I joined, not too long ago, a pre­pared­ness meet­up group in North­ern NJ. There seem to be only a few of us that are reg­u­lars and show up once a month to the meet­ing.  There are var­i­ous oth­er mem­bers of the group that may make it depend­ing on their sched­ules or not.  One of the ideas we had, was of course, to test our gear and our heads for a “Bug Out Week­end.” What is the def­i­n­i­tion of this bug out week­end?  Well, it goes a lit­tle like this:

• This is a sim­u­lat­ed test.  The test dic­tates that on a Fri­day morn­ing (most like­ly), there is some sort of man made or nat­ur­al dis­as­ter where you must aban­don your home for what could be a tem­po­rary or per­ma­nent peri­od of time.  You won’t know for at least 72 hours.  You will meet at the ren­dezvous point with the “team” and make your way to area “X” on foot to make base camp for a few days until things set­tle down and we can head home to assess the sit­u­a­tion.  

That is the loose sce­nario, here is the cri­te­ria the leader of the meet­up group and I had come up with over lunch that must be adhered to by the group before and dur­ing the week­end.  You will notice there will be some struc­ture to it in places and oth­ers will look like action items before the week­end occurs.

First, some cri­te­ria:

To Do List before we can make this week­end hap­pen:

• We need to choose a date (week­end) for this test and NOT devi­ate from it.
• We need to choose the location(s) of the week­end, both base camp and ren­dezvous point.  We decid­ed to try to keep the loca­tion with­in an hour or so dri­ve of north­ern NJ if we can.
• Time Slot.  From the time you get the “phone call” that says it’s “go time” you will have 60 — 180 min­utes to get to the ren­dezvous point.
• Cost.  If we plan on using state prop­er­ty, there may be a charge per per­son or for the group to ‘camp’ in the state park.… Of course, if this were a real emer­gency, that may not be the case, but in this case if we end up on state land, we want to abide by as many rules as we can…

Skill/Task list that will be assigned to one or more mem­bers of the group:

• OPSEC
• Fire
• First Aid
• Food Har­vest­ing / Hunt­ing (Where Nec­es­sary) and Food Stor­age if required.
• Water (find­ing a source and find­ing a way to store ample water for the team)

Dai­ly Con­sid­er­a­tions

• Weath­er.  I sug­gest we have this week­end, rain or shine… But that is just me…
• Gath­er­ing fire­wood
• Gath­er­ing food
• Secu­ri­ty.  Night­ly secu­ri­ty watch for two hours per team mem­ber is manda­to­ry.  Sleep depri­va­tion is a real­is­tic side affect of bug­ging out and stay­ing alert will be impor­tant.  You should feel the affects of the sleep depri­va­tion dur­ing the week­end to under­stand the real­ism of what you are test­ing.

Real / Nat­ur­al Threats

• Black Bear
• Coy­ote (pos­si­bil­i­ties are slim, but they are a con­sid­er­a­tion)
• Rat­tle Snake and Cop­per­head if it is not too cold or too hot for them to be out.

Restric­tions

• We dis­cussed no alco­hol, and state prop­er­ty may dic­tate that, how­ev­er, there are mul­ti­ple con­sid­er­a­tions for this restric­tion.  First, the mem­bers of the group do not know each oth­er all that well yet, and alco­hol is an added vari­able we do not want, and again it may be against the rules… We will see as we dis­cuss.   A small flask may be okay, but we do not want drunk­ards with us in the field.

Oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions:

• Air­soft.  To add a lev­el of addi­tion­al weight bear­ing equip­ment, and lev­el of pseu­do-real­ism, if you have Air­soft rifles and/or pis­tols I sug­gest you take them with you as you will get the expe­ri­ence of trav­el­ing on foot while hav­ing to hold and main­tain your weapon, so to speak.