures to survive. If you were in the same situation, could you bring yourself to amputate your own arm? If not, what would it take for you to reach that level of determination?

The spirit is the place from which we’ll decide to kill, and the place from which we choose to survive. Let’s look at an example of someone put in this situation and the resolve they willfully demonstrated.

In 2003 Aron Ralston fell and his arm became inextricably lodged between boulders in the canyon he was exploring while hiking in Utah. With no expectation of rescue, he cut off his own forearm using the knifeblade in a cheap multitool and hiked to safety. He demonstrated a will to survive.

At his spiritual foundation, Aron Ralston’s desire to live outweighed the cost of an arm, and the excruciating pain of its removal.

The spiritual strength to kill is harder to illustrate. Imagine a Marine Corps sniper looking down his scope at a 12-year-old headed for his buddies with a bomb strapped to her body.

Imagine if, after SHTF, we were looking through the scope and our families were at risk. There’s a lot to work through in order to be OK with taking a life that may jeopardize our loved ones.

When these situations rear their ugly heads, there won't be time for these questions. Will we kill or be killed and how will we live with the consequences?

We live in a democratic republic that affords due process, and other protections provided by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These are the conditions we operate under in a stable American society. The spirit has adapted to these norms.

Here are two exercises to prepare: the first is called preflection, a visualization exercise of ethical consequences.

The second is called emotional self-aid. Spiritual trauma, moral injury, and traumatic stress disorders manifest with emotional outbursts. This is an exercise to deal with those emotional flare-ups instead of suppressing them.

Pre-flection One could call this exercise spiritual stress inoculation.

It plays out the ethical consequences of a life-and-death decision before being faced with this kind of reality. It prepares the spirit for what follows such an event.

Outline a mock scenario where you have to kill someone to protect yourself or others. Write it in sort of a classroom assignment format as a logical exercise.

THAT’S THE SPIRIT Example: You’re forced to shoot a poacher who is stealing a deer on land you’d planned to use to feed your family.

Choose a quiet time where you can focus your thoughts and recall this scenario with a focus on what you may feel in that situation, moment by moment.

Visualize the scenario step-by-step, imparting as much realism as possible. The key is to feel the reality as if you’re watching it unfold. Make the people authentic, not like comic book villains. Be vivid in your description. What do people look like? What time of day is it? Where are you living? What are the thoughts racing through your head as you make this decision? Write it as if you’re a novelist.

Imagine the aftermath: the shooting, the body, the surroundings, how your family might react. Imagine it until you feel it, the anger that forced you to pull the trigger, or the anguish that you took a life, or the sheer disbelief — whatever comes to your heart and mind. The intent is to shake your spiritual foundation, to make yourself painfully uncomfortable with what happened.

Now back off the image and work through the feelings.

What did it feel like? Could you do it? Would you do it again? Write down the results, date them, and file it.

Run the exercise several times, leaving days or weeks between. After four or five repetitions of this exercise, go back and see the progress that has been made.

Pre-flectioning the scenario aligns spiritual issues of what we should do and what we will do. This will be the time to uncover and, as necessary, change the deep truths of what we believe and are willing to do.

Emotional Self-Aid Pain, injury, death — and life, in general — can raise unfamiliar or undesired emotions as the spirit adapts to new circumstances. When we shove those emotions into a box, it’s inevitable that the contents of that box will eventually permeate other aspects of our life.

While in seminary, I traveled to Israel for a short-term study. During that time, we witnessed a protest of the recent

Much like soldiers experience during war, you’ll be forced to make splitsecond, lifesaving decisions in a grid-down environment.

Preparing psychologically for emotions you might face during TEOTWAWKI is key to survival.

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death of a young Palestinian man taking place at the Church of the Nativity. This protest was surrounded by the Israeli military. When a young Palestinian woman thanked us for being there, because the Israelis were “less likely” to fire with American tourists present, it affected me much more deeply than I realized at the moment. In that instant, I simply packed all my conflicting emotions into a box and tried to leave the area as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until we returned home that the shame of what might have been seeped into my consciousness.

Survival in a SHTF situation will leave us tired and distracted enough. Adding the burden of emotional turmoil on top of a disaster scenario is nearly guaranteed to overwhelm.

Training our coping mechanisms ahead of time will lessen the blow of any circumstance we might not have prepared for. Unlike going to the range, one doesn’t simply sit and practice anger. This exercise is practiced in real life.

Prepare a list of emotional identifiers. An easy system is “glad, sad, mad, bad, and afraid.” Name the emotions as they come to mind as you walk through a variety of events in your memory that span the emotional spectrum. It’ll be very clunky at first.

Expand and adapt your own vocabulary through real-life experience. For example, your kid crashes and totals your new pickup — mad doesn’t begin to describe it. Build the vocabulary. The more descriptive or colorful the language, the more it’ll make sense to you.

Be aware of involuntary physical reactions. Elevated heart rate, jitters, sweating, shallow breathing, etc. — maybe anger triggers a freeze because you fear lashing out. When these physical manifestations of emotion happen, calm can be achieved with tactical breathing. Lt. Col. David Grossman explains this process in his lectures to law enforcement officers — using both our voluntary and involuntary physical reactions as handles to regain self-control.

Tactical breathing (breathing in, holding, breathing out each for a count of four) will calm the physical processes and eventually ease those emotional triggers. As you work it through, catalogue the physical reactions. Learn to recognize when yours are coming to the surface.

Ultimately, this is an exercise in self-awareness. Practiced in the relative safety of everyday life, it provides tools to work through the potentially overwhelming emotions that’ll come when the world is turned upside down.

About The Author

Spiritual Fortitude There’s a sign in a law enforcement training facility that says, “In times of trouble, we do not rise to the occasion, but fall back to our level of training.” This includes the human spirit. It’s one thing to claim we would kill to protect our families. It’s quite another to actually do so. It’s one thing to declare that if caught in a bear trap, we’d hack off a leg to survive. It’s quite another to have the spiritual power to actually cut into your own flesh if the need calls for it.

Most of the time, the human spirit doesn’t manifest itself. Our conscious mind is adequate to deal with the choices of normal life. When we go off the cliff of proper behavior to behavior to contemplate what’s worth dying for and what’s worth killing for, the spiritual trauma will manifest as powerful emotions.

In that moment, when we have to decide to live rather than die, no matter how grim the odds may be that choice is a spiritual one. From the spirit flows a wellspring of strength when all else has failed. Spiritual strength allows us to transcend limitations.

Your brain only works as far as the words you have to describe what’s in it.

Writing down your emotions as you experience different events helps you handle difficult experiences and identify your emotions better.

Peter Hofstra is a law enforcement, fire department, and emergency management chaplain. He works actively at developing the skills of these men and women to better prepare himself to survive and be more effective working alongside first and second responders. His pastoral work has been in the understanding, development, and strengthening of the human spirit as a creation of the Almighty in every person. He resides in central New Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and their two children.

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TURN UP THE HEAT Six Lighters and Torches to Keep Your Fires Burning This Winter

By Patrick McCarthy

H

ypothermia sets in quickly during bitterly cold winter weather when you’re unable to maintain your body heat. But even in warmer environments, a harsh wind chill or clothing soaked by an unexpected rainstorm can lead to a dangerous and potentially fatal drop in core temperature. For these reasons and many more, a reliable source of fire is an essential part of any emergency kit, and something you should consider and test thoroughly.

You certainly don’t want to learn about a flaw in your fire-starting plan when you’re already shivering, numb, and losing muscle coordination.

Last winter in Issue 18, we featured a buyer’s guide for manually operated fire-starters, including ferro rods, magnesium bars, several types of matches, and even a primitive fire bow. This time around, we’re focusing on tools that can create an instant flame.

Lighters vs. Torches These two devices share many similarities, but can be differentiated easily by observing their flames. Lighters produce soft and flickering orange flames from flammable fluid or liquified gas, while torches release a fine stream (or streams) of gas at higher pressure to generate intense blue jets. Some of these fire-starters blur the line, offering a manual adjustment that can achieve either type of combustion.

Both lighters and torches can easily ignite a campfire, and many share the same butane fuel, but there are functional differences as well. Lighters generally offer even heat, and simple ignition and fuel systems for long-term durability. Torches generate more powerful and focused heat — enough to solder wiring, braze metal pipes, vaporize moisture, and brûlée fancy desserts — but their fuels and Piezoelectric ignition systems may be more sensitive to environmental conditions.

We obtained three lighters and three torches, and evaluated each based on ease of use, reliability, power, features, and cost. Read our impressions and decide if one of these fire-starters is hot enough for your bug-out bag or winter survival kit.

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BIC

Classic Maxi WEIGHT

0.7 ounces (including fuel) DIMENSIONS

3.2 by 1 by 0.6 inches MSRP

$6.50 per 5-pack / $1.30 each URL

bicworld.com

NOTES: With 4.2 million lighters produced every day, the BIC has become ubiquitous. Packs of these Classic lighters can be found in the check-out area of virtually any gas station, grocery store, or big-box retailer. As a result, they’re a standard choice for bugout bags and emergency kits. The BIC’s Delrin polymer body is light, durable, and available in a massive variety of colors and patterns. Its flint wheel igniter is covered by a thin steel childresistant band; we’ve seen many users pry off this band for easier operation. In addition to the standard-size Maxi, the company offers a smaller Mini variant (pictured in blue below) that’s about 30-percent smaller. Both versions are easy to use, and produce a strong 1-inch flame. These lighters are designed to be disposable and non-refillable.

PROS: Lightweight, compact, and available in countless colors and designs Long lifespan of up to 3,000 ignitions Made in the USA and sold at an affordable price CONS: Child-resistant band reduces ease of operation Flame is easily extinguished by strong gusts of wind Igniting the lighter requires coordination, and may be difficult with cold or gloved hands

Lighters

TURN UP THE HEAT

EXOTAC

titanLIGHT WEIGHT

2.0 ounces (including fuel) DIMENSIONS

3.3 by 1 inches MSRP

$50 URL

www.exotac.com

NOTES: Liquid-fueled lighters such as the classic Zippo have an Achilles’ heel for survivalists — they’re not airtight, so the lighter fluid eventually evaporates. This leaves the user flicking sparks aimlessly at a dried-out wick that won’t ignite. EXOTAC has developed a new lighter that aims to eliminate this flaw. Much like other liquid-fuel lighters, the titanLIGHT contains fuel-retaining cotton balls, a fabric wick, and a flint wheel igniter. However, this outdoor-oriented lighter is machined from solid aluminum, anodized in one of four colors, and is fully sealed via O-rings on the threaded base and cap. That means the fuel is unable to evaporate or leak out while the cap is in place; it also means this lighter is waterproof to 1 meter. Other features on the titanLIGHT include a lanyard loop, and a quick-thread cap that’s removable with a single 360-degree twist.

PROS: Waterproof, leak-resistant, wind-resistant, and highly durable Compatible with standard Zippo-style fuel, flint, and wicks Made in the USA CONS: Excess fluid has a tendency to seep beneath the flame shield and onto the cap threads, especially if the lighter is stored horizontally or over-filled. It won’t escape the sealed cap in storage, but can lead to singed fingers after the first spark.

Requires periodic maintenance to replace the flint every 500 strikes and trim the wick

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Lighters

Zippo

Outdoor Utility Lighter (OUL) WEIGHT

6.6 ounces (including fuel) DIMENSIONS

7.7 by 1.3 inches MSRP

$20 URL

www.zippo.com

NOTES: Mentioning the name Zippo evokes thoughts of the classic flip-top fluid-filled lighters, but the company also offers a line of outdoororiented fire-starting tools. This OUL is a butane-powered lighter with a long body and rubber overmolded handle. In the hand, it feels like a ruggedized version of the candle lighters found in most homes. The “dual flame” design features two butane outlets: one recessed beneath a glowing ignition filament, and another offset pinhole at the tip. The gas from these outlets joins to form a single flame that can withstand strong gusts of wind. However, even with the butane reservoir filled and output knob dialed all the way up, the flame produced was the smallest of the lighters we evaluated. Also, the two child-resistant buttons require strong continuous pressure to keep the flame lit.

PROS: Dual flame provides good wind resistance Arrived pre-filled with butane, includes fuel-level indicator Long tip provides extra reach and reduces the risk of burned fingers CONS: Even with output set to maximum, the flame is disproportionate to the lighter’s size.

Flame adjustment goes from small to smaller, and any dial setting lower than 50-percent extinguishes it altogether.

Dual push-button system requires dexterity and continuous pressure

Torches

TURN UP THE HEAT

Bernzomatic

WT2301C Campfire Torch WEIGHT

3.4 ounces (torch only) / 2.97 pounds with 14.1-ounce propane cylinder DIMENSIONS

5 by 2 by 1 inches MSRP

$20 (torch only) / $5 per propane cylinder URL

www.bernzomatic.com

NOTES: This full-sized torch features built-in Piezo ignition, so unlike workshop torches, carrying a separate striker isn’t necessary.

Turning the knob and clicking the trigger produces a bright blue flame and a blast of heat that radiates outward. It’s powerful enough to incinerate even damp wood, and makes starting a fire at the campsite a breeze. You can skip the tinder and go straight to burning some kindling. However, the Bernzomatic torch requires a source of propane — either a green 16.4-ounce camping cylinder (such as those from Coleman) or a narrower blue 14.1-ounce cylinder (pictured). The torch is effective, easy to operate, long-lasting, and affordable, but these advantages come at the expense of a large footprint and considerable weight. If you’re backpacking or bugging out, you’ll probably want something smaller.

PROS: Blistering 7-inch blue flame Works with common green propane cylinders used for camp stoves Long burn time, potentially several hours depending on tank size and ambient temperature CONS: Requires a large and heavy propane tank — not suited for mobile backpacking or bug-out use Very cold environments will reduce the propane gas pressure and flame size Tilting or inverting the torch can cause it to flood and turn off

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Topsense

Pencil Torch WEIGHT

2.1 ounces (including fuel) DIMENSIONS

6.5 by 1.1 by 0.7 inches MSRP

$12 URL

www.amazon.com

NOTES: We found the Topsense torch on Amazon, and its slim design caught our eye. It’s about the same dimensions as a flashlight, and we noticed it fits snugly into the webbing loops on MOLLEcompatible gear. To ignite this torch, set the red flame intensity slider to the jet position, push the black butane switch to “ON,” and click the button on the tail. This results in a 1.5-inch blue flame; moving the red slider allows on-the-fly adjustment between a focused jet and a softer orange flame. A second recessed slider provides flame size adjustment, allowing the user to fine-tune the both the focus and power of the output. All these features are handy, but the placement of the ignition button away from the other controls is less than ideal. A miniature kickstand allows the torch to be turned on and positioned on a bench or table for hands-free use.

PROS: Dual adjustment sliders give the user precise control of flame size and intensity Flip-out stand allows for continuous hands-free use Conveniently fits into MOLLE webbing or flashlight-sized pockets for easy storage CONS: Inconvenient placement of ignition button makes one-handed use difficult Rough and uneven seams on molded plastic body indicate poor build quality To produce a soft orange flame, the torch must be lit in jet mode and adjusted while burning

TURN UP THE HEAT

Torches

UCO

Stormproof Torch & Bottle Opener WEIGHT

3.3 ounces (including fuel) DIMENSIONS

4.5 by 1.8 by 1.1 inches MSRP

$20 URL

www.ucogear.com

NOTES: Two versions of this torch are available; each is contained in a hard plastic case with a waterproof silicone cap and small carabiner. This version includes a bottle opener feature, while the other model is wrapped in 3 feet of duct tape. We’d recommend choosing the former and wrapping it in your preferred brand of tape for the best of both worlds. The torch can also be removed from its case and carried separately if you prefer (there’s even a lanyard loop for this purpose). Filling the torch with butane and pressing the activation button flips open a spring-loaded cover and produces three jets of blue flame. This action is fluid and satisfying, like clicking a ballpoint pen, and we found it to ignite reliably as long as the flame-adjustment dial was set above the halfway mark.

PROS: Powerful triple-jet flame with strong wind-resistance Push-button flips up the protective cover, starts the flow of gas, and ignites the torch in one smooth motion Clear torch body makes it easy to monitor the butane level CONS: Waterproof case adds bulk to an otherwise compact torch Flame-adjustment dial must be set to 50-percent or greater flow for the torch to ignite

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STICK

IT TO ’EM Crafting and Using a Survival Stick

By Jared Wihongi Photos by Jake Brosnan

S

ticks and stones may break your bones … period. Imagine a cataclysmic scenario — there’s been a criminal or terrorist attack during your vacation, and you’ve been forced to flee into the wilderness before making your way to a safe zone. Or an electromagnetic pulse or act of God has put emergency services out of commission while you’re away from home, and opportunist looters are on the street. Maybe it’s something simpler — you’ve encountered trouble while out on a camping trip with your family.

Whatever the case, so long as there are branches, trees, timber, or bamboo-type grasses around, there will always be an effective weapon waiting to be recognized and formed.

WA R N I N G!

The concepts shown here are for illustrative purposes only. Seek professional training from a reputable instructor before attempting any techniques discussed or shown in this story.

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Nature’s Weapons It’s not much of a stretch to assume that a stick was likely the first weapon wielded by mankind. Even apes can be found smacking each other (and other animals) with them in the wild. The number of cultures that developed intricate fighting systems or martial arts throughout history to enhance their ability to defend and attack with sticks is staggering. These systems extend much further than East Asia, where most people typically associate martial arts of this kind.

Origins As a young man growing up in New Zealand, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to train in an age-

old martial art developed by the native Maori people called Mau Rakau or “art of the wooden weapon.” The primary focus of this art is a medium-length wooden staff called Taiaha, which is typically 5 to 6 feet long. I also had the opportunity over two decades ago to spend two years living in the Philippines, where I discovered and began studying a Filipino martial art commonly called Kali.

Those familiar with the Filipino martial arts are aware that their training methodology starts with sticks and blades, as opposed to the initial empty-hand focus of most other martial arts. The arts that hail from areas of the Philippines where the Spanish once exercised greater control seem to put more focus on sticks, as their Spaniard

One-Handed Combination

1. Defending against a shorter weapon such as a knife, keep your distance and use your reach to your advantage.

2. Aim to attack the weapon-bearing limb. This allows you to maintain the maximum distance possible while disrupting the assailant’s ability to cause you harm.

3. Wind up for a follow-up strike. With a backhand strike, you can push your wrist with your support hand to add power.

4. Aim for areas that have the highest probability of neutralizing the threat, as is reasonably necessary.

5. If the threat persists, follow backhand power strikes with forehand power strikes for economy of motion.

6. Continue targeting vital areas.

STICK IT TO ’EM overlords prohibited the practice of fighting arts with blades during much of their 300-year colonization.

The likes of Bruce Lee and Ed Parker found the Filipino stick fighting arts so effective that they not only trained in them, but assimilated elements of these arts into the fighting systems they developed during their lifetimes.

Over-Under Grip 1. Hold the w eapon in the rifle grip, with support hand forward of the strong hand.

Categories When procuring a good branch or piece of wood to form into a weapon, there are two categories that you can generally put stick weapons into, each with advantages and disadvantages: one-handed and two-handed weapons. Although long staffs can be found in some of their arts, the Filipinos found that the ideal length for a fighting stick was around 24 to 31 inches in length.

Much shorter than that and the stick begins to lose the torque that can be harnessed with a good one-arm swing.

Much longer than that and the stick starts to become unwieldy as a one-handed weapon, requiring the use of two hands. For the purposes of this article we’re going to focus on the strengths of using a stick that can be manipulated with one or two hands for survival.

It’s very possible in a pinch that the old adage beggars can’t be choosers may very well apply when choosing a branch or piece of wood to become your survival stick.

2. Quick straight-line thrusts can be used to preempt an attack.

3. Use the forward end of the stick to parry an attack downward while positioning yourself to the outside line.

Pros and Cons of a One-Handed

Survival Stick

PROS Hands-free transport. It can easily be packed in a ruck or slung sword-style on your hip.

4. Quickly change the support hand to the baseball bat grip while winding up for the coup de gras.

Non-cumbersome. Less likely to be snagging on branches or walls as your move from A to B. Second hand can be free to grab, defend, attack, hold other equipment or wield a second weapon.

Easier and less clumsy to wield with little practice.

Better suited to close quarters. It’s harder to enter inside the effective range of a shorter stick.

CONS Longer weapons give you a greater standoff distance. This is a good thing in a spacious environment.

The power of a two-handed swing can be … you guessed it, about twice as strong as a onehanded swing.

5. Hit a home run to finish the fight.

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For defensive purposes, any rigid stick you can hold and swing is better than empty hands. But if you are in an area where sticks are plentiful, you may be able to choose and shape your own ideal survival stick. So what should you look for when hand-crafting one of these implements?

What to Look for The first step will be finding a stick that’s as straight as possible, with a circumference that is close to matching your hand size. When gripping the stick, you will want the tip of your thumb to reach somewhere between the tip of the index finger and the first knuckle of the same finger.

Wood can come in a variety of weights and densities. A heavier stick will be slower and more cumbersome to wield, while a lighter stick will transfer less kinetic energy on impact. Just imagine the chances of stopping a threat with a balsa wood staff.

You’ll want to find some middle ground — this will be different for everyone based on your size and strength.

It’s very possible that you’ll need to remove twigs or other protrusions from a smaller branch. If a simple knife is available to utilize, you can shape your ideal stick from a larger stronger branch or piece of wood. The last thing to decide

is the length. Again, people come in all shapes and sizes and so should your custom survival sticks.

As a good measuring reference, stretch your arm out directly to the side and place the stick in your armpit parallel to your arm. A good stick length will measure from the armpit to about the tip of your fingers or just a little beyond. At this length you can typically wield it with one hand comfortably, or can also put two hands on it for additional power if necessary. If you have a pocketknife and want to enhance the defensive capabilities of your stick, try sharpening the end of your stick into a point that can be used for thrusting.

As you train to use your stick defensively, keep it simple.

Regardless of the grip you use, downward 45-degreeangled strikes from right and left in a figure-eight motion can be used offensively and defensively. Centerline thrusts can also be used preemptively or as quick counterattacks.

These three attacks are all you really need to build a solid foundation. If you have time to train you can get more elaborate than that in steady progressions, or seek out the instruction of a good Filipino martial arts instructor.

At a fundamental level of defense, if you want to be able to stick it to ’em, it’s best to stick to the basics.

About The Author

Jared Wihongi is a 16-year veteran law enforcement officer with considerable time serving in the SWAT community, a specialist in close-quarter combatives, and one of a handful of master-level instructors of the Filipino combat art Pekiti-Tirsia

Double-Over Grip

Kali. Moreover, Wihongi has more than a decade of experience instructing armed forces around the globe. He’s the

1. Hold the stick in a kayak paddle grip, hands about shoulder-width apart.

2. Use the end to strike inward, parrying the straight-line jab.

3. Repeat on the other side to the straight-line cross.

4. Use the center of the stick between your hands to deliver a power strike to the jaw line.

tactical consultant and frontman for Browning’s Black Label line of knives.

Learn more about him at www.jared wihongi.com.

5. If the assailant is taller than you, pull down to their collarbone area to bring them down a little. Reach over the top of your stick and behind their neck with your left hand.

Grab the stick on the other side, leaving the stick under your left armpit.

6. Control their arm with your free hand, and pull backward on their neck with the stick.

Tightening the space around their neck is will sink a choke in.

7. Pivot your left leg back, go down to your left knee and pull them backward down to the ground.

8. If the choke doesn’t sink in fast enough, deliver a few strikes to disrupt any attempted counterattack.

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PREDATOR’S

PACK

How to Assemble Tools to Fish, Trap, and Hunt in a Survival Situation

S

By Kevin Estela

port fishing and hunting isn’t the same as survival fishing and hunting. “Sport” implies there is an element of chance and fair play. To a survivor, the concept of rules and regulations should seem ridiculous. After all, why would a survivor or someone in an emergency consider the confines of sport fishing and hunting if they’re starving? In a real disaster, there is no such thing as a bag limit, minimum length, or poaching.

As majestic as they are, in the absence of wildlife protection, even the bald eagle might be on the dinner table if you’re hungry enough. We’ve been field tested and we know the frustration of watching supper run, swim, or fly away. We’ve also learned that with the right tools and a few no-nonsense ways of fishing and trapping, it’s easy to make sure your dinner plate isn’t empty at the end of the day.

The differentiator between frustrated and fed is preparing like a predator and casting aside socially acceptable methods of food procurement. We’re not going to apologize for telling you how to kill prey and feed yourself with the gear and methods that follow. It’s been said Chuck Norris doesn’t hunt or fish because there’s a chance for failure in those sports — he just kills sh*t. Follow our lead and you too can be like Chuck.

DISCLAIMER:

This article is meant to be a brief overview and not a detailed guide on improvised fishing, hunting, and trapping in survival situation. Check local regulations before attempting to use any tools or techniques discussed in this story.

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10 Essentials of the Predator Pack: 1. Mosquito Head Net: For use as a dip net 2. Kevlar Thread: Combined with gaff hooks for turtles 3. Rat Traps: Two to four for small game 4. Gil Net: Helps in catching larger fish 5. Automatic Fisherman: Great triggers for fishing or for small game 6. Rabbit Snares: Commercial grade (eight weigh approximately 1 pound) 7. Sling Shot with Spare Bands: For use as-is, or to rig up a Hawaiian sling 8. Treble Hooks: For predators or weight with split shot for snagging 9. Flashlight: Use with firearm for jacking or for frogging 10. Frog Gigs: for spearing frogs, fish, lizards, etc.

Luxury Items if Space Allows: 1. Extra fire-starter

Caption?

2. Salt, pepper, oil, balsamic vinegar, and various spices to offset food boredom 3. Edible plant reference cards — no, one can’t live on meat alone 4. Game processing blades, such as a small fillet and skinning blade 5. 110 Conibear: This trap is king, but each is heavy and bulky 6. .22 Pistol: Minimum 4-inch barrel.

Fishing Sport fishing rules and regulation books may define fishing as a single baited hook attached to a pole held by an angler.

This is meant to protect a species from overfishing. A lone survivor should not be limited. Some basic equipment provides an advantage over a single hook, line, and sinker setup.

Gill Net: Anyone who has seen the History Channel show Alone knows the concept of a gill net. Designed to capture fish by the gills, these nets work wonders if they’re constructed to match the fish in your area. A gill net can be used in a stationary location, or it can be anchored on one side and walked through the water in an arc by holding the other side. A gill net can be set discretely underwater as well, if traveling unnoticed is a concern. It can also be fashioned into a scoop net or a net supported by a frame, and raised in and out of the water by a central point.

Frog Spear: Made from steel and used for nighttime frog hunting, a good 3- to 5-prong frog spear will outperform any

A gill net can be set above water or below water. When used with two poles, it can be moved through the water by two survivors. It’s a versatile survival tool worth its weight in fish fillets. Just make sure to use the right size net for the fish you intend to catch.

wooden spear crafted in the bush. Frog spears can be used on reptiles, amphibians, and small fish. They work exceptionally well when paired with a flashlight to temporarily blind your prey. Inexpensive Eagle Claw brand gigs are widely available and custom spears made from higher-quality steel ensure you have the right point for your spear.

Hawaiian Sling: A Hawaiian sling is a long thin-shafted spear with an elastic band attached to one end and a pointed barbed end on the other. The elastic band is looped around the hand, stretched, and the spear is held holding the energy back until the hand is relaxed and the spear is launched forward. These are highly effective as they don’t require easily telegraphed body motions to thrust. The Mako 3-in-1 Take Down Pole Spear is an excellent choice if space allows. Otherwise, the survivor can pack surgical tubing, spear head, and lashing twine to make his own.

Hacking: This method of fishing involves using the back of a machete in a chopping motion against a fish spine in order to break it, making easy retrieval of your fish. The back of the blade is used to avoid accidentally cutting your leg. While blood works great as chum, using your own blood isn’t advised. Attract fish with a lantern, LED headlamp, or a torch made from folded birch bark.

Long Line: Imagine a length of paracord with pieces of fishing line hanging off of it at different intervals and depths. These lines are just short enough to avoid tangling with one another, and since they’re attached to a single long line, multiple fish can be caught with a single retrieve.

The long line works well — so well that it’s on the radar of

PREDATOR’S PACK A well-stocked small fishing kit will take up very little space. A combination of dry fly poppers for bass, nymphs for trout, and jigs for panfish are all contained within the author’s fishing kit.

the humane society. That’s good for you if you need to indiscriminately catch to put on your plate.

Automatic Fisherman Reels: Operated by a spring, these lightweight fishing reels automatically retrieve your fish after they swim away and trigger the mechanism.

These reels do your work while you tend to other survival needs. They can work above water or underwater in icedover conditions. The constant spring tension “plays” the fish and your prey will be tired when it’s time to retrieve the unit from the water.

Collapsible Fishing Rod: Sometimes, you still need a good fishing rod to reach out to the fish biting just outside your reach. Three-piece (or more) fishing rods break down to less than 24 inches and are easily packable on the outside of a small ruck. From the inexpensive and durable Ugly Stick brand to higher-priced St. Croix Rods, there’s an option for everyone. If space allows, it can’t hurt to pack a small, ultra-light fishing rod and reel with some basic tackle.

This combination this author used while in Alaska to feed himself for two weeks in the bush.

5 Ways of Stacking the Odds in Your Favor Hunt at morning/night: Animals are most active during the early morning and late hours of the day. They tend to hunker down during the brightest hours of the day. To be more effective, avoid hunting and fishing when the sun is high. Spend your time building your kit and planning your predation during these hours.

Camouflage: Animals aren’t foolish. Unless one is injured or ill, you probably won’t be able to walk right up to it. Camouflage yourself to the environment. Use natural concealment to hide your presence. Minimize your footprint and blend in.

Bait/chum: Baiting or chumming animals is often illegal in many jurisdictions, but fair game for survival.. Don’t discard, burn, or bury the entrails of an animal. Use the unwanted bits for scavenger bait. Raccoons and catfish are fond of scraps and both are edible.

Overset (quantity of traps): There’s no such thing as too many traps. If you’re capable of setting 10, set 10. If you can set 15, set 15. Set as many as

Trapping

possible and learn to set them correctly. Assume some of your traps will

A survivor should consider trapping before he considers hunting. It’s easier to fashion traps than it is to make projectiles. A properly constructed trap can be just as effective as (or even more effective than) a hunter seeking out prey while burning calories and launching a projectile with questionable accuracy at a target, which may be situated in an awkward position.

be triggered, but won’t harvest game. Even a 20-percent chance of success out of 10 traps is better than 100-percent success on one.

Ambush (driving game): Many survival scenarios involve a single person. With a team of two or more stuck in an emergency, a team can be coordinated to drive animals into nets or toward an ambushing member with a club or spear. Utilize natural choke points and create a strategy.

Work like a pack of wolves and be lethally efficient.

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Rat Traps: Inexpensive, lightweight, and crazy effective against small rodents — do you need more reason to pack these? Oh that’s right, if you have special skills, they work well to close circuits and make other traps for bigger threats. They can be baited with camp scraps or wild edibles gathered on the move.

Braided Picture Wire: The same wire you used to hang that painting of dogs playing cards is the kind you can use for creating snares. Braided wire is much tougher to break than solid copper or stainless wire of equal strength. The braid also grabs onto animal hair as your prey fights for its life. Depending where you are, the braided wire can also serve as fishing leader for fish with sharp teeth that would otherwise cut through your line.

Commercial Rabbit Snares: If space allows, carry real snares. They are often equipped with locking cams that prevent the snare from loosening after the animal realizes it’s caught. These snares also have hardware designed to swivel to prevent the wire from kinking and breaking.

If space allows, you can’t beat a half dozen or more real snares. Just learn where and how to place them.

Flashlight: A high-intensity flashlight can help you confuse animals like … well, a deer in headlights. There’s a reason why hunting some game with a flashlight is often illegal — it’s simply effective. A good flashlight can help the survivor catch animals by hiding behind the wall of light. Paired with a spear, club, firearm, or other hunting tool, a flashlight is a game-changer.

Build a Better Mousetrap: Litter is found in the most remote places around the globe and some of the best traps are repurposed garbage. An easy but highly effective

mousetrap requires a bucket, a piece of wire, and a bottle.

The wire is inserted through the bottle and poked through the bottom. The wire is extended over the top of the bucket and you’re left with a roller like those found on American Ninja Warrior. The bottle is baited with seeds, nuts, or scraps of leftover food. When the mouse stands on the bottle, it rolls off into the bucket. If you fill the bucket with water, the mouse drowns. These traps have been used in farmhouses and barns for years and for good reason.

Hunting

With a few scavenged materials, a survivor can create a highly effective rodent trap. Rodents are numerous, nutritious, and easily caught with a rollerbottle bucket trap.

We’ve all known that one guy in our camp who takes the nearest piece of wood and sharpens it to a point for

When Manuals Get it Wrong, Get it Right Too many survival manuals are butchered and doctored from their

doorsmen. Many survival manuals today feature traps we’ve never seen

original source. Once information leaves the author’s control, editors

a single person construct and set on their own (though it may be pos-

and art layout folks have the potential to tweak a factually correct

sible with a steady-handed team of two or more). Intimate knowledge

point into something foreign that’s more pleasing to the eye than it is

of a handful of triggers is better than limited knowledge of many. Don’t

effective in the field. Here are a couple common mistakes leading to

try constructing anything that looks like the boulder Wile E. Coyote bal-

misconceptions we’ve found in the survival manuals in many book-

anced upon a sharp point in the cartoon world to kill the Road Runner.

stores today.

Spearing a fish: Have you ever tried hooking a minnow through the

“M”-shaped fish trap: We’ve all seen that sketch in manuals. A set of sticks is driven into the ground to create a trap that resembles the

body with a steel hook? It isn’t easy, and this is when you have one

letter “M.” Sometimes the back of the trap is also cordoned off with a

hand on the fish and one on the hook. How many survival manuals

“C” shape to create a pen. This trap works as long as the conditions are

show a single pencil-point-style wooden spear going through a fish float-

right. It doesn’t work in rocky creeks, or when the fish sought are able to

ing in the water? The best type of fish spear is a forked spear that pins

wiggle through the gates (weave some horizontal branches between the

the fish to the underwater bottom.

vertical), and it sucks when fish won’t swim into it. In rocky conditions,

Complicated trap triggers: Some of the best trap triggers can be learned from classic poorly drawn survival manuals from true out-

build a trap out of rocks and to get the fish to swim into the trap, beat the water with evergreen boughs as you walk from upstream down.

PREDATOR’S PACK “bear protection.” An equally comical explanation may be given about how he’ll use that spear to get dinner. Aside from scratching his ass, that “spear” won’t work nearly as well as some of the hunting implements that’ll put meat in the pot with a little practice. As previously mentioned, hunting does require energy and it burns calories, but this doesn’t mean you should leave the hunting tools at home. Sometimes, shots present themselves, and you’ll kick yourself if you could have taken it with any of the following.

Slingshot: Unless you grew up in a sheltered household with overbearing parents, you probably had a slingshot as a kid. At some point, you probably noticed how well it worked on soda cans, or managed to scare off the neighborhood cat or the birds that cat was chasing.

Since your childhood, slingshots have come a long way and are now equipped with more powerful bands cut from Theraband Gold. As long as you practice, you can become extremely proficient with one, and it’s possible to kill squirrels, rabbits, snakes, ducks, and other small game.

Keep a spare set of bands in an airtight bag and use marbles, steel or lead shot, or small pebbles as ammo.

Bow and Arrow: While the slingshot works well and operates quietly enough for discreet hunting and undisturbed follow-up shots, the bow and arrow is the right tool for larger game and greater impact. The survivor can select field points, broadheads, or bludgeon points, depending on what animal is hunted. A good takedown bow that needs little maintenance along with a few arrows is easily packed opposite of the takedown fishing rod to balance out your pack. .22 Pistol: If you’re legally able to pack a quality .22 pistol, do it. In our experience, the .22 pistol is the king of compact survival firearms. Not quite rifle accurate, but accurate enough, the .22 is capable (with the right shot placement, of course) of putting food in your belly.

A 4-inch barrel cuts velocity down, but not to a point it becomes impotent. Of course, if you can carry a longer barrel, do it. The increased sight radius will help you if you aren’t running a micro red-dot.

can sink their claws into. Wolves gang up and seek out the weaker animals, and sharks will hunt out the source of blood in the water even if it comes from one of their own. When a survivor takes on a predator mindset, he or she must be willing to accept the psychological conflict of killing immature or undersized game, destroying a nest for eggs, or maiming a cute and fuzzy animal and hearing it sound off in pain.

One must be willing to break sport hunting and fishing rules and regs if they want real results. From our experience, hunger is a great remedy for the guilt associated with cheating, and hunger can motivate the average person to unlock their primal self. Primal man existed long before sporting fair play. Next time you venture out, be prepared with your predator pack when you need to fill your belly at any cost.

Slingshots are not just kids’ toys. When powered with modern bands, they’re capable of dropping small game quietly with lead rounds, steel shot, or small pebbles.

Broadheads, field points, and bludgeon points can all be used from the same bow and arrow.

If you have the room, a takedown bow and arrow makes a great addition to the predator pack.

Conclusion There’s no such thing as fair in the animal kingdom.

Lions don’t discriminate and will eat any easy meal they

Kevin Estela is the owner/head instructor of Estela Wilderness Education, a bushcraft and survival school in New England. He’s a Sayoc Kali Associate Instructor, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, and an avid marksman. When not teaching outdoor skills, he’s a full-

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About The Author

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ROPE

RESCUE

101

Whether it’s for Supplies or People, Rope’s Uses Are Infinitely Practical in an Emergency Situation Story by Andrew Schrader Photos by Andrew Schrader & Brenton Birr

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uring a mass-shooting scenario, it may not be tactically feasible to try and evacuate the wounded (or yourself) by dragging them down a set of stairs and out the main entrance. If you’re safely barricaded inside a room, wouldn’t it make more sense to evacuate a victim through a window before they bleed to death? Or, for example, you’re doing a canyon hike with your family and someone falls 20 feet down a sheer cliff. How would you get down to attend to them?

Basic knowledge of rope rescue including raising, rappelling, and lowering allows us to defy gravity in whichever direction we choose. In this article we’ll give you the basics of what you need to know and what gear can aid your mobility. If you choose to build and maintain this perishable skill, you’ll unlock a rescue “cheat code” and be able to save lives in ways you’d never previously imagined.

SAFETY DISCLAIMER:

This article is meant to be a brief overview and not a detailed guide on rope rescue. Check with a certified rappelling instructor or search-and-rescue professional before attempting to use any tools or techniques discussed in this story.

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Knots

and Rigging Because many of the techniques described here are more easily seen in a video than by reading, check out www.elementrescue.com and www.animatedknots.com to learn more.

Based on what we’re showing you in this article, these are the four knots you should care about: Bowline with Yosemite Finish: This quick knot is used to secure your rope around a suitable anchor.

Figure 8 Stopper: This is used as an end knot to prevent the rope from passing through the end of your rappelling device, in which case you’d fall the rest of the way down.

Why Ropes?

Rope skills are always useful. Perhaps you routinely work and play in places where you can’t dial 911, or maybe you’re interested in learning to be an active bystander or “first care provider” who is willing to make a difference before the professionals arrive. Alternately, think about an escape-and-evasion scenario. Need to get out of a building quickly, and have a sinking feeling that the stairs and main entrance are being watched? Ropes can get you there.

To provide a proper introduction to rope rescue we sat down with firefighter Dominick Briganti. Dominick is a 27-year veteran of the fire service. He was deployed to the World Trade Center during Sept. 11 and now works as a lead instructor for SWAT teams, firefighters, and special operations warfighters on the subject of technical rescue.

Rope rescue, specifically, is a vast subject and there’s a ton of conceptual theory and background behind it.

Experienced climbers could have a field day nitpicking all the things we “should have” noted or warned you about in this article. But thanks to Dominick’s instruction we’re able to give you all the ground-level knowledge you need to start down the path — without making you reach for a glass of whiskey and two Ibuprofen.

Munter Hitch: Can be used as a

The Basics

friction or descending device for

Rope rescue techniques consist primarily of three different actions: Rappelling down to a lower level by yourself Lowering (or being lowered) with someone else’s help Raising (or being raised) with someone else’s help Rappelling is the most simple of these three to rig. It’s also the only one of those actions you can accomplish by yourself, although it’ll require both hands to do so.

This means that you won’t be able to carry tools down in your hands or brandish a weapon. It also won’t be as easy to circumvent tight spaces, snags, or obstructions as it is with some other rope access methods. On the plus side, you’ll be able to personally control your rate of descent as well as set up and get down quickly. That’s the big advantage — it’s simple and very fast. Rappelling allows you to access an incapacitated victim very quickly, and can also be used for escape/evasion should you be having a seriously bad day.

Being lowered allows you to descend with both hands free. Now you can use a weapon while descending (think sweeping a gun into each window on your way down, instead of just peering inside and waiting for what may be an unpleasant surprise). Mobility and flexibility of your descent path is improved as well. Lowering doesn’t require any additional gear, but it does require a second

controlling the rate of descent.

Double Bight Bowline: Not strictly necessary for rappelling, but will be critical if you intend to learn anything else about rope rescue.

ROPE RESCUE 101 Wilderness rope rescue performed by prepared survivalists, using a tree as an anchor for their rope rescue system.

person at the top of the drop who’ll control your descent.

Raising (hauling) someone is like the final exam for Rope Rescue 101. It requires more complicated rigging and more gear. Since an average person can only haul roughly 50 to 80 pounds vertically (much less than what a person weighs), you’ll have to use the principles of mechanical advantage and multiple pulleys.

In this article we’ll focus on rappelling. This will give the uninitiated a bite-size introduction to the subject, and hopefully whet an appetite to level up to the next two tiers of capability.

Ingredients for Rappelling These are some of the basic components for rope rescue rappelling: Anchor: This will hold you and your rope system in place. It should be stable and fixed in position. In the woods, we might use a tree trunk — in a canyon, a large rock. In an urban environment such as a hotel room or high-rise we could use large heavy furniture or substantial railings.

Alternatively, if we wanted to go full Jason Bourne we could even attach a carabiner to the end of our rope, feed it through the hinged side of the open door into the hallway and then close the door. Once the rope is loaded, the carabiner will prevent the rope from being pulled through.

100% Aramid Rope (75 to 100 feet): Ropes made from 100-percent aramids like Technora or Kevlar are relatively new. These materials offer superb abrasion resistance and brush off the effects of high heat and fire. They also don’t lose strength in wet conditions and can shed water quickly, unlike nylon rope. Last, they’re stupid-strong — a 9mm-thick piece of rope can take roughly 7,000 pounds.

Auto-Locking Carabiners (2 to 3 total): A carabiner is a specialized shackle used to temporarily connect your ropes to your harness. Because they’re very easy to manipulate with gloved hands, we prefer magnetic-locking carabiners like the Rocklock Magnetron from Black Diamond Equipment.

Rappel Device: During the early days of climbing, rope was simply wrapped around your body to increase friction and slow your decent. Although convenient, using your flesh as a brake pad is obviously uncomfortable. As an alternative, rappelling devices (aka descenders or descending devices) were developed, providing a hand-holdable forged metal loop through which the rope is passed. As the rope rubs on the metal the friction is increased, allowing a controllable rate of descent. There are tons of options too numerous to mention, but usually we prefer a metal-descending device such as a Rock Exotica Totem — or we make our own by using a simple Munter hitch knot (see photo in sidebar).

Climbing Harness: For minimalist experts, it’s possible to make a climbing harness from webbing material. But for this

Rookie Mistakes to Avoid Not bothering to tie a stopper knot at the end of your line. To prevent this, make sure the knot is on the end of your rope before you even stuff it in the bag for storage. This way there’s never a question.

Rappelling “Hollywood Style” by bounding and bouncing. The faster you go, the greater the chance of getting your hands or clothing sucked into the descending device. This will stop you cold, and unless you built in a lowering contingency to your anchorage you’ll be stuck there. To avoid being the rescuer who had to be rescued, keep your descent speed to a minimum.

Keeping hands too close to the rappel device. Maintain a minimum 12inch distance between your hands and the descender to prevent a finger from getting sucked in. Also, avoid loose clothing and long hair. We’ve seen long hair get sucked into a descender before, and it literally pulls the skin out with the hair. Not pretty. Don’t do that.

Not having enough rope. Check to make sure your rope can reach the ground, and then some. Not just sometimes but every time. Otherwise you’ll find yourself jumping down from a height that may or may not be survivable.

Best Gear for Rope Rescue Could a skilled rescuer do this work with just a rope? Of course. But having some modern equipment can make you much faster, safer, and more effective in the process.

Exfil SAR Tactical Helmet by Team Wendy Anytime there’s a falling hazard (as there always is in rappelling and rope rescue) protect yourself from traumatic brain injuries or death by wearing a helmet. The Exfil SAR Tactical Helmet from Team Wendy provides lightweight, long-term comfort by using an updated four-point retention system that instantly adjusts to the shape of your entire head instead of just cinching down front-to-back like a cheap hardhat. We liked the heavy-duty front shroud that’s purpose-built to accommodate night-vision goggles or your GoPro, as well as the Magpul picatinny side rails to mount lights and other accessories.

We also appreciated the array of useful add-ons that allowed us to customize the helmet for our needs. These included a positivelocking clear visor as well as quick-release Peltor headset adapters, which provide hands-free communications with no need for an uncomfortable headband. www.teamwendy.com Transition Gloves by Black Diamond Equipment Use all-leather gloves for rappelling. If you cheap out and try to use a random pair of gloves, the heat from the rope generated during rappelling can cause the glove material to melt on your hand. Instead, we’d recommend the Transition Gloves by Black Diamond Equipment. These full-fingered goat leather gloves feature Kevlar stitching and reinforced patches on the knuckles and palm.

The fit at first felt much too small, and took several hours of wearing before we had anything approaching dexterity. However, once the gloves had broken in we had a form-fitting second skin that allowed us to thread ropes into our gear while enjoying protection from the rescue environment, be it rocky crags or broken glass and metal. www.blackdiamondequipment.com Phantom AVS Kit from Rescue Craft by Tactical Medical Solutions The amount of different gear options can be staggering for laypersons just starting out. For this reason, a ready-made kit may make a lot of sense. The Phantom Adaptive Vertical System (AVS) kit from Rescue Craft by Tactical Medical Solutions includes everything you’ll need from the start for rappelling, hauling, and lowering.

The kit weighs less than 7 pounds and is small enough to attach to your bug-out bag, so that you’ll never be without an egress or rescue option. Start off like we did by using the kit’s most basic components.

As you gain additional skills you’ll be able to use more and more of the kit — its usefulness will grow along with your capabilities.

Note: When storing your gear, you usually want to keep your rope in a separate rope bag and all your other gear in its own bag or pack.

Storing the rope in a bag will help prevent it from getting kinks during storage and transport. www.tacmedsolutions.com

introduction we’re going to err on the side of safety and comfort, and suggest purchasing a commercially available version, such as the value-priced Patriot Harness from Metolius.

10 Steps to Your First Descent Once you’ve assembled the ingredients, you’re ready for your first rappel. The steps shown below illustrate a simplified method, which doesn’t include a contingency to lower you down if you get stuck. For this reason it’s appropriate only in dire emergencies, or in training when you have a partner watching, and at heights which you feel comfortable jumping down from.

Tie a Figure 8 Stopper Knot to the end of your rope.

This ensures you don’t rappel off the end of the rope and into the history books under the chapter titled “Dumb Ways to Die.” Check your drop distance by lowering the rope to the ground. If your rope can’t touch the ground from your position, relocate. You should have enough rope to touch the ground below you plus at least 5 feet extra.

Tie the rope around your anchor. The most simple and effective way to do this is by using a bowline knot with a Yosemite finish (see photo in sidebar), which strengthens the knot and prevents the knot from coming loose.

Keep the anchor point as low as possible. Don’t tie it at eye-level just because it’s convenient. This will help minimize shock-loading or jarring of the anchor.

Attach your anchored rope to your descending device using a vertaco-mode configuration. This means that the rope comes back to the carabiner, and if you’re right-handed it will go from the left side of the carabiner, through the right side, then back up (see sidebar photos for reference).

Then attach the descending device to a carabiner on your climbing harness.

Double-check your system. Most rappelling deaths aren’t due to failures of the equipment. Instead, they’re caused by preventable mistakes that could have been detected if the climber had bothered to double-check their anchor, knots, and climbing harness.

Stay low, go slow. Instead of standing up and walking backward over the edge, keep your center of gravity close to the ground and roll over. This will help prevent your anchor from dislodging and also maintains a lower profile in a tactical situation.

Once you’re over the edge, face the wall and plant your feet shoulder-width apart. Maintain a sitting position in the harness and proceed step by step down the wall while slowfeeding line through the descending device. The bounding, large downward jumps you see the SWAT teams doing in the movies are pure fantasy (and poor practice). The correct pace and posture is kind of like walking down, but you maintain an “L” position instead of straightening up.

Use friction to control your speed and keep both hands out in front of your face. Because we’re using the vertaco configuration, we can keep our hands out in front instead of having one hand down by our hips as is traditionally seen.

This allows us to assume a lower-profile position on the wall and more easily lock off the rope to stop our descent.

Once you’re on the ground, unhook your carabiner from the rappel device. Then, go to work.

We hope this article gives you the head start you need to add rope work to your bug-out and rescue skillset. As you learn more, you’ll find that you can enhance your capabilities by using different knots and gear configurations, instead of simply buying more components. You’ll be able to do more with less gear. Unlike many of our other interests, this makes rope rescue a unique pursuit that rewards the craftiest and most knowledgeable — not just the guys who can drop top dollar on the most expensive offerings.

About The Author Andrew Schrader is a licensed professional engineer and is certified by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Structural Specialist.

His company, Recon Response Engineering LLC, advises state and federal government organizations on the subject of urban search and rescue and structural collapse.

He recently assisted the U.S. Department of State’s Italian Consulate in the development of their postearthquake response and rescue protocol. www.recon response.com

Hauling someone using rope should not be attempted by novices as it usually requires complicated gear and mechanics.

Photo by Brenton Birr.

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HAVE SPORK, WILL TRAVEL Portable Utensils Bring a Touch of Civility to Any Situation

By Steven Kuo

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ure, you can eat with your hands. But who wants to do that all the time? Whether camping, surviving, or just taking a snack break on the trail, having handy, easily carried portable utensils can enhance your dining experience.

A quick story: During a multi-day rifle marksmanship course, the Tier 1 instructor, he took one morning to explain how to maintain the AR-platform rifle. During his demonstration, he field stripped the bolt carrier group on a sample rifle that had seen several thousand rounds since its last cleaning. For all to see, he held up the tail of the bolt, which had collected caked-on carbon and other fouling. He pulled a knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and showed the class how you could use it to scrape the bolt tail. He stashed the knife back in his pants pocket. Later, we broke for lunch. The seasoned, snake-eating instructor ambled over to a table and produced a loaf of bread, mayonnaise, and lunch meat from a grocery bag. He dipped into the mayonnaise and started spreading it on a slice of bread — with the very same pocketknife.

If this sounds like something you might do, then perhaps you can happily use some rusty nails as skewers and your dirty knife to cut your meat. But even those whose five-second rule is more like five minutes must admit that it’s often easier to eat with utensils than your hands, especially when food is scalding hot. While they aren’t strictly necessary, we suspect many of our readers would appreciate the luxury of purpose-built utensils. Plus, during tense and difficult situations, being able to feel a little more civilized with some comforts of home can provide much needed psychological benefit and boost morale.

So we collected a wide selection of portable utensils with varying design philosophies for your reading enjoyment. We tested them with different types of foods and took them on the road.

Evaluation Criteria In particular, we assessed the following: Scooping: How well does it function as a spoon?

Spearing: How well does it function as a fork?

Cutting: How well does it function as a knife?

Packaging: How compact and portable is it?

Durability and maintenance: How durable is it and how easy it is to clean?

The usability of a utensil as a spoon, fork, or knife involves not just the pointy (or spoony) end, but also how you grasp it.

Products designed first and foremost for compact size typically hinder their effectiveness by compromising in two areas: a small handle and a “spork” design, combining a spoon and fork in one.

Sporks are invariably better spoons than they are forks. In fact, they’re usually pretty poor forks. Additionally, ultra-compact tools often lack a knife, which probably isn’t the end of the world since we suspect nearly all of our readers have a pocketknife (if not an entire collection of them). Select one of these types of tools if you value portability over all else.

Some products use a folding design, like a pocket or Swiss Army knife. This results in a convenient, compact package, but has some disadvantages as well. Some designs also make the forks or spoons awfully small. While the handles are typically generously sized, the necks of the spoons and forks extending from the pivot are usually rather short, making them less useful for dipping deeply into your food or soup. And all suffer from being harder to clean — you need to be diligent to avoid rust. These types of tools make a tidy, compact package, but they aren’t our favorites to use and maintain.

As you’ll see, our favorite utensils for the actual dining experience feature separate spoons, forks, and knives, and stack together for storage. Simple and efficient.

In a web-exclusive supplement linked at the end of this article, we also looked at a couple of portable chopsticks. These are the ultimate minimalist utensils, as they offer the exact same functionality as regular chopsticks. Chopsticks are simply… sticks.

Like a portable pool cue, two-piece chopsticks simply thread together for use, becoming identical to a one-piece chopstick.

Not to mention that they’re very compact and lightweight. As long as you're mostly eating solid foods, chopsticks can be a viable alternative to a utensil set.

So read on and see what’ll make your next meal a more civilized experience.

HAVE SPORK, WILL TRAVEL

BUYER’S GUIDE Böker

Magnum Bon Appetite COLORS

Brown DIMENSIONS

7.4 / 4.1 (open / closed) by 1.2 by 1 inches WEIGHT

6.4 ounces MATERIAL

440 steel, laminated plywood MSRP

$27 URL

www.bokerusa.com

NOTES The Böker is a compact cutlery set, evoking the nostalgia of an old-school pocketknife. The three layers pull apart to reveal a knife, spoon, and fork (with a bottle opener). Like the slip joint knife blade, the layers aren’t secured with a positive locking mechanism. Speaking of the knife, it was quite tight, and you might just break a nail trying to deploy its 3.25-inch blade — or perhaps you can use another tool to help you open this tool. The spoon and fork are quite small, like baby utensils, though they provide a fair amount of reach and a reasonably long handle.

Böker penalizes lefties, as the spoon feels awkward when used with the left hand due to its offset neck.

As with all folding-type utensils, it’s a bit tricky to keep clean — once after washing it, we must not have thoroughly dried it and some rust formed at the pivot

of the knife. The Magnum Bon Appetite is conveniently compact, but we found it less effective for dining than some other products.

CRKT

Eat’n Tool Titanium COLORS

Bead Blast DIMENSIONS

4 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches WEIGHT

0.7 ounces MATERIAL

TA1 titanium MSRP

$20

NOTES Designed by Liong Mah, the Eat’n Tool crams several functions into a light and small package. In addition to the spork, the handle ends can be used as screwdrivers, while three hex cutouts function as metric wrenches (6, 8, and 10mm). There’s also a bottle opener. As you might expect, the spork works better as a spoon than a fork, with its very short tines. The circular cut-out and contour of the handle makes it pretty comfortable to wield, though it’s still

short, putting your hand pretty close to your food and making it hard to reach into deep cans or containers.

The titanium version is half the weight of its regular steel brethren. It’s strong, easy to clean, and comes with a small carabiner, making for a nifty piece of emergency kit to clip onto your gear.

URL

www.crkt.com

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CRKT

Iota COLORS

Black, Silver DIMENSIONS

3.2 by 1 by 0.5 inches WEIGHT

0.5 ounces MATERIAL

2Cr13 steel

NOTES The Iota, designed by Tom Stokes, is quite diminutive — just one piece of contoured steel. At one end is a rectangular spork, with a deeper bowl than you might expect. It’s pretty frustrating to eat with it due to its small size, though the fork tines are long enough to be of some help. A notch on the side functions as both a can and bottle opener, though you’ll be cursing if

you need to open more than one can — and good luck reaching into the can with the tiny Iota. A small cut out acts as a 1/4-inch wrench. A beveled edge isn’t sharp, but can be used as pry tip and to open boxes. So,certainly not our favorite eating implement, but it comes with a small carabiner and can be used as a key chain or clipped on to your gear for emergency use.

MSRP

$6 URL

www.crkt.com

GSI Outdoors

Stacking Cutlery Set COLORS

Blue, Green, Orange, Red DIMENSIONS

6.1 by 1.5 by 0.8 (stacked) inches WEIGHT

0.7 ounces MATERIAL

Copolyester MSRP

$5 URL

www.gsioutdoors.comt

NOTES At first, this cutlery set just looks like an up-market variation of disposable plastic utensils. But after using them for a while, they really grow on you.

They’re made of durable BPA-free resin and molded to snap together into a handy, compact bundle. They’re on the small side, but it’s nice to have three separate utensils — and each of them did their separate job quite well. The knife blade is small, as it’s shaped to stack nicely inside the bowl of the spoon, but it cuts pretty well. The fork is also curved to nestle in the spoon, but the tines are effective. The spoon is a good size and is the best of the three. They’re easy

to keep clean and will flex a bit without breaking, but titanium they’re not. There’s a hole at the end of the handles so you can clip and hang them. We packed the set in a carry-on bag and sailed through airport security. One note: We flew with and used these on several trips and over time the pieces no longer snapped together as securely as they originally did.

HAVE SPORK, WILL TRAVEL

GSI Outdoorst

Telescoping Foon COLORS

Blue, Green, Orange, Red DIMENSIONS

6 / 3.9 (closed / open) by 1.5 by 0.7 inches WEIGHT

0.3 ounces MATERIAL

Copolyester and acetal

NOTES This utensil has a head that slides back and forth on the handle. It might seem a little rickety when collapsed, but it locks in nicely when fully extended.

GSI Outdoors calls it a “foon” rather than a “spork,” perhaps because the tines are thin, reinforced, and longer than typically found on other spork designs. Additionally, there are hooks on either end;

in our testing, this feature actually did improve its effectiveness as a fork. Plus, the spoon is reasonably large and deep. It’s our favorite spork-like design. But it’s not metal; don’t be too rough on it.

MSRP

$4 URL

www.gsioutdoors.com

KA-BAR

Hobo 3-in-1 Utensil Kit COLORS

Silver DIMENSIONS

7 / 3.9 (open / closed) by 1.2 by 1 inches WEIGHT

5.3 ounces MATERIAL

3Cr13 and 420j2 stainless steel MSRP

$25

NOTES Like the Böker, the KA-BAR Hobo features a folding pocketknife design. It also has three layers that come apart, with a knife, spoon, and fork. The 2.9-inch blade locks in place and functions just as a folding knife, albeit lacking panels on the handle. The spoon is rather small, but works fine; the bend in the neck initially feels a bit odd, but it’s not a big detraction.

The fork, however, is toddler-small with just three tines. The folding design provides good reach, but

isn’t easy to wash. It’s even more compact than the Böker with a better spoon design. Comes with a black nylon carrying case with a Velcro flap and belt loops on back.

URL

www.kabar.com

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KA-BAR

Tactical Spork COLORS

Black DIMENSIONS

6.9 by 1.2 by 0.7 inches WEIGHT

1.2 ounces MATERIAL

Grilamid

NOTES KA-BAR’s Tactical Spork is made of Grilamid and separates in half by pulling it apart. True to its tactical moniker, it’s quite sturdy, and you’d have a hard time breaking it, unless you’re really trying or are a Marine.

The two parts don’t have a locking mechanism but hold tightly enough; they do rattle a bit. Our favorite part of this tool is the 2.6-inch serrated knife hidden in the

handle. The spork part, less so. The tines are OK as far as sporks go, but the spoon is rather small and the bowl quite deep, making eating from it somewhat awkward.

Still, it’s fun, and you could use it as an improvised weapon if need be.

MSRP

$8 URL

www.kabar.com

Kershaw

Ration COLORS

Black, Crocodile, Ranger Green, Wolf DIMENSIONS

4.6 by 1.4 by 0.6 inches WEIGHT

1.2 ounces MATERIAL

3Cr13MoV steel MSRP

$7 URL

kershaw.kaiusaltd.com

NOTES Rather than offering the ubiquitous spork design in the compact steel Ration, Kershaw went with a separate spoon and fork on either end. The spoon is generously sized and works well, though there isn’t much of a handle as you grab the fork end. The fork has real tines and is moderately effective, though they’re somewhat short and taper with less spacing in the slots than we’d like. It’s great to separate the spoon and the fork on either end, but you may have already realized the downside of this arrangement — if you need to use both during your meal, you’ll get

food on your hands, since you need to grab one end to use the other. Its small size also makes it hard to reach into deep or narrow cans or containers. It has a built-in bottle opener and carabiner clip, making for a handy tool to clip on your gear for occasional or emergency use.

HAVE SPORK, WILL TRAVEL

Light My Fire of Sweden

Spork Titanium COLORS

Polished DIMENSIONS

6.8 by 1.5 by 0.8 inches WEIGHT

0.7 ounces MATERIAL

Titanium MSRP

$17

NOTES Light My Fire calls this a spork, but the spoon and fork are on opposite ends of the utensil. If you don’t mind the extra space it takes up (compounded by the fact it isn’t flat), it’s way more comfortably sized than the other products in this guide. And you won’t notice the weight, since it’s made of titanium. The spoon is large, and the fork has four tines, with one serrated edge for use as a small knife. We wish the tines were longer, but the fork worked well enough. The knife edge is

serviceable, but you’ll need something else to hang on to your food while sawing at it. The middle of the handle is blasted for additional grip. Perhaps blinded by the siren song of titanium, we initially thought this might be a favorite, until we realized that, like the Kershaw, using both the spoon and fork during a meal would result in messy and slippery hands.

URL

www.lightmyfire.com

Red Rock Outdoor Gear

3 Piece Chow Set COLORS

Silver DIMENSIONS

6.8 by 1.8 by 0.6 (stacked) inches WEIGHT

2.4 ounces MATERIAL

Stainless steel MSRP

$4 URL

redrockoutdoorgear.com

NOTES This three-piece set from Red Rock Outdoor might remind you of the silverware in your college dorm’s cafeteria, but, hey, you managed to stuff your face just fine for those four to seven years. They aren’t sexy, and they look kinda cheap — but they're only four bucks … and they work great! The spoon is about as large as a regular soup spoon. The knife is serrated and gets the job done, though the blade is short in order to nest neatly in the spoon. The fork is also somewhat small overall, but the tines are long and work well. Studs on the spoon’s handle slip into keyholes on the other two utensils to stack nicely into a single bundle. And it’s easy to keep clean. It

would have been handy if they added a hole at the end of the handles through which to thread a chain or clip, like the GSI Outdoors set. Still, function and value win out here, earning our Top Pick. In fact, if our final selection for Best Value weren’t literally free of charge, this set would have also won that honor.

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Red Rock Outdoor Gear

4-in-1 Chow Set COLORS

Silver DIMENSIONS

7.5 / 4.5 (open / closed) by 1.5 by 1.3 inches WEIGHT

5.2 ounces MATERIAL

Stainless steel MSRP

$9

NOTES This Swiss Army-style design from Red Rock Outdoor Gear is different from the others, with a clever interlocking design that secures its two layers together when the fork and spoon are collapsed. When you extend both of them, the internal studs are freed and the two halves fall apart. The fork portion also has a bottle and can opener, while the spoon portion houses a 2.8-inch knife. All work well, with the fold-out fork being refreshingly similar to a regular fork. Of the folding

style tools, this is our favorite and the most functional.

However, like the other folding utensils, it’s harder to keep clean and dry. While washing it, some water seeped into the handle. We didn’t sufficiently dry it, and rust formed. It comes with a simple carrying case, though our fork tines occasionally got stuck in the stitching.

URL

redrockoutdoorgear.com

TOPS Knives

F.O.R.K. IT COLORS

Stone Wash Finish DIMENSIONS

6.5 by 1.5 by 0.5 inches (7.1 inches long in sheath); 2.625-inch blade WEIGHT

1.5 ounces (2.6 ounces with sheath) MATERIAL

1095 steel, Kydex sheath MSRP

$100 ($115 with serrations) URL

www.topsknives.com

NOTES The F.O.R.K. It, designed by Leo Espinoza, is more of a fixed-blade neck knife configuration, with a multipurpose single piece of steel sheathed in Kydex.

One end of the tool features a 2.6-inch blade with a bottle opener and jimping on the spine; the other has a round spork with a deep bowl and short fork tines. When using the knife, just draw it from the sheath and your fingers settle comfortably into the contoured handle while the spork sits in your palm.

The bottle opener is accessible even when sheathed through a cut-out in the Kydex. To use the spork without cutting yourself, simply replace the Kydex and use it as the handle. As far as sporks go, this one works pretty well — the bowl is deep, but larger diameter than the KA-BAR, making it less awkward to

use. The fork tines are triangular and don’t always grip pieces of food that well when you stab them. Its 6.5-inch length makes it easier to wield, but it’s still relatively easy to stash as besides the spork end, it’s thin and flat. It comes with a chain and a loud survival whistle. It’s quite a bit more expensive than the other options, but exhibits fine craftsmanship.

HAVE SPORK, WILL TRAVEL

Whole Foods Market

Plastic utensils COLORS

Black DIMENSIONS

7 by 1.3 by 1 (stacked) inches WEIGHT

0.3 ounces MATERIAL

Plastic MSRP

Free URL

www.wholefoodsmarket.com

NOTES The point of this tongue-in-cheek product entry is that you surely have a local grocery store or restaurant serving prepared foods for you to take home. They invariably provide you with complementary plastic utensils. Same with food courts in shopping malls. So the next time you buy some rotisserie chicken, pork chile verde, or whatever your poison is, grab a set of plastic utensils too. Some are nicer than others; it won’t take you long to find a place that provides good ones. The set shown here were from our local Whole Foods Market.

They don’t get any more utilitarian, they don’t stack together, and they’ll break under any strenuous use (especially the fork tines), but as countless harried office workers on their lunch break will tell you, they work fine. And they’re easy to clean and reuse. Throw a set in a Ziploc bag, and bingo — you can stage them for emergency use virtually anywhere.

Wildo

Spork COLORS

Black, Lemon, Light Blue, Lilac, Lime, Olive, Orange, Pink, Tan DIMENSIONS

6.5 by 1.9 by 0.6 inches WEIGHT

0.3 ounces MATERIAL

Polyamide 6

NOTES Wildo’s spork might more accurately be deemed a sporknife or a knifoon, as it combines a spoon, fork, and knife all at one end. As an all-in-one design, you can only use one at a time, though. The spoon works well, though soup can dribble out of the fork slots.

The serrated knife edge is curved and grows relatively thick, but you can hack through food with it. The fork

has relatively long tines for a spork, but it’s awkward to use right handed. Lefties rejoice, finally! The handle is comfortable to use, though the BPA-free polyamide material flexes quite a bit. It’s cheap, light, and easy to keep on hand.

MSRP

$3 URL

www.proforceequipment.com

Stick With

What Works If chopsticks are your preferred utensils, we’ve got that covered too. Check out offgridweb.com/gear/chopsticks to see our reviews of two chopstick sets and find out if they have a place in your meal loadout.

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SUPERIORITY COMPLEX Physical Preparation with Limited Space

By Ryne Gioviano

Y

ou’re holed up waiting for help to arrive, and it’s taking much longer than expected. You can’t just wait idly by, though. You need to maintain your physical abilities because you have no idea what’s in store for you ahead. Don’t worry. While your space and resources may be limited, we can still keep you physically prepared for the steep road ahead. Here’s what you need to know.

What is a Complex?

A complex is a series of exercises with the same implement (dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell, bodyweight, etc.) with little to no rest in between exercises. You’ll only rest at the end. That’s right, you don’t even get to set the weight down. Traditionally, complexes have been used for athletes who are in-season, where time is limited, as a great way to maintain strength without fatiguing athletes to the level a typical training session might. Of course, there are many other times you might want to use complexes in training.

That being said, there’s one significant reason a prepper might be interested in using this type of training — it’s a great choice for limited space or equipment. Outside of that, the structure also provides a significant challenge to your conditioning. So, it’s perfect for anyone looking to improve in this area or to lose weight. They can even be modified to improve strength simply by increasing the weight and lowering the repetitions, which we’ll discuss later in the article.

(i.e. overhead press and a horizontal press). It’s also a good idea for at least one of those lower body exercises to be single-leg, such as a lunge.

Next, you should prioritize power first in the complex just as you would typically put a power exercise before a strength exercise in a program. Power is a quality that isn’t as fatiguing on your muscles, but is dependent more on your nervous system. It’s best to do these exercises first when the muscles and nervous system are fresh, as power production will be much more limited when you’re tired. Some examples of a power exercise would be a kettlebell swing or any kind of explosive movement.

Choose the most challenging movements earlier in the complex. After fatigue sets in, these movements tend to break down.

So, it’s best to do these near the start of the complex to make sure you’re fresher.

Repetitions will vary based on what you’re looking to accomplish with the complex. The same rules that apply to traditional strength training are used for this style of training as well. If your goal is to improve strength, we’ll use heavier weight for five to six repetitions per exercise. On the other hand, if you need to shed some excess body fat or work on general conditioning, bump the repetitions up to 8 to 12 per exercise and lower the weight a little bit.

Lastly, choose your weight based on the most limiting exercise in the series. So, if an overhead press is the weakest movement you’ll complete, you’re going to choose a weight that’s appropriate for that exercise, and you’ll use that for the rest of the exercises as well.

How Do You Structure a Complex?

There are many different ways to structure a complex; it really just depends on what you are looking to get out of it. For our purposes, we’ll focus solely on physical preparation for the unknown.

First, you should ideally hit all major muscles or movement patterns in the complex. This means getting lower body and upper body throughout the exercises. Generally speaking, it’s best to alternate between upper and lower body, or at least separate competing exercises like two consecutive pressing movements

Sample Complex for the Prepper While this should probably go without saying, make sure the exercises you use with a complex are ones that you’re competent in completing. If not, doing multiple exercises with bad form and combining them with little to no rest is a recipe for disaster. The below exercises are suggested to provide an idea of how the flow of a complex would go. Feel free to substitute your own exercises for the ones listed.

jacoblund/istockphoto.com

WARNING! The exercises and content expressed in this column are for illustrative purposes only.

Consult a medical professional before trying any physical activity or nutritional plan.

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One-Arm Dumbbell Push Press Six repetitions on each side

Dumbbell Split Squat Six repetitions per side

1. Begin with the dumbbell in one hand and resting on your shoulder.

2. Quickly bend your hips and knees slightly and explode up as you press the weight overhead.

3. Slowly lower the dumbbell back to the starting position, using your other hand to assist if need be.

1. Begin in a lunge position with one leg forward and the other back.

2. Hold the dumbbell with one hand in front of your back leg.

3. Slowly descend straight down keeping the weight in your front foot.

Make sure to feel the whole front foot in contact with the ground.

4. After gently tapping your back knee to the floor, press your front foot through the floor, and return to the starting position.

Three-Point Dumbbell Row Six repetitions per side 1. Begin with one arm supporting you on a bench or other sturdy surface roughly knee height.

2. Sit your hips back with your back flat, and grab a dumbbell in the free hand.

3. Drive your shoulder blade and elbow back, stopping just before your elbow is about to pass your torso.

4. Slowly return to the starting position.

SUPERIORITY COMPLEX

Dumbbell Lateral Lunge Six repetitions on each side 1. Begin by standing with a dumbbell in front of your left thigh.

2. Take a large step out to the right. Make sure your toes are facing straight ahead.

3. Sit your hips back as you squat down on your right side. Your left knee should be straight, and you should feel a stretch in your left inner thigh.

4. Explosively push your right foot into the floor and return to the starting position.

Plank Hold this position for 30 to 40 seconds 1. Set the dumbbell down and get on the floor on your toes and elbows.

2. Reach your elbows through the floor, lock your knees, squeeze your butt, and look at your hands.

Conclusion While you’re using a structure called a complex, it’s anything but that. Keeping the movements simple, focusing on good technique, and progressing slowly are surefire ways to see some great gains. After all, if you’re holed up for a while, this is a great way to both pass the time and keep yourself healthy and prepared.

About the Author Ryne Gioviano is the owner of Achieve Personal Training & Lifestyle Design located in Aurora, Illinois. He earned his master’s degree in exercise physiology and is a certified personal trainer through the National Strength and Conditioning Association. You can find more information at www.Achieve-PersonalTraining.com or reach him on Facebook or on Twitter and Instagram at @rgioviano.

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HANDSON

Water Water Everywhere… Review of the IN-CASE Water Filtration System

By Jim Cobb

M

ake no mistake, this isn’t your granddad’s water filter. It is, however, one of the fastest and highest-capacity portable water filters this writer has ever seen.

The IN-CASE Water Filtration System was designed by Rich Gilbreath, one of the owners of a mom-and-pop prepper store called SHTF and Go, located in Burlington, Wisconsin. According to the manufacturer, when the IN-CASE is used properly, it’ll remove 99.999 percent of all bacteria, cysts, parasites, and heavy metals. And it does so with a flow rate of almost 1 gallon per minute.

Weight and transportation issues aside, you could take a 55-gallon drum to your local pond or creek and fill it with filtered water in about an hour.

What it Does The IN-CASE uses an electric pump to pull water through a prefilter, then forcing it through a silver impregnated ceramic filter with silver-activated charcoal. From there, the water is pushed through an ultraviolet (UV) sterilizer and then ionizing resin, which takes care of any heavy metals that might be present in the water.

The 12-volt DC pump is powered by three 10-watt solar panels that attach to the outside of the filter case. One panel is permanently attached, and the other two are affixed with strong magnets. The system is foolproof in that the panels can only be installed one way. The panels are light, flexible, and add almost no weight to the system. The 30 total watts generate about 1.5 amps. You can let the panels soak up the sun all day long and operate the pump at night using the internal battery.

The pump is maintenance-free, with an expected life span of about 10,000 hours.

The battery will operate the filtration system under normal conditions for about six hours. As a bonus, there are two USB ports so the battery can be used to charge a cell phone or other devices.

The battery is rated for about 1,000 charges. If needed, it can also be charged using the included international wall charger.

Survival is all about redundancy, and the IN-CASE has that in spades. If the sun isn’t shining, there’s a dynamo crank that’ll generate the juice needed. If that fails, there’s also a stainless steel manual pump option.

Under normal operating conditions, the IN-CASE will pump and filter about 50 gallons of water per hour. The output rate is slightly lessened when the UV system is employed. The UV light also uses more electricity, which means the battery will last three or four hours as opposed to six.

There are two power buttons on the outside of the case. The top button is for the UV light, and the bottom is for the pump.

If a leak develops inside the unit, an alarm will sound.

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HANDSON Use

Assembly The IN-CASE requires a little assembly before the first use. However, there’s nothing that requires tools. When the unit arrives, it’s ready to take out into the field. Everything can be assembled while sitting on a riverbank or the shore of a pond.

The battery must be plugged into the charge controller.

If you take the IN-CASE when traveling by air, you’ll need to disconnect the battery in order to be TSA compliant.

The ceramic filter is packed inside its stainless steel housing, but needs to be unwrapped before using. Remove the housing and pull the filter from inside, peel off the plastic protective coating, and attach the filter to the housing base.

The ceramic filter will need to be cleaned on a regular basis, though the frequency will depend upon how dirty the source of water may be. A distinct reduction in the system’s output and speed will indicate when the filter needs attention. Simply remove the filter and clean it with the scrub pad included with the system.

The intake and output tubes are simple press-fit attachments. The intake tube runs approximately 20 feet, and the output is about half that length. The prefilter slides over the stainless steel water pickup. Tie the lanyard tight, but make sure you can loosen the knot to remove it for cleaning and storage. The prefilter can be rinsed out when it becomes dirty. If it becomes misplaced or torn, virtually any fabric can be used, as the purpose is merely to limit the amount of dirt and debris that could enter the filter. The IN-CASE comes with one prefilter.

Attach the solar panels to the outside of the case, drop the intake into water, and you’re ready to go.

Everything is unpacked and assembled. The manual pushpull pump is located at the back of the unit with the knob on the left side.

Toss the water intake out into the pond. After priming, clean water begins to run from the output hose.

The 20 feet of intake tube means you can stand on shore and toss the intake out into the pond or body of water without having to immerse yourself in it.

The electric pump cannot pull water more than 10 feet vertically, so in those situations the manual pump must be used. The manual pump may also be used to prime the electric pump, but this isn’t absolutely necessary.

The power switches for the pump are located on the side of the unit. Push both buttons in, and the pump will start up. Once water has filled the ionizing chamber, turn on the juice. Of course, the pump will require electricity, so either the sun must be shining or the battery needs to be charged.

The pump does make noise, but isn’t very loud at all, especially with the case closed. It sounds similar to a toy windup boat. If noise is a concern, you can use the manual pump to provide clean water with very little sound.

Once the unit is running in earnest, water flows from the output almost as fast as a kitchen faucet. It’s clean, clear, and ready to drink.

We took the IN-CASE to a local pond for some real-world testing. The assembly took about 20 minutes, but most of that was spent on one-time operations, such as unpacking and assembling the ceramic filter. Once the unit is fully assembled, it may be stored and transported that way.

After assembly, putting it into operation consists of tossing the intake hose into the source water, putting a container at the end of the output hose, and turning the unit on. We primed the pump manually to test that function and found it took a fair amount of effort to draw the water through about 12 feet of hose and the filter. Not impossible, but it was a bit of a cardio workout.

The water in the pond was predictably dirty, and the water flowing from the output hose appeared to be as clear as normal bottled water. It tasted, well, like water is supposed to taste. The IN-CASE doesn’t lend any sort of aftertaste to the water, unlike chemical purifiers such as chlorine tablets or iodine drops. We suffered absolutely no ill effects from consuming the filtered water, either.

The largest drawback to the system is the weight. While the unit packs nicely into the case, at 30 pounds it isn’t something that’ll be easy to lug around during a bug-out. The INCASE is, however, perfect for a family or group who needs a reliable method of producing clean water in large quantities.

Another reason the IN-CASE Water Filtration System might be best suited for a group is the price. It currently retails for $1,799, not much more than a large manually operated purifier.

All in all, it’s a very impressive system filled with redundancies. Each unit is assembled by hand, and Rich insists customers call him upon receipt of their units so he can walk them through the assembly process. That level of customer service isn’t seen very much nowadays.

Left side is the filtered water, and right side is the source water.

MAKE & MODEL IN-CASE Solar Water Purifier URL www.SHTFandGo.com

ISSUE 23

094

DEBUNKED

Nature’s Not

Always Bountiful

A

lthough it was never confirmed, if you’ve ever seen the movie Into the Wild, it’s speculated that Christopher McCandless’ journey into Alaskan Wilderness ended with possibly ingesting toxic plants in his location that he was trying to survive on in the absence of other, more practical food sources. While it may seem that plants offer enough nutrients to exist on during the harsher months of a survival situation, you may ultimately succumb to a slow starvation or inadvertently poison yourself.

The Myth: There’s a belief among certain preppers and survivalists that an experienced forager can survive indefinitely by eating nothing more than wild edible plants. These starry-eyed weed-eaters seem to believe that you can always receive enough nutrition and calories from the plant kingdom, anytime and anyplace. But is the grass always greener, or will this strategy leave you malnourished or dead?

The Reality: You and I are living proof that nature provided the necessary food for our ancestors to live long enough to procreate; but you have to understand that beggars can’t be choosers.

Our remote forebears harvested both plant and animal foods to sustain themselves. That’s why they’re labeled “hunter/gatherers” in the history books. Today, overeager botanists and vegans might think that they can subsist on wild edibles in any long-term survival situation, but they’re forgetting one critical detail — intermittent availability.

You see, there are certain times and places that you could live off wild plant foods for months at a time (like an autumn forest with a bountiful nut harvest or fruiting season on a lush tropical isle). However, these “feast” times are always separated by generous stretches of “famine,” when only low-calorie plant foods are available.

Winter is the most brutal example of this cycle of natural deficit.

When snow blankets the land, hiding or killing most wild edibles, your caloric needs skyrocket as your resources plummet. Even if you could find enough plants to fill your belly, it’s unlikely that they would offer enough calories for survival. As a second example, let’s look at springtime.

When I teach foraging classes in April, I have the greatest annual diversity of plants to show my classes. And I always tell them how our ancestors thought of spring as the “starving season.” Despite all the new green growth, the young plants are mostly water and they lack sufficient calories for subsistence. Eating only spring greens is like starving to death slowly in a field of iceberg lettuce — all water, no calories. Many cultures made it through winter by storing food, and they made it through spring by taking advantage of wild animal foods (like wild bird eggs and migratory spring fish runs). tornado98/istockphoto.com

The Myth of Subsisting on Nothing More than Wild Plants

By Tim MacWelch

As a final example to scare you straight, you simply may not have the necessary understanding to use the resources around you. Case in point, you may find yourself in unfamiliar territory and you won’t know which local plants are safe to eat. Plant identification can be difficult enough in your normal stomping grounds.

Add in the stress of a survival event, a strange environment and a splash of desperation, and you have a recipe for disaster. This idea of a wilderness that’s always filled with high-calorie plant food is nothing more than wishful thinking.

THE ALTERNATIVES: If you find yourself in a survival situation with only wild food as a source of sustenance, don’t give up! This scenario is survivable, if you’re not too squeamish. Here’s what you can do to survive on wild foods.

Focus On Calories: Whether you’re trying to live on plants, animals, or a blend of both, focus on collecting safe high-calorie foods. Make a positive identification of edible tree nuts, starchy roots, and nutritious berries, then collect as many of those calorie dense foods as possible. And maybe don’t worry so much about collecting wild edible plants for teas and salads. These may taste delicious and provide vitamins and minerals, but they are never going to provide high calories.

Eat It All: There were plenty of ways to die on the early American frontier — but one of the weirdest was called “rabbit starvation.” Novice trappers, hunters and wanna-be mountain men would occasionally die from eating only lean meat (no fat or carbs) for weeks on end. For a more contemporary example of this, author Jon Krakauer speculated in his popular book Into the Wild that Chris McCandless might have died from this odd form of acute malnutrition. The take away here is very simple. When hunting, fishing, or trapping strive to collect animals with higher amounts of body fat, then eat ample amounts of fat and organs along with the meat. An animal-based menu of meat, organs, and fat sustains our cousins in the arctic who are eating a traditional diet, and it can keep us alive too.

Don’t Be Picky: In a grid-down situation, you may have to get creative. Bugs are surprisingly nutritious and safe to eat — if you choose edible species and cook them thoroughly. Termites are my top recommendation, as they have the highest calorie count of commonly available insects and arthropods (up to 6 calories per gram). Do your research, determine edible species, and cook them to destroy pathogens and parasites.

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ISSUE 23

096

ONTHEGRID

’Tis the Season to Survive

Web Debriefing In case you missed them, here are four online stories that can help you prepare for cold-weather emergencies.

Cpl. Immanuel Johnson / U.S. Marine Corps

In the first of a three-part series on cold weather survival, contributor Andy Schrader examines the lowtemperature precautions advised by

By Patrick McCarthy

the U.S. Army Mountain Warfare and

W

Cold Weather Operations manual: www.offgridweb.com/?p=7561

eather is a major concern in any survival scenario, and it can dramatically amplify the difficulty of staying alive.

Cold weather is especially challenging, even for veteran survivalists. In Issue

Think hammocks are only useful

Jeff Zhang / Serac

21, we asked “Survivorman” Les Stroud about his opinion on the

during warm summers in the

most difficult place to survive. He responded simply, “The worst

woods? Serac Hammocks’ cofounder

place to survive is wherever it’s cold. That’s it. With cold, you can

Jeff Zhang dispels this myth,

never stop.”

and shares three simple tips for

So, ask yourself: Am I adequately prepared for coldweather survival? The creature comforts of urban society can lull us into a false sense of security, perhaps more during winter than any other season. It’s easy to sit in a heated car, sipping a peppermint hot chocolate, and scoffing at the idea of hypothermia. But consider how you’d cope with the elements if a car crash or breakdown left you stranded on the side of a desolate road at night.

Would you be able to pop your trunk, grab your readymade backpack full of supplies, put on your boots and insulated jacket, and remain comfortable until dawn? Or would you be huddled inside the car, hoping for rescue to arrive soon?

Preparedness and forethought are always key to survival, but during winter many of your preps should be focused on one imminent danger: the loss of body heat.

That means wearing layers of insulated clothing, establishing a warm shelter, being able to start a fire quickly, and watching for signs of hypothermia or frostbite.

Fortunately, our website offers exclusive articles addressing each of these topics, and many others related to cold-weather survival. Check out the links in the Web Debriefing box, and use the lessons within to fine-tune your winter preparedness skills.

Do you have any cold-weather tips or winter survival experiences to share? I’d like to hear them — send me an email at pmccarthyoffgrid@gmail.com.

hammock camping in cold weather: www.offgridweb.com/?p=4046

Patrick McCarthy

Lighting a fire can be a real struggle during the winter, especially if all the naturally occurring tinder is soaking wet. However, this DIY guide can show you how to prepare easy-toignite char cloth and get your fire burning faster: www.offgridweb. com/?p=4599

IJY / morguefile.com

Grab your smartphone, tablet, or laptop and head to OFFGRIDweb.com for more exclusive content.

Frostbite is an insidious threat, silently killing tissue and numbing the pain before the victim realizes the damage that has been done.

Learn how to diagnose, treat, and prevent frostbite in this webexclusive guide: www.offgridweb. com/?p=7435

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ISSUE 23

098

THE LAST PAGE

Easy as it Sounds?

Review of The Backyard Homestead The Premise: Since its publication in 2009, Madigan’s The Backyard Homestead has been a staple in the library of anyone with a desire to live life unhindered by GMOs, pesticides, chemicals, and unnatural fertilizers lacing their store-bought food. Long before she collected the materials for this book, Madigan had been the managing editor of Horticulture magazine and has lived, worked, and learned on an organic farm in Massachusetts.

Overall, The Backyard Homestead is an excellent resource for homesteaders and preppers interested in sustainability, from the beginner to the advanced reader. Because it tries to cram lots of info into one resource, it hardly has room to delve into scholarly depths. If you’re a beginner, you won’t feel overwhelmed about getting started.

The 411: The Backyard Homestead is nicely divided into seven sections, from vegetables, fruits and nuts, herbs, and grains to poultry, meat and dairy, and wild food. The information is presented in a straightforward and wellorganized manner, showing readers just how easy it is to grow their own food and raise their only limited livestock.

Illustrations are used liberally throughout the pages, but a touch of color would’ve been nice if only to tell the difference between a few of the species whose leaf patters are similar (lemon balm and parsley, for example). The beginning, however, includes some handy illustrations showing you how much food you can produce on 1/10th of an acre, on ¼ acre, and ½ acre.

Each map is detailed with where everything should be placed and planted.

Throughout the book you’ll learn how to store your harvest, how to thresh wheat, information on wheat grinders, how to butcher a chicken, what to do with the feathers, how to make maple syrup, how to brew beer, and even how to milk a goat.

The Verdict: As a whole, if you’re beginning to transform your backyard or a portion of a larger estate into a garden, this book is for you. Each section isn’t overly detailed, but there’s enough information to point you in the right direction.

In the section, “The Home Vegetable Garden,” for example, illustrations and graphs abound, such as visuals on various garden layouts, each designed for a different-sized yard.

There’s info on planting dates for each part of the U.S. as well as how much to plant, what grows best where, how to extend the season, how to help your seeds germinate, and directions for making your own trellises for plants like

Shablon/istockphoto.com

By Ryan Lee Price

tomatoes. This book has it all, but this is where it has trouble keeping up with itself.

Madigan tried to write a book that’s an everything-foreverybody and underdelivered. A book of that caliber would easily be 3,600 pages. The topics that are covered (and there are many) are dealt with superficially, with very little meat left over once the basics are explained. Also, the subjects chosen were given uneven consideration. For example, container gardening only spans one-and-a-half pages, whereas choosing the right breeds of chickens takes up five pages. And there’s only three or four egg-laying breeds to choose from.

That said, there are some stellar sections worthy of high praise. “Vegetables A to Z” discusses many types of popular vegetables in great detail, from planting to care to harvest (and more). The same can be said about the section on milking goats.

At the end of each chapter, it would’ve been helpful to include a section for troubleshooting, especially in the animal husbandry sections. Instead of a few dozen detailed illustrations of various livestock, it would’ve been nice to see a section of basic animal first-aid, medical treatments for injuries or disease, or at least a list of general shots and vaccines livestock need.

Madigan assumes that 1) a beginner is capable of doing anything in her book — such as making vinegar, canning fruit, or slaughtering a heifer (which is covered in only about 200 words); and 2) that a beginner has all the necessary equipment to perform the outlined tasks.

Although a great starter, instead of being outlined like a car-repair manual that walks you through every procedure, think of it more as a book to make you aware of basic ideas and issues you’ll be faced with when beginning a self-sufficient homestead. Then, from there, you can decide if you want to read more by seeking out other resources (there are a host of them at the back).

NOVEL & AUTHOR

The Backyard Homestead Carleen Madigan PUBLISHER

Storey Publishing, North Adams, Mass.

MSRP

$19 URL

Storey.com PAGES

368 RATING

THRIVE SURVIVE DIE