A little contest - the $50 survival kit

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Muppet

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Here's the idea for the contest: design a survival kit costing less that $50.

Your kit description should start with some idea of what kind of scenario it covers: I doubt anybody can design a do-it-all kit for that kind of money, so make some assumptions, and make them explicit! I'm doing this partly for fun, partly to refine some ideas, but mostly to learn!

Suggestions: URLs for items which can be purchased online, nearest-dollar or rougher accounting, and sub-dollar/commodity items can be assumed to come from home at no cost. Or do it your way 🙂

Here's my first entry: Muppet's Lost-In-The-Woods Kit

A $50 buck basic survival kit for the "briefly lost in the woods" scenario. The sort of thing one might carry on a day hike which suddenly turns out to take a little longer than expected due to a sprained ankle, or a minimalist kit to outfit an inexperienced friend with.

----------------------- the easy stuff -----------------

- two person sized space blanket - actually a very cool item, I saw them today.
http://www.rei.com/online/store/ProductDisplay?storeId=8000&catalogId=40000008000&productId=9392380&parent_category_rn=4500522
$5

- whistle with compass. REI sells this at three different prices, branded by Coglins, Sunnuto and For Kids.
http://www.rei.com/online/store/ProductDisplay?storeId=8000&catalogId=40000008000&productId=12229077&parent_category_rn=11549413
- OR whistle with compass and waterproof match case
http://store.yahoo.com/wj-enterprises/5insurwhis.html
$5

- Iodine for water purification (either potable aqua or 2% tincture of iodine) plus vitamin C to kill the taste
OR
- Potassium permangenate crystals. These sound great, but I can't find any solid information on them online.
$5

- Lifeboat or equivalent matches, plus a bic lighter and a bit of a candle
$5

- Cheap LED flashlight (Dorcy AAA from Walmart or the Energizer LED headlamp for $12)
$10

------------ now some harder choices, $20 left --------------

- knock-off swiss army knife with wood saw (or a cheap or craft knife and a cheap folding saw, also around $10)
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=knife+saw+opener&btnG=Search+Froogle&scoring=p&sa=N&start=30
$10

- metal cup / mess kit pan to heat water.
$5

- small bottle of hand sanitizer, and some bug repellent/sun screen
$5

-------------- No money left, stuff from stores, assumed at marginal cost. ----------------

- Recycled soda bottle to carry water.
- String
- Sticking plasters
- Food
- Pen, paper
- Stout garbage bags
- Duct tape 🙂
- Safety pins

---------------------------------------------------------------

Your turn 🙂
 
Skip the space blanket, it's useless. Garbage bags are good. Do bring warmer clothes than you think you'll need.

Don't bother with the Dorcy light. $1 Countycomm coin cell light is about the same. If you're going to bivouac, long runtime isn't needed, just stay put til daylight. If you're really concerned, install a 2032 cell instead of the two 2016's and you'll get enormous runtime.

I don't see much point to the SAK, unless you have some cans or bottles to open, etc. (P-38 GI can opener, 25 cents).

Skip the metal cup, what do you want hot water for? Or just use an old soup can. Also, skip the lifeboat matches, you're not on a lifeboat. I'd be careful of starting any fires anyway. This presumes it's not winter, or you shouldn't have been out there without real gear in the first place, especially alone.

Do bring some more first aid stuff. Disinfectant, Advil, etc.

Add a signal mirror ($5?).

Also, bring a cellular phone ($10 on ebay if you don't already have one). Even if not activated, you can still call 911 with it in most places.
 
Heh... got to disagree with you on the space blanket. I've used them more than once to keep warm, once recently on a very, very windy mountainside waiting for it to get dark in a bitingly cold wind (it's a long story). They do actually perform as advertised, at least in my experience!

SAK is mainly along for the saw, handly for dealing with wood for fires. Soup can works for me ;-)

Signal mirror... anybody ever used one?

Phone's a brilliant touch, that's classy thinking!
 
The following site has seems to have some good info...
http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/prepinfo.htm


Here's two packs from the above site...
http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/pocketkitbulldog.htm

http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/pocketpowderdry.htm

Never forget about...
http://www.redcross.org/services/disaster/0,1082,0_3_,00.html


When looking at potential contents some variables to take into account are: location, climate, car or on body, projected duration, et cetera.

To define the question of what should bne in a kit one might want to start asking what it is one wants the kit to do. Is it for urban, suburban or wilderness? Is it for 12-24 hours, or 2-3 days or? Is it simply to see you through a short interruption of normal civil services, or is it going to serve as a meager platform by which to survive in case of a longer term interruption? Will you need it as potential tool by which to facilitate your own rescue from some remote location?

As you said, typically one kit won't serve all function... so it's best to 'layer' your kits to suit various needs and contingencies... personal (on body), car, office, home, cabin, cache.

Food and water are often overlooked items. For sustaining life and providing comfort (and maintaining the ability to think clearly), having ready to consume food and water is vital for the first 2 or 3 days of any serious emergency (at a minimum). Coastguard ration bars and water packs are great to have on hand in the trunk of a car, or tucked in closet -- they are not yummy, but they are cheap, well preserved, and in theory nutritious enough to keep a body going.

Awhile back I did some work designing emergency preparedness kits for a large institution and I took the ground up approach... starting to look at them from what your asking about, the single person, short term kit. It's a very interesting feild, and there's a lot of great info out there.

Personally, if I'm looking at a $50 kit it'd be a car kit.

I think the average person will most likely encounter an emergancy in or near their cars -- a break down, a really bad traffic jam that lasts for hours, or as a participant in a accident and maybe even as the first person who arrives at the scene of an accident. Heck, it seems almost inevitable.

It would surely have pre-packaged water, food bars, first-aid supplies (probably a $10 OSHA kit from Wall-Mart type store). I'd also toss in some space blankets, work gloves, and a few other tib bits.

So with that $50 I'd focus on food water and first aid for the car.

Also, it goes without saying that CPR and First aid training are a minimum. If you work for a good employer such training will be free... if you only have $50 and do not have access to such training for free, then I'd say spend the money on Red Cross training.

A very good freind of mine was first on the scene of an overturned car in a ditch and literally saved a womans life because of his Red Cross training... no other fancy equipement -- so I place a high value on that basic traing and think it should be a part of any emergancy kit.
 
The SAK saw is pretty near useless, and really, it's better to not start fires in the woods. If you really must cook something, take a homemade alcohol or Esbit stove, e.g.:

http://www.hikingwebsite.com/gear/homemade/rrstove.htm

If you have to bring a saw, you can get a decent sized one in the $5 range. Really though, I'd say skip all this stuff if the weather isn't freezing. You can stand some discomfort and you don't need the Jack London experience.
 
Datasaurusrex - good chain of thought... want to fill in a little more detail? I think the idea of the car kit as primary is really wise. I'd love to see a more fleshed out idea of what that would comprise...

If I get enough good ideas together, I might even put up a web page ;-)

Haarkev... I like doug's kit, but which problems does that-and-a-knife solve?
 
Stockwiz: that stove doesn't look very stable, but a very clever idea otherwise.

Paulr: I made a similar stove once, but a fair bit simpler.
Used the Trangia burner, cut a piece of aluminium for a windshield, punched a few holes along the bottom, and two set of holes about halfway up. Poked two (steel!) tent pegs through the upper holes to rest the pan on.

BTW,I've been led to believe stove alcohol is very difficult to come by in the States, but obviously my informant was mistaken?
 
[ QUOTE ]
paulr said:
The SAK saw is pretty near useless, and really, it's better to not start fires in the woods.[...]
If you have to bring a saw, you can get a decent sized one in the $5 range. Really though, I'd say skip all this stuff if the weather isn't freezing. You can stand some discomfort and you don't need the Jack London experience.

[/ QUOTE ]
He's asking about a survival kit, not hiking gear, so we're talking about stuff to prevent death, not discomfort (e.g. when you have to start a fire or risk freezing to death.)

A $50 limit gives you a lot of leeway; size is probably the more important limiting factor. (A gallon of bleach is cheap but you're not going to fit it in an Altoid box or fanny pack survival kit.)...you want to cover the basic categories: shelter, fire, water, signaling, first aid, etc.

Equipped.org is a great resource and goes into far better detail than I can. The Ranger Digest also has some interesting ideas.
 
Well, he's talking about a kit for something going wrong on a newbie's dayhike in the woods, so that's different than a kit for being on a lifeboat, etc. In particular, newbies should not go on solo dayhikes in the winter. And if it's summer, in most places, then no matter what happens, the chance of freezing is near zero. I guess there could be some totally freak storm that dumps snow on Miami in July, but you could also get hit by a meteor. Both are so unlikely that there's no point preparing for them. So, assuming we're talking about a summer dayhike, I still would skip all the fire stuff, no stove, no lifeboat matches, etc. A rainstorm is more likely and some kind of stuff to stay dry (plastic tarp, garbage bags) helps a lot.

Similarly, if you go hiking in a park near a big city, you won't suddenly be teleported to the Alaskan tundra. So chances are that your best signalling device in such a location is a cellular phone. Write down the phone number of the rangers when you enter the park, and if something happens, call them and tell them where you are and whether you need assistance. Crazy stuff like pistol flares are just a fire hazard. It occurs to me though, that you might be able to make a cheap signal device out of a used-up disposable camera with an electronic flash. In open terrain at night, that should be much more noticable than any small flashlight.
 
What's interesting is that almost all of the current survival thinking seems to be bounded either by extreme conditions (the classic "survivalist" model of "no resupply, ever") or size/weight constraints ('2 lbs', altoids tin etc).

I was trying to step out of that model, get ideas about price sensitivity. I think that a big reason that people are caught short is that they think a really useful kit is going to be expensive, and they don't know that to buy. There's remarkably little convergence between kit designs, outside of half a dozen basic items, and many of them seem to make radically different assumptions about both threat model and skills.

For example, fishhooks. I'm a relatively handy guy, you know? I think there's less than one in a hundred chance I could catch an edible fish with a fishhook and a line without a rod and a lot of practice.

Yet they're everywhere in survival kits.

Just odd. Ditto a lot of the little kits which don't include any shelter component, assuming you'll make some kind of primitive shelter. Possible, yes, but my god a space blanket and a plastic bag is hard to beat, especaially combined with a windbreak and natural insulation beneath you.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts, folks.

Mup.
 
[ QUOTE ]
paulr said:
Well, he's talking about a kit for something going wrong on a newbie's dayhike in the woods, so that's different than a kit for being on a lifeboat, etc. In particular, newbies should not go on solo dayhikes in the winter. And if it's summer, in most places, then no matter what happens, the chance of freezing is near zero. I guess there could be some totally freak storm that dumps snow on Miami in July, but you could also get hit by a meteor. Both are so unlikely that there's no point preparing for them. So, assuming we're talking about a summer dayhike, I still would skip all the fire stuff, no stove, no lifeboat matches, etc. A rainstorm is more likely and some kind of stuff to stay dry (plastic tarp, garbage bags) helps a lot.

[/ QUOTE ]
Respectfully (and strongly) disagree. It doesn't take a "perfect storm" to come up with a scenario where a newbie day hike turns dicey. Heck, right now, it's mid-April and the evening lows for the past few days in Virginia have been in the 30s and 40s (fortunately, it's going to be much nicer this weekend). You can get hypothermia in 50 degree weather if you're not careful, especially with wind and rain.

Say Mr. Newbie goes for a day hike in the Shenandoah Valley, out by Luray Caverns (about 90 minutes drive from DC). Fall, wants to see the leaves change, it's pretty out there. Mid to upper 50s during the day, 10-15mph wind. He's been hiking all day, some elevation changes but nothing major (East Coast mountains and all that). Kind of tired. Sun's setting and he's eager to get back, so moving a little faster. Sweating. Gets turned around, loses the trail. Tries to retrace his steps, no dice. No signal on the cell phone. Before he knows it, it's dark, clothes are damp from sweat, 40 degrees out and dropping. Mr. Newbie can have a very bad night if he's not careful.

That's what a survival kit is for. Hope it has a lighter or a hotspark in it.
 
For me if I ever was caught off guard a ways away from my car, which is unlikely, a cell phone, whether it be on a plan or just one with prepaid minutes would be the most valuable commodity for me. I don't see what use I'd have for a survival kit.

I have some hand warmers, water, and matches in the trunk in case conditions would warrent their use, but that's it.
 
[ QUOTE ]
neogoon said:
Say Mr. Newbie goes for a day hike in the Shenandoah Valley, out by Luray Caverns (about 90 minutes drive from DC). Fall, wants to see the leaves change, it's pretty out there. Mid to upper 50s during the day, 10-15mph wind. He's been hiking all day, some elevation changes but nothing major (East Coast mountains and all that). Kind of tired. Sun's setting and he's eager to get back, so moving a little faster. Sweating. Gets turned around, loses the trail. Tries to retrace his steps, no dice. No signal on the cell phone. Before he knows it, it's dark, clothes are damp from sweat, 40 degrees out and dropping. Mr. Newbie can have a very bad night if he's not careful.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, ok, again, depends on surroundings and time of year. I'm thinking more like San Diego in August. It's warm, even at night. And as mentioned, bring warm clothes. In colder places, A disposable lighter and some vaseline-soaked cottonballs should be enough firestarter. Are those Sparklite things really any better? Maybe you want some trioxane bars too. Trying to gather wood and get it burning in a rainstorm is pretty difficult. Anyway, if Mr. Newbie is on a trail 90 minutes from DC, he'll likely see other hikers every few minutes to ask for directions, or else he shouldn't be hiking alone. And why doesn't his phone work?

There's a big thread on equipped.org about food, with some saying skip it (no fishhooks etc). You need water to survive, but no food for a few days won't hurt you, especially with your adrenelin going. And anyway, fish swim in water, they don't run around in the woods; at least in the places I hike, there's no fish to catch.

From what I can gather, the advertised heat-reflective properties of space blankets don't really usefully exist. They can help you keep warm by being a windbreak and vapor barrier, but a plastic sheet can do the same. However, since that 2-person space blanket costs just a few bucks and is probably very visible to searchers, I guess it's a reasonable buy.

I guess it's just hard for me to picture situations where this stuff would be used, at least in the places I hike. I never bring anything like it and I guess I feel ok about it. There's always other people around, the phone coverage is solid, etc. But other places obviously can present different challenges.
 
There was a wreck here on the Loop last week that had a LOT of folks stuck for 4 hours plus!

Perhaps some prepackaged food and water in the truck wouldn't be such an awful idea...

Are we talking bottled water or something else entirely?
 
Mundane as it may seem, toilet paper is awfully handy to have around when you need it.

Brightnorm
 
[ QUOTE ]
paulr said:
Anyway, if Mr. Newbie is on a trail 90 minutes from DC, he'll likely see other hikers every few minutes to ask for directions, or else he shouldn't be hiking alone. And why doesn't his phone work?

[/ QUOTE ]
Suffice it to say, I agree that you should prepare for the conditions where you will be.

As for being 90 miles from DC -- it's not the heart of darkness, but it's not a big outdoor mall, either. And while it may be hard to believe, there are still lots of places, especially in more rural areas up in the hills, where cell coverage can be spotty.
 
If not heading far into true wilderness, I'd want short term "get found" and "make it through the night" stuff:

Compass
Topo Map
Whistle
Signal Mirror
Knife
Matches in Waterproof Container
Emergency Space Blanket
Emergency Food
Iodine Tablets
Water Container, full (Platypus bag, etc.)
---
The below items would blow the $50 limit, but you probably already have them anyway:
Insulating, Water Repellent Outerwear
Watch Cap
Cell Phone
 
Hey, for what it's worth, I live at about 7,500 ft in the Rockies. You can get messed up here pretty quickly a lot of different ways - snow in July, lightning, rain storms, bears destroying your campsite and stealing your food while you're away, you name it.

It's lovely, but not forgiving.

I figure the big threats up here are:

Trouble caused by:
Lostness
Injuries, including altitude sickness

Resulting rapidly in:
Exposure, Exposure, Exposure
Dehydration

I doubt you'd be gone long enough to die from hunger up here and not be dead from something else first or found: the terrain is rough, but there are a lot of people around. A pound of trailmix is a lot of food 🙂

In summer, most of what goes wrong for people is typical hiking stuff: hunters getting lost, spraining ankles etc. in winter, it's all avalanches wiping out back country skiiers and other stuff that's way out of my league (although *somebody* should be designing kit for those people, because they're dropping like flies some years and not all of it is immediate deaths).

One thing I forgot in the pack was sunglasses for snow blindness: bad omissions!

Anyway, I wasn't specifically designing a kit for up here, but that's the environment I'm in these days and I'm sure it influenced my thinking somewhat, like thinking that such a kit would be necessary at all.

And, on the space blanket front, they do actually work. I don't know about the super thin ones, but the more durable kind with the thick bright red backing are bloody amazing. The night I mentioned above, I was outside of Ward at something like 9000 ft in Feburary in a freezing cold wind. I was out there for three or four hours well into the night, and even decent outdoor gear wasn't remotely going to keep me warm.

The magic blanket did a damn good job, though. After I had it wrapped around me, I went from freezing cold and getting colder to "not too bad" and was fairly comfortable. It really didn't feel like a plastic sheet would have been just as good.

I'm really pretty sure there's at least something to the reflective effect, even if it's insignificant compared to a good insulating base layer. I can really feel the warmth reflecting back at me if I put the reflective surface close to my face, for instance.

I've also used the stuff on a prototype refugee shelter I've been working on:

http://mindismoving.org/hexayurt/

That's a reflective vapor barrier - basically the same stuff - and it kept the cardboard building in the pictures cool enough to sleep in 'till noon in 100F weather.

But that's a whole other story 🙂

Mup.
 
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