Basic Self-Reliance Series: How to Choose a Survival Cache Location

This is Part 1 of several episodes in a series titled Basic Self-Reliance. The purpose of this series is to help you develop some confidence that you can be self-reliant in case you ever need to be. Accordingly, the focus is on developing a habit of experimenting with various skills you don’t normally exercise; not necessarily to become an expert in any of them, nor to show you the best way to accomplish a specific task, but rather to train yourself to happily tackle the unknown.

For instance, in a couple of segments I’ll show you how to make your own soap. Now, arguably, making soap is not an essential survival skill — I’ll grant that. But the process of collecting ingredients, measuring them accurately, understanding the chemistry by doing it, all coupled with the satisfaction of achieving a tangible result… it’s a hands-on experience that gets you away from the TV and the computer and reacquaints you with the physical world you’ll have to deal with much more intimately if the grid fails.

(video coming soon)

For this to work, though, you can’t just watch the videos. It is essential that you actually do the tasks I illustrate, or at least something similar.

The first video in this series is part 1 of 4 videos about survival caches. (For exhaustive coverage of this issue, please read How to Hide and Recover Your Survival Cache, which is the culmination of a long-term project in which I solicited much input from SNO readers, some of whom are experts in the field).

In the videos I will cover the subject in more topical fashion. This video discusses the basics of finding a good location for a survival cache and how to hide it. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of camouflage vs. concealment and how each is suitable for different purposes.

Part 2 will cover how to go about recovering your cache without giving away its location, with a brief discussion of the basics of ingress and egress.

In Part 3 you will learn what to put in your cache if it is an emergency evacuation cache.

In Part 4 we’ll discuss what to store in the cache if it is a waypoint cache.

Upcoming videos will address a wide variety of skills and activities that will help you develop a self-reliant attitude, including preserving meats, building an emergency shelter, and making your own soap.

In the end, you’ll probably come up with many more ideas for how you can practice self-reliant skills.

And that’s the point.

~SnoMan