Category Archives: Discussion

Convincing Your Loved Ones You’re Safe While Solo Hiking

Convincing Your Loved Ones You’re Safe While Solo

So, you wanna go into the woods by yourself? This can be so exciting, yet nerve-wracking! One of the most difficult parts is convincing your loved ones that you’re safe while solo. Well, how exactly do you do this? I have some tips for you below!

Educate Your Loved Ones

Part of the reason people are scared when their loved ones go off into the woods alone is that they are just uneducated about the matter. It’s easy to be scared of something you don’t know when A) you’ve never done it and B) all you hear about are murders on the Appalachian Trail and cougar or bear attacks. How do you combat this part of human nature, where the worst case scenario is all they can think of? Sit down and have a conversation with them! It helps to know statistics of the area you’ll be hiking in for the wildlife encounters, as well as some general safety statistics. This way you’ll be able to back up what your thoughts with facts and put their mind to ease. They will also appreciate the time you took to have a mature conversation about it and trying to calm their fear.

Here are just a couple of facts to get you started on your research:

Bear attacks kill on average 3 people per year in the United States, whereas transportation accidents cause 48,441 (circa 2017)

Mountain Lion attacks average 6 per year, with less than 1 fatality as a result (circa

Build An Itinerary

After you sit down and have a conversation go over many aspects of your trip, your next step should be to create an itinerary! Planning and getting a good layout for our solo adventure is going to make you more confident AND show your loved ones how prepared you really are. This guide will help your loved ones keep tabs on you, as long as you check in on a regular basis to let them know if you are keeping to schedule or falling behind. This works great when paired with a satellite messenger (see below), so you can communicate even when out of cellphone coverage.

GPS and Satellite Messaging

A really great tool that you can use to ease the mind of your loved ones is Satellite Messengers. These don’t need cell service, so you’re able to send an “I’m okay” message at the end of the day. This can really comfort your loved ones at home. Especially if you are on a more intense hike, like the Appalachian Trail, or a week-long trip up north where there is no service. These tend to be a little spendy, the Garmin InReach and InReach Mini are great options. Depending on budget and how often you will go on these excursions, renting may be a more affordable option try here and here.

Invite Them On A Trip

Now, you don’t need to invite them on the solo trip that you have been planning (although, you can if you’d like). The fear that your loved one is having could be that they have never gone camping or hiking. What is a better way to teach them, then to plan a trip and show them just what camping and hiking are all about! Not to mention, you get some great quality time with your loved one in nature and enjoy a favorite past time of yours.

Convincing Loved Ones You’ll Be Safe

When you get down to it making sure your loved ones know you are safe consists of educating them and having great communication. When your loved ones know what to expect and that you know what you are doing, they will worry less and you will get to enjoy yourself on your adventure! If you have any tips make sure to comment them below!

Safety Items

Safety in the woods can mean a lot of different things from dealing with animals, humans and just emergency scenarios. Below are a few things that help keep you safe in various scenarios. Again, the number one thing is to have an itinerary that you can follow closely and communication with loved ones so they know when something is off and can get you help right away.

Bear Spray – convincing your loved ones you're safe while solo hiking

Garmin InReach Mini –  convincing your loved ones you're safe while solo hiking

First Aid Kit  – convincing your loved ones you're safe while solo hiking

Ursack – convincing your loved ones you're safe while solo hiking

 

How to Start a Food Stockpile

So You Want to Start a Food Stockpile?

How to start a food stockpile has been a big question lately. With the weather doing crazy things it has people thinking about “doomsday” and how they can better prepare themselves. One of the best ways to prepare for a situation like that is to be ready to hunker down, this includes having a good stockpile of food. A good stockpile of food doesn’t just mean having a large quantity of food (even though that is part of it.) Having a good stockpile means having food that you eat on a normal basis, is delicious raising morale when it’s low, and foods that are easy to prepare.

Building a Stockpile

Where to start:

When starting a food stockpile it will take some time and preparation. The first place to look when you start a food stockpile is your very own pantry. Looking in your pantry can help you see what food is part of your diet in everyday life. This way of stocking up has three huge benefits:

  1. Having things you eat regularly helps you rotate through your stockpile so that nothing spoils. This prevents you from wasting food AND money!
  2. It is easy to prepare these items as you are familiar with them and use them on a semi-regular basis. For example, if you have rice kept on hand, chances are you have multiple recipes where rice is an ingredient. This saves time because you know how to prepare it and gives you a little variety as you are able to swap out recipes.
  3. It builds morale! Food often carries a sense of nostalgia and good memories for us. Having food that is associated with good times just gives an extra boost of positivity on days when it is really hard to think of going forward. Not to mention, that when you eat something that tastes SO good, you just feel good too!

 

How to Stockpile:

Now that you have a list of food that you keep on hand at all times, you can start shopping for these items. This can be very overwhelming and can be very expensive if you just jump in all at once, you can take the stress off of starting your food stockpile by breaking it down into sections – this helps allow you to shop for the best deal as well!

A basic breakdown of categories to help you build your food stockpile would be:

  • Canned veggies
  • Rice and Pasta
  • Canned fruit
  • Sauces
  • Canned meat

You can absolutely adjust this to whatever your preference or needs are. Once you have the categories you can shop the sales!

There are four ways to get the most for your dollar when starting your food stockpile and maintaining it from there:

  1. Shop sales! Seriously, get to know your local variety of grocery stores and their weekly ads! You can generally figure out the rotation of when they will have different categories on sale, it is usually a six-week rotation. The items that are advertised in the weekly ads are “loss leaders,” which are to get you in the store to buy other items while you are there. If you have a very strict budget STICK to your list and just pick up the items of the ad for your stockpile.
  2. Coupons! Coupons are so much more than just the clip from the newspaper kind these days. While those are great, most stores have their own apps these days loaded with virtual savings. You can stack these with paper coupons as well if you get the chance. Coupon apps are great to watch before and after holidays especially. A couple of days after Easter I was able to score hams for $1 per pound thanks to Target’s Cartwheel app, and now we have those saved in the freezer.
  3. Another great place to catch deals for your stockpile is the store’s grocery clearance and less than perfect product section. Many stores will mark down items for at least 30% when the packaging is damaged. This can add up to great savings for you. Just check over the product and make sure that you are comfortable with eating the food inside the packaging. An example of this is that not everyone is comfortable with dented cans, they don’t bother me so I ended up with a 6pack at .25 cents a can! You can also get steep discounts when a store is discontinuing a product so make sure to check for clearance!
  4. Last but not least is the good old dollar store! They are a great place to pick up canned food as well as pasta, rice, and other longterm storage foods!

 

Specialty Items

The last thing to touch on when talking about starting a food stockpile is specialty items. Specialty items are your Mountain House, Backpacker’s Pantry and other freeze-dried meals as well as options like MREs. These tend to be spendier options than your average food. I like to just keep a few of our favorite varieties on hand for every once in a while.  By making them a supplement to your food stockpile and not the bulk of it, it allows you to watch for sales and again clearance at sporting good stores and online retailers, making them much more affordable. For MREs I watch for deals on Amazon. I do this for freeze-dried meals as well, but I also look in brick and mortar stores for clearance when a new season is coming and the camping gear is resetting, making them much more budget friendly.

These are my tips to help you with starting a food stockpile, I hope they helped you out! Make sure you share any tips you have for starting and maintaining a food stockpile in the comment section below. I love to hear from you!

 

how to start a food stockpile
how to start a food stockpile

 

GiveAway Revamp Gear Front Pack

This Revamp Gear Giveaway will end 9/8/18 Also check out the coupon code to get 10% off plus free shipping. The pack in this GAW was sent to me from Revamp Gear.
https://www.shoprevampgear.com/product-page/revamp-gear-front-pack
USE CODE – wolfpack10
Enter GAW – https://gleam.io/fBuYq/revamp-gear-front-pack-gaw

More on the Revamp Gear Front Pack – https://www.wolfpackwoodcraft.com/front-pack-camping-backpacking

Stainless Steel Pathfinder Canteen VS Water Bottle

This is a Full comparison between the Pathfinder Stainless Steel (material) Canteen vs the Pathfinder Stainless Steel (material) Water Bottle Kits. When it comes to the Stainless Steel canteen and Stainless Steel water bottle kits there is a lot of features that are similar such as the stainless steel material but there are a lot of things that are different.
Stainless Steel Water Bottle – https://www.selfrelianceoutfitters.com 

Stainless Steel Canteen – https://www.selfrelianceoutfitters.com

Check out the 5C’s of survival==> https://www.wolfpackwoodcraft.com/5-c-survival-kit Continue reading →

Affordable Backpacking Sleeping Bags for Camping

 

When on a budget, it is hard to find an affordable backpacking sleeping bag for camping or hiking. In this video, I compare 3 different sleeping bags that are very affordable.
Patrol Bag – https://amzn.to/2JLxaTT


Outdoor Vitals – https://amzn.to/2ym6eVj

sleeping
TNH Outdoors – https://amzn.to/2yoMmAU


Gear in Video – https://www.amazon.com/shop/wolfpackwoodcraft

Let’s Help Eachother – https://www.wolfpackwoodcraft.com/affiliate-links

google.com, pub-7066259607393589, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0