Keep getting to know your bug out site

Hopefully, if you have identified a plausible Situation X that could make you unsafe in your home, you have identified a safe place to go which meets the requirements of that scenario. It could be anywhere. If the kind of Situation X you anticipate is just a house fire, your bug out spot might just be a hotel. But it still pays to have been there a time or two at the very least. You want to know if your car is safe there, if the staff is intolerant of your children playing, etc. Obviously the stakes only get higher if your hotel is a wilderness and the intolerant staffers are bears.

So if there is a place where you intend to go if SHTF, I suggest making it a recreational destination as frequently as you can enjoy, and taking the people who would be with you in Sit X if you can.

There are plenty of more-or-less automatic advantages to this experience. You get better at moving over the terrain, you get familiar with where you encounter wildlife and how they react to you, etc.

But you will also want to purposefully seek other advantages that relate to your anticipated Sit X.

This might mean going into constricted terrain in the area to carefully look for or even create hard-to-find escapes, mapping out lines of sight and blind spots from key points, observing how the sound of vehicles, aircraft, weapons, etc are affected in certain areas (ie: places where you can be sneaked up on by someone who sounds far away, or heard by someone who should be out of earshot), or just leaving a bit of food around to see how bad the bugs and critters can get if you've got humans and their goodies around. These are of course just simple examples- what you wish to find, what there is to find, and how clever you have to be to exploit it will depend on your unique situation.

It pays to know your land. If you don't spend time there, you can't really know it and it can't really be yours. This comes from personal experience. I recently started hiking again, and I've liked a lot of what I have found. But I also found a lot of horse tracks near a spot that I used to think had potential. The only things near by used to be a small nature preserve and a construction yard (which in the kind of Sit X that has me bugging out seemed likely to be uninhabited and maybe even a great place to scavenge materials). Unfortunately the owner of the preserve put in a small horse ranch adjacent to the construction yard and started giving horse back tours of his preserve. So that spot is off the list so as to avoid conflict with someone else who has since developed a greater interest in the land. Glad I was just visiting when I found out.

This is a good idea, but I wonder if everybody had such a bug out spot, whether we would run out of acres of land to fit everyone in case SHTF. I say an acre because you'd probably need at least that much warning of invaders and whatnot if you do plan on dealing with them in a somewhat well thought out way.

OK, to get this ball rolling, I'll kick it.

In some way--see later--I'm fully prepared in about all ways to defend my surburban house and 2.10 acres if it comes to that. A bug-out site plan is not on my to-do list if the SHTF.

Those that need to escape from one area to another will have various reasons. They will have legitimate reasons, lacking safety, services, and essentials. I understnad their decision to move to another place, and the apparent, absolute need to do so, but....

What I consistantly read here is that little thought is given to the folks that are in the path of these escapees. Those folks, such as myself, will have our own agendas and ideas of what we need to do. Will that be to welcome newcomers that come through, merely avoid them, or repell them?

The answer is obvious, morally or ethically right or wrong as it may be. The King's Castle rule will apply. The rule of thumb will be to Defend You Castle,(position and supplies).

As an outlander, regardless if from just around the corner or from another city, you will have a set of crosshairs positioned on your back or red dot on your forehead when you venture into the territory of others. To argue why that would be is a waste of time. The humanity of being human has just been reducd to the classic law of nature, territorial protection.

As a general rule, you will be seen as a potential foe, killed on sight, stripped of your supplies, allowed to join (sharing your supplies), or perhaps serenely allowed to pass through unmolested (which is doubtful). Your chances of dodging detection will be zero to none. The territory to which you have advanced will have guards, outposts and patrols.



A bug-out plan is basically saying, I need out of here and I will do what I must do to survive elsewhere. It is a subtle plan to take what you need in your journey of whatever length until you stop or are stopped. Once outside of your immediate area, you are an interloper into the area of others, and you will view them as obstacles to your reaching your bug-out site. And they will view you in much the same manner.

Regardless of what I have written just above, in the last few months I've decided that the best thing for me to do is to throw in my abilities and equipment to a young family that hopefully will have a better chance of survival than my old bones that has little value other than being added security and support for such a family/group.

There will be no happy endings. I wish I had a better view, but there is none. We will be barbarians, if not savages again.

Facing hard truths is what ATS is all about.

Thanks for two very different, but inherently linked sides to this issue.

It will help people to make more realistic plans, I hope.

I live in an apartment in an extremely urban area.

I have a location in a very rural, forested area about 2 hours driving distance from my home ... a 2-story steel-framed and aluminum sided barn with a wood-burning heater, 4 small windows only on the second floor, two reinforced steel doors with deadbolts and crash bars. It sits off a 2-lane county road, well back in an unmarked location off a long, dirt road. There are 2 neighbors along this private drive. It is on 2-acres of land that could be made "gardenable" (with about 2 weeks work of overgrowth clearing) if needed.

This wasn't an intentional preparation but a piece of property I came into from a deceased relative and I have nothing else to do with it.

The problem, of course, is depending on the scenario it would be very difficult to get there from here. If I had advance warning of an exigency it might not be much an issue, however, any situation that emerged suddenly would put me in a tight spot.

In that scenario my plan is to shelter-in-place in my apartment for 2-4 weeks (I have 6 weeks of food and bottled water on hand), not leaving for any reason. In most scenarios there will be an initial surge of chaos in an immediate aftermath which will lessen as the herd is thinned out and the initial shock subsides. Once that happens then I would probably pack-up and move to my reserve location, ideally offering to bring along any of my neighbors who had survived as a trip would be far safer with some numbers. I'm confident that - within 7 months - my reserve location can be self-sustaining for up to 4 people. If I can "max out" that number we'd have - when combined with the neighbors on this road - 8 people to protect the private drive. That's far too few for an urban or suburban area, or a "spotlight" rural location, but I think manageable for my specific place.

reply to post by Aliensun


You have very accurately described potential dangers of bugging out, particularly in certain regions. This is precisely why the subject of a bug out plan comes up. Planning and familiarization has saved me exactly such a problem as you describe with the owner of that horse ranch which was erected near one site I had previously found.

Allow me to fill in some context. It sounds like you come from a place where space is taken up pretty thoroughly but distributed into reasonably comfortable portions that people are accustomed to being able to protect.

I come from a place where everything and everyone is crammed together. Nobody has enough space or can protect it 100% of the time- at least not until their net worth hits eight figures, and various obstacles have left thousands of square miles completely untouched on our doorstep in the hands of various government agencies which allow access but strictly limit activity and forbid development.

My plan is all about getting away from the places where people are being extremely defensive and potentially predatory and into space of my own where I get the first look and the first choice on whether or not there is going to be a gunfight.

I live near the exact center of a once-remote town along the freeway out of a very major urban area. At any given time there are between one and two thousand people within half a mile of my house... add at least 2,500 more if the high school is in session. There are at least fifteen apartments with a clear view of my property and one that appears to have a clean shot at my spot at the dinner table, plus I am on a heavily trafficked corner. Even when things are fine I can expect regular violence and theft in the neighborhood, and it takes a lot of effort to keep it off of my property. On top of it all, there is a history of racial tension and occasionally violence- and my "side" (not that I care to take one) is a minority- like 85% to 10%
We have almost no local water, electricity, or food (there is some farming in irrigated areas, but only enough to cause conflict). Temperatures can exceed 110 degrees. This land is only habitable for large groups of people while society is functioning. If society stops functioning, this place will be a major way point for an exodus from the cities.

In short, many worst case scenarios lead to a large number of people being stuck in my area fighting over extremely scarce resources and possibly seeing me as a better target because I have a characteristic which can be used to mark me as an outsider. I'm in an utterly untenable position in every sense of the word if defending resources becomes necessary.

Fortunately for me, there are 100 miles of nothing that begin just outside of my city. With the right equipment, knowledge, and planning, it would be possible to evacuate a few people and valuables and establish an indefinitely sustainable camp in a place that no other person is likely to arrive at by chance or design, and which can be readily defended.

Perhaps even more fortunately though, I'm pretty comfortable that I will never have to put my plan into action, because sustainability on any level I care to imagine isn't within my means at the moment. I'm not paranoid exactly. I just notice worst case scenarios and have interests that offer me at least some security against them.

Last but not least there are non-bug out reasons why its nice to have access to a little known remote area too. Suppose they want to take our guns away some day? I'll have a place to continue honing my marksmanship, won't I?

I thank you for the info, cause I have been sort of plotting my defenses against a chaotic scenario and you gave me a few good pointers to take a good look at. I want to be as ready as I can get when the time comes.

THANKS!

reply to post by The Vagabond


You have thought long and hard over the ultimate "what if..." situation for yourself. Your insights seem to be the epitome of an old (of course) Zen saying that I favor:

"Expect nothing. Be prepared for anything."