You can never have too much knowledge – that’s what I firmly believe and that’s why I’ve shared this with you. From the folk at Gray Wolf Survival

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Medicine

What about medicine? It’s all well and good that you have an Elite Large Fully Stocked GI Issue Medic First Aid Kit Bag but do you know how to use anything in it more than the band-aids? Do you know how to recognize the symptoms of internal injury? Would you know when to use the veterinary antibiotics that you stocked up on this last year? By medicine, I don’t just mean pills and stuff but how to fix people.

Obviously medicine is a HUGE thing to look into but one of the things I’d suggest you start looking into (after some basic First Aid) is how to make  your own medicine. Just like alcohol, if you can make medicine, you won’t have to carry or stock it, and you can use that knowledge to either barter for goods you don’t have or use yourself.

And don’t think that just buying a book on survival medicine is sufficient. You should go out and train on how to do the things in that book or you’ll be staring at the pictures wondering if you’re doing it right.

Books are definitely things that I do spend quite a bit on – but I actually read them and then do some research on how to use that knowledge. I use the books as reference and to get me started.

Hunting and gathering

Sure it helps if you pack a gun with ammo and your fishing pole with string and hooks with all the smelly stuff etc but do you know how to use all that stuff? Tracking animals takes some skill. Trapping them can take even more.

And if you got yourself a deer in the woods, do you know how to field dress it, skin it, butcher it and store the meat, and all that jazz? There are things to learn about what to do once you actually manage to grab or kill something you’re gonna eat. There are also a lot of uses for animals outside of just eating them. Would you know how to tan animal hides if you had to?

Homesteading

Let’s say you got yourself a dandy cabin in the woods and have a month’s worth of food stocked up there. What’re you gonna do the next month? Tracking, trapping and fishing take time and energy. One thing that can provide even more food per ounce of effort is gardening/farming/homesteading. You may not be able to carry or store 1,000 pounds of potatoes but you can sure grow them.

People who lived throughout the U.S. a hundred years ago and longer knew how to do this stuff because they grew up doing this stuff. A lot of us have lost this knowledge but it’s still available to be learned. Homesteading is the essence of self-sufficiency. In fact, there are so many useful things you can learn if you get into homesteading knowledge that it could easily deserve its own post on the benefits. Divining the knowledge within will bestow upon you the ability to do such things as: make soap, raise and butcher farm animals, grow crops, store food, make food such as butter and cheese out of basic components, make clothing, get energy off the land, and a LOT more.

Self defense

If you find yourself in a disaster or SHTF scenario, it won’t be enough just to know how to get stuff, fix stuff or store stuff. There are always gonna be people out there who’ve learned the TOPS method of survival – Taking Other People’s Stuff.

Even having a gun is pretty useless if you don’t know how to use it. Take some time to learn how to defend yourself. Learn how to fight, how to shoot, how to take care of your weapons, how to make ammo, all that stuff. Figure out what you’d need to know that you can learn now. You may not be able to learn it in time then.

Mechanical stuff

It’s awesome that you brought a $100,000 tricked-out, lifted, blown and bad (in a good way) F350 turbo diesel all EMP-proofed and stuff but if you went out one morning and it wouldn’t start, would you know how to get it running or does it instantly become a really expensive radio and extra storage for stuff you don’t wanna keep in the cabin?

You may have a garage full of all sorts of tools but do you actually know how to use them? There are a lot of basic things you can learn about how to troubleshoot and fix a car to get it running even if you don’t have replacement parts.

The big thing about mechanical ability that you also need to keep in mind is that you need to learn how to fabricate things and use things in ways they weren’t designed for. If you were in the woods, would you be able to have hot water for showers? Could you make an evaporative cooler running off solar or water power? The more you learn about how things work, the easier it’ll be to make it work yourself, or even make one from scrap. Here’s a quick example of how you could make a hand-pump for a water well. With some experience, you could adapt something like this to work without you having to pump it.

Basic survival

This is one that preppers usually do spend some time on. There are literally thousands of websites out there that can teach you call manner of bushcraft, as well as schools. I’d suggest that you get off your computer and get out actually into the woods and try it.

There are many ways to start a fire with wood and friction, and you may know ten methods off the top of your head but have you ever tried to do it? It’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s a little like learning how to play pool. You can read all the books on the subject you want, and sit in lecture halls taught by the leading experts but that’s all crap until you get yourself to a table and hit some balls. If you’re gonna get a book on survival – just get this one – and then take it out camping with you.

You may not think so, but learning how to tie knots can be an important survival skill too. When I was going through the Warrant Officer Candidate School we had a leadership obstacle course that made us have to figure out how to do all kinds of stuff with random crap that was laying at the station. I’m decent with several knots but this was a bit more than I was used to. Luckily, one of the guys on my team was an 18C dude with a LOT of knot-tying experience. It made a few things work that wouldn’t have normally.

Electronics and communication

I spent decades in electronics. It’s one of those things that’s easily transferred to other things. Getting started in it was difficult. Lucky for me, My first MOS in the Army was in electronics in the 80’s and back then they taught you all the basic theory and then how to troubleshoot things down to the component level. I moved on from there to computer systems and even now use it with my ham radio (which is the best thing for emergency communications). And, don’t be an idiot and say there won’t be any electricity so there’s no reason to learn it now because you don’t know what’s going to happen until it does.

Just like electronics in general, ham radio is a very broad and complicated topic. It may seem like all you have to do is buy a Yaesu 857d like I have, hook it up to an antenna with a coax cable, and power it. That just sets you up. You have to be able to reach someone on the other end and have them reach you.

That can be very difficult at times. Learn it now and you can use it later. Learning it by yourself later is very hard. If you want to start, first get your license and then pick up something cheap like this handheld that you can learn on and keep in your bugout bag. It’s SUPER cheap but works. The best upgrade for any handheld btw is a new antenna. Just keep in mind that this one has a different post at the top than others so you’ll need an adapter.

So don’tt just stack up on gear but rather learn some skills too. Better save this lesson for later! For more great survival info, check out Gray Wolf Survival.

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