If you love to be adventurous and brave the elements while hiking, camping, or engaging in other outdoor activities, you need to keep a survival bag at your side. Your survival bag is a simple and portable collection of resources that can come in handy in a wilderness emergency. Some of the items in your survival bag even have the potential to save your life in a worst-case scenario.
Being adventurous and embracing spontaneity does not mean that you should go into the wild unprepared. A survival bag equips you with the tools and resources that you’ll need to turn to if something goes wrong. That way, you can rest easy knowing that you will be ready to respond to an emergency.
A Quick-Read Guide To The Most Important Survival Gear
This post is all about wilderness survival gear. From food and water to handy, portable tools, we will walk you through everything you need to pack in your survival bag before you head out on an outdoor adventure.
These resources are designed to be as easy to carry and use as possible, making them perfect for long stretches of traveling on foot. You don’t want to be weighed down by your supplies, even if it is lifesaving survival gear. Fortunately, all of the items we will cover in this post are as lightweight and easy to transport as possible.
Don’t Let Hunger or Dehydration Get The Best Of You
Your survival bag would be incomplete if it didn’t contain high-quality, non-perishable sources of food and water that can be easily transported and used anywhere. Hunger and dehydration can quickly wear you down in an emergency leaving you discouraged and exhausted. If you are ever in a situation where your main sources of food and water run out, you always want to have backups packed in your survival bag.
Our emergency preparedness kits come packed with energy bars that are high in calories and boast a five-year shelf life. We chose energy bars as our go-to source of nutrition for emergencies because they are reliable, small and calorically dense, and they can last years without expiring. If there was ever a perfect food for emergencies, this is it.
Water is another precious resource that you never want to be without in a crisis. Stock your survival bag with enough of it to keep you hydrated for at least a day. When you are in an emergency, you often need to be much more conservative with the amount of food you eat and water you drink, rationing out small amounts to keep yourself going until you can get help.
However, just a little bit of water goes a long way in a worst-case scenario. If you have a survival bag that is stocked with emergency water, you are much better off in any emergency situation, especially if you find yourself in a crisis miles from the nearest sources of running water.
Dealing With Injuries Using Your Survival Gear
If you are out in the wild and find yourself in a potentially life-threatening situation, do everything in your power to stay calm. To deal with any emergency well, you need a clear head, steady hands and all your wits about you. The gear in your survival bag can be a major difference-maker in a wilderness emergency, but you need to be in the right headspace to use your resources well and respond to a crisis.
If you or someone with you is injured and you do not have access to medical help, you will need to have the knowledge and experience to use the first aid gear in your survival bag well. One of the best ways to prepare yourself and level up your survival skills is to get first aid training. First aid is the immediate response to someone getting injured, and it can play a crucial role in helping an injured person recover and preventing their injury from worsening.
Understanding the basics of first aid and practicing dealing with different types of injuries helps you to gauge your levels of emergency preparedness and have confidence in your ability to handle a crisis.
First aid experience isn’t just beneficial out in the wild, either. Knowing how to take care of injuries like burns, cuts, scrapes, splinters and other minor wounds is one of the keys to everyday safety in your home, school and workplace. Regardless of what your life looks like and the situations you find yourself in on a daily basis, you can greatly benefit from gaining first aid experience.
Your survival bag needs to be equipped with a fully-stocked first aid kit. This case of ready-to-use medical supplies should include all of the basic tools and materials needed to treat minor injuries that can happen anywhere. Keeping your survival bag with you anytime you are traveling is a great idea, even if you are not venturing too far from civilization.
The supplies in your first aid kit can be used to prevent an injury from getting worse while you wait for professional medical help to arrive. This means that even if you are close to the emergency room or doctor’s office rather than out in the woods hiking or camping, your first aid kit still contains items that can save a life.
Supplies For Staying Clean
Whether you are eating, dressing a wound, or cleaning up after doing your business, a reliable germ killer is a must-have resource for your survival bag. If you are hiking or camping, you will not likely have access to running water for miles. You can’t rely on washing your hands with soap at a sink out in the wild, so you will need a plan B that you can count on.
Because there are so many circumstances when you need to get your hands clean quickly, a bottle of hand sanitizer is one of the best items to stock in your survival bag. Practicing good hygiene habits when you are out in the wilderness helps to keep disease-causing bacteria at bay.
Doing a poor job of getting your hands clean while hiking or camping, especially after using the bathroom, can ruin your adventure and even make you sick. Using hand sanitizer that contains a high concentration of alcohol helps to reduce your chances of getting sick from anything germy that might be lingering on your hands.
Tools For Making Quick Repairs In A Pinch
You never want to be out in the wild with no solutions if something makes a massive rip in your tent, backpack or jacket. Patching up holes caused by weather, sharp objects, rough surfaces and the everyday wear and tear of time out in the wild is essential for success on any outdoor adventure. To make quick repairs to damaged equipment, you need a set of easy-to-use, lightweight tools that you can take anywhere.
One of the most important tools to stash in your survival bag is a roll of duct tape. If one of your essential pieces of gear gets a rip in it, you can use duct tape as a quick fix until you can make long-term repairs. The duct tape in your survival kit can also be used to quickly patch up a leak or broken window in your home in the event of a natural disaster.
Because transporting a full-sized toolbox with you every time you travel is out of the question, your survival bag needs to contain a compact alternative. We love multi-tools because they are extremely versatile, lightweight and compact. You can use your multi-tool to accomplish a multitude of tasks, using its many utilities to cut, ply, saw, screw and unscrew, and more.
Gear To Keep You Warm And Dry
We at JUDY like to divide up the essentials for emergency preparedness into the following categories: warmth, tools, safety, first aid, food and water. Our emergency kits come fully stocked with indispensable resources in all of these categories. In this post, we have covered some of the most important resources in the tools, safety, first aid, food and water categories, but we’d be remiss if we did not mention some of the essentials for staying warm and dry.
Your emergency bag can be majorly leveled up if you pack warmth-preserving resources in it that are light and portable enough not to weigh you down. You may not be able to bring a full-sized blanket with you, for example, but you can bring a lightweight foil emergency blanket instead. A bulky rain jacket may not fit in your survival kit, but a portable poncho certainly would. These types of items are exactly what you want to have on hand to turn to if you are suddenly exposed to bad weather. Anything that can be quickly accessed to help keep you warm and dry is ideal for emergencies.
These are just a few of the items to keep stocked in your survival bag in each of the key categories. To learn more about emergency preparedness and get extra tips and info, visit our blog for more helpful guides and articles.
Sources:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/hand-sanitizer.html
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