Day 228: 2020 Pandemic. Jeep Wrangler, Scout and a Trip Into The Smoky Mountains
Smoky Mountain National Park is the most visited of all the National Parks. Therefore, I tend to avoid it. The reality is everyone crowds onto 441 and every place worth stopping is packed with cars.
The National Park only takes a portion of the Smokies. There’s the Cherokee National Forest and other preserves and parks. BTW, there is a difference between a National Park and a National Forest. No dispersed camping in the former and Parks are much more tightly regulated.
BTW, for veterans, you can get a free Golden Pass for National Parks HERE.
I use my short trips into the Smokies not just for enjoyment, but to shake out my gear. There are a lot of people who have nice looking Grab-n-Go bags and other equipment but have never actually used a lot of it. Just setting up a tent can be challenging if you’ve never done it (speaking from experience—we never carried tents in Special Forces, no matter how tough the weather).
For this trip I went south toward the TN-GA border then cut in to the Cohutta Wilderness Area, which is the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi with more than 40,000 acres. It’s south of the Smoky Mountain National Park, east of Chattanooga and north of Atlana. It straddles the border and abuts the Cherokee, Nantahala and Chattahoochee Natl Forests, so there’s a lot of elbow room as Daniel Boon likes to say.
I was first introduced to this a few years ago when talking to someone in the parking lot who was admiring my Jeep. Or Cool Gus. Or both. He mentioned a thing called the Georgia Traverse. I’ve driven the entire traverse and much more. Technically, it’s not particularly hard, although there are some very bumpy sections.
This week’s trip covered 237 miles, at an average speed of 17.3 miles per house and a total ascent of 15,451 feet. Love my Gaia app. I’m not slow, I just get there. Plus, I have to stop a lot to let Scout recon.
I’ll be doing some videos this next week to show how my Jeep is configured for off the grid (including a solar panel on the roof and backup batteries). Nothing but good times ahead.
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Updated as of October 2020. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve also just published The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1).
Guide to Seven Great Disasters Publishes Today!
I hope everyone is enjoying cooler fall weather.
My latest release, The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (2) is out today. This series of books is about learning from past disasters to prevent future ones. From the misconceptions on both sides that led to Pearl Harbor to the last Tsar’s leadership failures which shaped the 20th century into the present. There is also the Sultana, the greatest maritime disaster in US History, whose wreck site is now land and two miles from water and for which Abraham Lincoln was partly responsible.
The first nine books of the Area 51 series are each .99 this month. And Chasing the Ghost, the first Horace Chase book in the series is free today.
Stay safe!
Bob
Day 218: 2020 Pandemic. Are You Prepared for Winter?
Having served in the Special Forces Group that focused on Winter Warfare, I spent several months every year not on deployment, training at high altitude in the cold. It was amazing how each year, I’d forgotten how tough and brutal the cold is.
There are things we all need to know to prepare ourselves for winter and to deal with possible emergencies we might encounter. Here is a free slideshow on that. I’ll have one on preparing for and dealing with Blizzards shortly, as I just updated that in the Survival Guide in the new edition.
Stay safe!
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Updated as of October 2020. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve also just published The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1).
Day 217: 2020 Pandemic. What Books Should You Have in Your Survival Library?
I just finished updating my Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide and an addition to the new edition is a listing of books I believe should be in everyone’s survival library. These are books I have, both in print and eBook. While I think my book is pretty good, it’s impossible for any single book to cover the breadth of knowledge we’d need.
From plants to medicine to fishing to how to rebuild technology after a collapse, to a novel that gets kids interested in survival, these are some suggestions.
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Updated as of October 2020. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve also just published The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1).
Day 216: 2020 Pandemic. What Really Happened to the Donner Party?
While researching the Donner Party, the thing that struck me wasn’t what everyone focuses on: the cannibalism. That’s almost an afterthought to all the mistakes and, particularly, the murders, that came before.
The Donner Party was doomed long before it got stuck in the snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Poor leadership, bad decision-making, trusting a stranger—and then the deaths and murders.
My Donner Party short, extracted from The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1) is free. Below is the free slideshow summarizing what happened.
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Updated as of October 2020. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve also just published The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1).
Day 211: 2020 Pandemic. Free Survival and Emergency Apps—Updated. And the Best Hiking, Off-Roading, and Topo App
I’m in the process of updating all my nonfiction and this morning I went through my free slideshow on useful apps, adding a couple, including one for Wildfires. Also, I added an affiliate discount link for the best map app I’ve found and used: Gaia.
Here’s the free slideshow:
I’ve also just published The Green Beret Guide to Seven Great Disasters (1).
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
Day 189: 2020 Pandemic. How Climate Change Will Reshape the United States
We’ve noticed this summer in Tennessee has been more humid than usual. To the point where working outside is fraught with the danger of heat exhaustion event though the temperature is not extreme, perhaps 90 degrees. My wife and I are talking about moving. But where?
Welcome to the future. The Mississippi valley, extending to either side, north to Minnesota, will be like this from here on out.
It’s estimated that half of Americans, 162 million, will experience a decline in the quality of their environment in the coming decades. That being it becoming hotter and their being less water. Which, interestingly, before I began researching this I labeled as the two keys to wherever we move: cooler and a secure water supply.
Yes, California is burning and 2020 is the worst year. But as many are saying, it’s going to be looked back on as the best year. The same with Washington and Oregon. We lived on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, a ferry ride from Seattle for several years. People there have disdained air conditioning and always been proud of their temperate weather (albeit they’re vampires for ten months of the year with no sunlight). That’s changed. Record temperatures are baking homes and work. Smoke from fires is trapped in the bubble of the Sound between the Olympic and Cascade Mountains.
The hottest day recorded on the planet, 130 degrees, was recorded this year in Death Valley. You might not live there, but people are still moving to Phoenix which had 53 straight days hitting 110. Meanwhile hurricanes are coming so fast, we’ve run out of names for this season.
One study estimates that one in twelve Americans will move from the Southeast toward the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest and California. That’s literally out of the frying pan into the fire. Climate refugee is a term we’re hearing more and more and it is now inside our borders.
The unseen danger for many is drinking water. Drought is searing not only the west but Florida, Georgia and Alabama. The Memphis Sands Aquifer which provides water for MS, AR, LA and TN is going down by millions of gallons. Every day. In the west the Ogallala Aquifer will be gone by the end of the century.
Eight of the US’s top twenty metro areas face dire threats from rising sea levels, including Boston, New York City and Miami. One projection says 13 million will have to move away from the coast, but I think that’s vastly undercounting, since it’s not just whether their home will untenable, but the infrastructure around them. Even here, in Knoxville, during one deluge, a key road was cut by deep water. An event so unusual lots of people simply drove around the warning barriers and to their surprise were dangerously submerged as they plowed into deep water.
Insurers have been backing off of dangerous areas. Even in 2004, while we lived on Hilton Head (the entire island is a flood zone, something many locals never really consider) we saw the change in our insurance company and the coverage and knew it was time to get out. The problem is that state governments, such as in California and Florida and 28 more, have been supplementing insurance to keep people in place for economic reasons. The problem is that the numbers on the costs are going far beyond allowing people to rebuild in the same place their house burned, was blown down, or flooded. Florida, for example, has the potential for being liable for 511 billion dollars to back up coastal property insurance. That’s seven times the state’s budget.
Doing research for my flood risk for The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide, I found that the flood zone maps most use are out of date since they haven’t taken into account water level rising (not just oceans, but the Great Lakes and other bodies of water are going up).
We are entering a new world that is changing fast. The speed of the change, both in terms of climate change and human reaction to it will be exponentially fast and not in a good way
How are you preparing?
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
Day 187: 2020 Pandemic. What President Roosevelt said two days after Pearl Harbor
“We must share together the bad news and the good news . . . So far, the news has been all bad. If you feel your Government is not disclosing enough of the truth, you have every right to say so.” FDR over the radio, two days after Pearl Harbor, December 1941
I guess he trusted the American public wouldn’t panic and would pull together in the face of harsh reality.
As people on the west coast are finding out, it’s not just the fire, it’s the secondary effect of air quality that extends far beyond the hot zones.
Stay indoors. Make sure any air circulating isn’t vented to the outside. Here is the EPA page on what to do—of course, love where they say use N-95 masks which STILL aren’t readily available. Not like we haven’t had most of a year to react to COVID-19.
I’m releasing two books in the next month about disasters, because as we face future ones, we need to learn from the past.
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
Day 179: 2020 Pandemic. 410,451 Dead From COVID-19 by the end of the year.
That’s the latest prediction. Which means a surge and more than double the current death toll coming in the next four months.
This is the projection by the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics. They’ve been on target from the start. The model says many of those deaths can be avoided if we follow basic precautions, particularly wearing masks. It also could be much higher if we loosen restrictions and do thing like hold massive motorcycle rallies and football games and open schools. Oh, wait.
We still don’t have any Federal plan to deal with a pandemic that’s been raging all year. In fact, the government is actively working against any sort of plan. It’s trying to juke the stats, putting the re-election of the man who bungled our preparation and response ahead of public welfare. That is a non-partisan reality. We have a quarter of the world’s deaths from COVID yet only 4% of the world’s population. Numbers don’t lie.
What can you do?
Wear your mask. Don’t attend large gatherings of people. VOTE. Frankly, I’m going to vote in person, well masked and social distanced and immediately disinfecting after. I predict that mail-in votes will be used by the current administration to claim voter fraud and try to negate the election. After all the present administration claimed the Republican primaries were rigged in 2016. And won. And claimed the election was rigged. And won. Maybe we should believe?
Get your flu shot. You do not want the double whammy of COVID and flu.
STAY SAFE!
I just updated the free slideshow on dealing with power outages. Now that I have a solid copy of Equinox ready for publication on 22 September, I am focusing on updated all my survival information and on some other projects that touch on it.
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
Day 176: 2020 Pandemic. Money Can’t Buy Happiness, But Can It Buy Survival? What the Rich Get Wrong
I “what if” for a living.
What makes Special Forces elite is our planning before the actual mission. Planning for all possible contingencies, on top of the actual mission. I did it as an A-Team leader, as a battalion operations officer responsible for deploying 15 A-teams around the world, and as an instructor/writer for many years at the JFK Special Warfare School, which also runs the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school.
I’ve applied those experiences as a bestselling writer in multiple genres in fiction, including thrillers, historical and science fiction and in nonfiction writing with my Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide as well as my Stuff Doesn’t Just Happen books. In the former I’m looking forward to possible disasters; in the latter I look back at past catastrophes and dissect them for the cascade events that caused them and examine how similar disasters can be prevented in the future.
I constantly study and examine how many different types of people have been preparing for what the rich call the ‘event’. The ‘event’ is a breakdown of civilization.
Those preparing for the ‘event’ range from the person in the remote already living off the grid, to hard-core bunker preppers, to those plunking down billions/millions of dollars for their exclusive estates in places like New Zealand or the isolation of Montana or buying ‘condos’ in survival silos.
One of the problems when approaching the ‘event’ is that it could be many things. Frankly, a key event is going on all around us right now as the climate changes. We are experiencing survival situations right now as a byproduct of that from wildfires to stronger and more frequent hurricanes to persistent drought to flooding and more.
Thus, the first thing I teach is to conduct an Area Study. Every person and group need to examine their situation, beginning with themselves and expanding outward. For example, in my survival book I cover dealing with a house fire (which odds are you will experience at some level) well before learning how to make a fire for survival out in the woods (have a lighter?)
Thus, the rich make the same mistake most make: they’re focused on the end game and miss the more likely, dangerous events in their everyday life, such as stalking (aka Gavin DeBecker’s Gift of Fear), a helicopter crash or even health issues that are ignored or the dangers in their various mansions.
I’ve put a lot of thought and war-gaming into various scenarios for the rich because of some of my fiction. I’ll discuss more of these in other blogs, but one of the first that comes up is security in case of the ‘event’. The moment you establish a static position, you become a target. Thus, one must consider how to protect that position. Hiring guards raises many issues. Money will be worthless after the ‘event’. So, what are you offering? A place in the survival site? But why then is the no-longer-rich person in a better position than the security? Can you buy loyalty? With what? How long will it last? Does your security have family they will have a higher loyalty/love for?
I have an exponential rule of security: the more you need, the less likely you will have it.
There are ways around this, but one thing I’ve learned is that the rich didn’t get that way by giving things away. As I noted, each person’s situation is different so there is no one answer solves all.
For the rest of us? Get prepared now for the more likely occurrences and even for the event. Start small. Build from there. Here is how to do an Area Study. FREE.
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
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