A Winter Camping Adventure - Mission > Gear > Wins/Loses

Hello, Welcome to the podcast. Is that your vaccine passport? And to use social credit score and be sure you have enough remaining carbon credits to enjoy today's show. Me and A Family, Your garden is the Resistance. Welcome in PB and Family. Thank you for joining me today. It's James Walton, intrepid commander of these prepper broadcasting networks, and I'm going to talk to you about winter camping. Okay, did a little winter camp. I don't want to go over the good, to bad and the ugly with you pull from it what you will. A lot of great information gear success is failures, opportunities in the new year, Okay. Before we get rolling, PBN membership is changing. If you'd like to support what we'd here do here, okay, go down to the show notes. There is a supporter link for Spreaker support. Okay. Fundamentally, it's a five dollars a month membership and you get access right there on your Spreaker player to all of our archived members only podcasts. You get ad free podcasts, you get podcasts early, okay, and as we get online, you're also going to get access to everything that PBN members get. If you are already a PBN member, you'll be receiving an email from me. Check your inbox. We're gonna get you all shifted over so that everybody gets to enjoy what you well, some of the things you've come to enjoy, and also some new things. Right. The access to the members only podcasts on the speaker app is way better than getting them off the PBN family website. Okay, So all that said, let's get to it linked down below. Become a supporter today, keep the PBN train running on full stem. Okay. The beginning of twenty twenty six to me marks a lot. It marks a big moment in my life because twenty twenty five was a bit of a well it was, it was everything. It was kind of a whirlwind, you know, of good and bad, but there were some exceptional lows and so as you can imagine, at the beginning of twenty twenty six, I thought to myself, this is where we You know, you can set a year up, you can start a year off in a way that it's you know, it's gonna work. Things are gonna work, and at least at the very beginning, things are gonna work, right, and it's you know, set goals and that kind of stuff. One of the things Dave Jones reached out to me and talk to me about in the Azure Force chat room was what are some of your goals? What are some of your guys' prepper goals in twenty twenty six, And one of mine was to do more camping and to bring more people camping who who don't go as much as you know, I'd like them to family camping, friends together, camping that kind of stuff, because camping in and of itself is probably one of the most underrated, you know, self reliant prepping, survival sort of human skill events upgrades that you can do, right I mean, if you're pulling up an RV and parking it and hanging out in there and playing the Nintendo Switch and that's a different thing. But if you're really gonna go camping, you know, like pack your gear in on your back, set up your camp site, cook over a fire, that kind of stuff, you're gonna do that kind of stuff, then you're gonna learn a lot about your preparedness level right out of the gate, right. So one of the biggest things I wanted to do was to take my oldest out and I just got lucky to be honest that he was into it and brought it to my attention, which was crazy. He said, Dad, I want to go out in camp before I go back to school. I want to go some high and see some views. And I said, all right, well, let's do it. And so we wound up at a state park in Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains, a beautiful one one i'd been to before when I'd driven by many times, a pretty quick and easy drive to get to the Appalachian Mountains from Richmond, Virginia. And what our biggest quarry was, right was going to be the cold weather. Like we were facing the cold weather, like really cold weather. I think the day itself wasn't bad, it was forty five something like that degrease, but the night was going to go into the twenties and feel like the teens. For me, it's nothing new, you know, I've done it in the past. I've done it with PBN hosts in the past. We've done cold weather stuff, cold weather ops, cold weather Night's out. You know. Gotham get Out was a terribly cold night, and you survive these things. It is what it is. But I wanted to talk to you guys about it, about kind of what the game plan was, what gear we used, what worked and what didn't, and some of the conversations that we had also while we were up there, or maybe one in particular. Now at the start, I want you to understand this whole camp out, and this is valuable because listen, it's not gonna happen for you in twenty twenty six if you don't do it, if you don't make it happen. This is key to the whole concept of self reliance and independence. Right, The whole concept of what we are here at PBN comes down to that phrase. It ain't gonna happen if you don't make it happen. Period. That's the whole story. This camp out would have never happened if I didn't make it happen, if we didn't make it happen. Right, and everything subsequently that happens here on the network happens in my life happens, you know, fitness and health and skills and family and fatherhood and husband and hold, everything that exists in life. I tell you all the time, it's about reps, and none of it's gonna happen if you don't make it happen in twenty twenty six. I want that to reverberate in your head. Right. In other words, you say you want to do a thing, Well, it ain't gonna happen if you don't make it happen. Put it on the back burner. Rolling into this year, there's been about five things that I've done already in six days that have already begun the trance for my year because there are things that have kind of been lingering. They've kind of been lingering in the background of my mind, and I had to give my own self a kick in the ass and say, look, Jim Bow, it ain't gonna happen if you don't make it happen. Okay, So suffice it to say that was the situation here. Also, you know, there were a million reasons not to go, but the mission was to get their set up camp right, hike in that the camp sites are hiking only anyway, so that's one other reason we chose the location. Get their hike in, set up camp, survive the winter night with the camping stove in the camping stove compatible tent right, and you know, try to make it as fun as possible. And that whole thing. It was an overnight. It wasn't a big, a big deal. Everything could have gone wrong and we would have been fine. So the risk wasn't big or anything like that. So we rolled into camp with a lot more gear than was necessary. We brought in backpacks that were heavy. And you know, my son's fourteen. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we packed a little heavy so we could test his MC do you know what I mean. It's important to have these kind of experiences as a young man. So yeah, we had. We had bags with probably too much gear in them. Mine was really a bug out bag that I didn't modify much for this camping trip. I took out some things in order to shove my one Tigris tent into the bag itself so I didn't have to carry it separately. Because the camping stove, the cast iron camping stove that I use, and listen, I'm not I'll keep it simple. You could go to Amazon and you can search one Tigris hot tent and you'll be able to find the tent that I used, I'm sure, or something similar. It's a tepe style tent with a compatible hole in it. For putting a hot flu up, right, you have to have that. You have to have a tent with the with the I don't know what it's called, but it's it's like a little material the velcrows onto the tent itself. This tent is designed and comes with it, and it's just a hole in the top of the tent that allows you to run a hot flu through it so you can not melt your tent. That's that's the basics. My tent is so super basic. It's just a tarp basically in a tpe shape with some doors on it and some tie outs on it and that hole. Like I talked about, no floor, no ground, which in the wintertime can be a benefit, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. On the things that I wish I had done. We run the flu up, we set you know, set the stove up, and then go about our business of sourcing as much burnable material for the night to come. And I think we did relatively well on that. We depended on the campsites would stock a little more than we should have, because it turned out that there would was mostly incompatible with the size of the stove, you know what I mean. It was simply too long. So that was a problem, you know, that was undoubtedly a problem. But we set everything up. We used basically those were outside of that in two sleeping bags. That was it. That was all we really wound up using mostly. I mean, we had some steel cups and water bottles and those kinds of things, but the camp itself was extremely minimal in set up. I'm trying, I'm thinking around to see if there was anything else we really used. We had some light, of course, we had some different lighting options headlamps, flashlights, but really it was a pretty minimal camp out. And that's important for you to remember too, you know what I mean, Start minimal with camping, Really start minimal. Start one single overnight, and start minimal with camping. That way, you don't have to look at camping in twenty twenty six and think there's no way I'm gonna be able to do this. I can't afford to do it. I can't afford to get there, I can't afford to buy all this gear, I can't afford. The campsite site was twenty seven bucks total with parking for an overnight, right, So I don't know what that sounds like. To you, that was pretty cheap as far as I'm concerned for an overnight with my son, that that's pretty good. And it should be added that this was no backcountry site. This was they call it the backcountry camp sites, but this is not. This really was kind of luxury, to be honest with you in my terms. Okay, I know there's a lot of RV campers and people who camp in real good comfort. But for me, when I'm used to camping, the money that I spent was for a lot of nice things. Right, they're literally, i don't know, fifty yards from our campsite. Probably there was a non podable water faucet pump, right so you could pump as much water as you want to bring it to a boiled, drink it, use it for whatever you need to use pot so you can't drink it right out of the out of the pump. But you know, too, huge benefit of your camping, especially if you're going for a while. You know, you can set up off gride showers with that. You can do all kinds of stuff with just an unending and an unlimited source of you know, non powtable water. So that was cool. And there were bear trash cans there bearproof trash cans. Each campsite had a bear locker, like a bear proof locker for your food, which was also really cool. Like this was in my standards. The campsite itself was pretty prim pretty pretty nice. You could get You could buy firewood on an honor system right there. You got like ten ten sticks for six bucks something along there, I don't know, something like that if you wanted to go that route. But you could also take whatever you wanted for that had fallen in the woods. You could take whatever you wanted. So again, it wasn't like showing up at a wildlife management area like I do, finding a spot and going okay, you know, zero amenities, let's do it. One of the biggest goals in the mission was to get up high and to enjoy the view from up on high. Right, we hiked and you know, dropped all our kits and all that kind of stuff off, set up the tent, and in the last hours of daylight we headed up this hill, got back in the sun's rays because we were in something like a valley. We had some boot issues that we got sorted out. But again, this is a gear thing, right, this is an important gear thing. This is a important reps thing. The layering of clothes held up fine in the cold weather. We were able to really sit down and enjoy the view, which was an amazing view of I guess it was Paris, Virginia basically looking over at that view, and it allowed me to have a conversation with my son that was really important one and one that you should have with your children too. In the world of in house living, right building to building living, which is what we do now our species largely right, our species is largely a building to building operation. Right, we wake up, we leave a building, we go to another building, we sit in that building, and we go to another building. We go maybe we spend an hour outside, and then we go back into a building. What's been happening to me lately, PBN family is I walk outside in the four o'clock ish four thirty ish hour, out of my building and to the right at the end of my block is the sunset. And if I had a day where I've really been flocked in on the computer and focused in on things within the house, like the sunset just hits me, man, It just hits me, like it just smacks me. In the face and goes like, don't forget there's a world out here, you know what I mean. And that was the point I wanted to convey to my son, because he's coming to that age where it's a wondering of what life will be and a wondering what he will be in life, and you know, all the challenges of life that a man faces, and there's a lot of influence on sort of giving up or life's too hard, or it might suck, or maybe it's just this sucky dredge for the rest of your life. And what I wanted to convey to him, and what I did convey to him was as We're walking up this hill and looking back, and I could see his eyes mesmerized. You know, I try to talk to my kids in the same way that I talk to you, right. I don't talk to you like you need to do X, Y and Z, because I don't like that personally. I'm not a big fan of people coming up to you saying you need to do this, this, this, this, and this. I try to convey to him just, you know, the truth of things, the truth of things in the world in a way that he can recognize it and say, wow, that's an opportunity. So we're walking up and we're looking down on this span of miles right because we can see, you know, miles down the hill and miles headed to the horizon, because we're up on a mountain, and it's unbelievable, you know, the cars are like little specks that are moving. And I can tell he's mesmerized. And I just told him, I said, you know, this is this is one state park in Virginia. This is one day. This is one state park in one state in the United States of America. I said, there is a lifetime. There's a lifetime of views and experiences that can be had if you only do this on the weekends. Right, if you were just to say to yourself, I want to experience all the state parks and national parks of the United States of America, Like this could be an adventure of a lifetime. I told him, because I want him to understand that. I want him to understand that there is so much to be had in the natural world for so little, you know what I mean, Like like to save up money to buy a maserati, to buy do people buy maseratis anymore? That was some stuff they used to talk about the grown ups in my day in the nineties, Oh get them a masarati. But you know what I'm saying, to buy the material things that people think will make them happier, that other people will sort of pat them on the back for it is such a crazy way to try and find fulfillment. And I wanted him to understand that. I want him to understand that this nation is incredible and it is his, just like it's yours and mine, and your children's and your grandchildren's and so on. And the adventure is unending. It's the I don't even know anybody who's scratch the surface of American adventure, right. I hardly know a single person who has been to every state and national park in the state of Virginia. Do you know anybody who's been to everyone in your state? The things that you see, the things that you experience just in doing that, you know, and to visit the parks, not even a camp, but to visit them, it's probably it's way less money, if any money. So there are many of these immense adventures that will take your breath away and pull you so far away from the digital gulog that exists today, the woeful and miserable and boring but addictive digital gulog that we're all hooked on. It'll pull you away from that, and it's dirt cheap, if not free. And one of the biggest goals I had was to get him on top of that mountain and convey that to him, so that he could look down on that view and say, oh, I could spend if nothing else, I could spend the rest of my life going to places like this, taking pictures, you know, taking people who are important to me, and just marveling at the natural world. So we get back there, we hike down, we wait for the sun to set fundamentally or you know, to mostly set, and we get down to camp. And at this point it becomes real. At this point the cold becomes a thing, right, and it becomes now the mission is the feeding of this small camping stove and the heating of our small tent to stay warm. Now where gear comes into play is Carter has a a great sleeping bag. Okay, he's working a zero degree and below sleeping bag, mummy bag from Coleman. I think it is. You get in that thing, you zip up, you know, put and he's got layers on and everything, and it showed, okay, because he was working that bag. I grabbed a new sleeping bag for many purposes right for the year of twenty twenty six. And it wasn't a it wasn't a winter sleeping bag. It was a very cheap sleeping bag. It was like a twenty five dollars sleeping bag on sale for twelve dollars. And I thought it'd be a great opportunity to see the difference. And boy, oh boy, what a difference. Uh. I had long existed in this world where I believed that Bivvy's sacks were unstoppable, and I found out that I was wrong for a very long time about that. I had given out bad information here on PBN about that. Now the baby sack made a difference. Before I even got into the sleeping bag, I knew it wasn't gonna work. Oh mind you. I was also not on I was on the directly on the ground. Okay, that changed as the night went on, but I was directly on the ground to start. But I knew the bag was not gonna handle the cold. I knew that already, so I immediately took the bivvy sack and put it completely over my sleeping bag. So now I have this next to nothing sleeping bag with a bivvy sack that goes all the way up, you know, all the way up the bag. And I thought to myself, this will be fine. This might be too much once I really get the stove rocket. And as I mentioned in prior podcasts, you know, the struggle with cold weather camping with a crappy sleeping bag and a camp stove is that you're gonna you're gonna run out of You're gonna fall asleep for a certain amount of time, and the fire's gonna go out and the heat's gonna stop. Now on Carter's side of things, he was wrapped up cozy and warm. And that's how you rock it, right. You take the heat as long as you can get it, and then you wrap up tight in a good sleeping bag with whatever however many layers you need to stay warm and carry on into the morning. It didn't really work for either of us. He popped up around midnight. I was kind of up already about eleven thirty. We went to bed really early, so we got a few hours of sleep in. But I was up about eleven thirty nurse in the heat back the cold gravels pad camping pad that we were on, the pea gravel camping pad that was provided by the camp site was winning. It was winning in a big way, you know what I mean. And it was fine, Like I said, it was good. It was great. Actually, it was great to see it all happen, and I was kind of excited. We took a midnight stroll around about the time the bombs were dropping in Venezuela. Carter and I were walking back to the car. He was walking back to the car for a charger, a charging cable, and I was walking back to the car for a blanket that I was going to use to separate myself from the ground. And to some degree it worked, and to some degree it didn't. You know. At the end of the day, my sleeping bag just was not good enough. That was it. It was just not good enough for the cold, you know. And even with the BIV sac, even with the blanket, I was still pretty cold. I had separated myself from the you know, the convection of the the pea gravel ground that was just it was never gonna heat up. It was never gonna be anything other than stealing all of my body heat, right, And that was fine. Actually, the whole thing was fine. It was great, really, because when you can have a when you can have a revelation like that from experience, it's good. It's really good. But to the credit of the stove, okay, to the credit of the stove, to the credit of our hard work to have plenty of wood, plenty of you know, ways to start fire and so on. When that stove was rocking, it was as wonderful and cozy as it could be. It really was. It was amazing. Like we would go we did one or two uh runs throughout the evening for more sticks, right, not wood, but sticks, because the the it's quicker. It's quicker to get the fire going, quicker to extend the fire once it's going right, and there's only so much space. So if you have a big sort of like a big piece of wood in the stove but you wanted to burn a little more, you know, it's getting kind of poke it around a little bit, but it's not lighting. You want to have a you know, pretty nice pile of small sticks. And we ran out to add to that from time to time throughout the evening and uh when we would return and the stove was really rocking, our little tent was. I mean it was one livable, like beautiful, like get out of your camping bag, sit down, drink some cold water out of your nearly frozen water in your water bottle, and enjoy the heat and the warmth. I love that. I don't know, I just love that. I love that you can conquer the freezing cold like that with one of those stoves. It really does make me consider buying one that's a little bigger. You know, something that is a little bit You got to carry it in, so you don't want it too big because m's cast iron, you know, it's heavy. What I would have loved to try, and I didn't try. I should have because there's a bunch of ways you can heat yourself throughout the night. I could have probably use a heated water bottle. That didn't I didn't even that didn't even cross my mind. I didn't try it. I didn't even think to try it. There's always this survivalist in bushcrafting and prepping talk about digging your campsite up and filling it with hot rocks that you set around the fire and then covering the whole campsite and allowing those rocks to heat the ground. That may have worked. I mean, I could have never done that at this campsite. They would have killed me for that. One of the things I would have liked to do and I should have done, is I should have brought in a couple rocks to sit, if nowhere else, then just to sit on top of the stove itself, because there were a bunch of rocks in the provided fire pit. But I could have brought a couple of those rocks in, sat them on top of the wood stove, right, and get that thing rocking and get it going so that it's really blazing, and as the stove would die out, the rocks would still radiate heat hypothetically, and that could have made for an extended comfortable sleep period for a guy who was unprepared for the cold, like I was with that bag and that bivvy. Right. That's really about it, really, I mean, that's really about the only thing I would have changed about the whole operation. It was nice to take our late night stroll in the cold. The cold, really, as I've noticed in the past, the cold when you are out and moving in. It is kind of a noun entity, you know, if you're dealing with twenties, you know, twenty degree weather whatever. If you're out there and you're moving around and it's just not as much of an issue as you think. When you stop moving, that's when you get in trouble. So suffice it to say, PBN family, the winter camping trip was well, it was a blessing. Really, that's what it was. It was a blessing. It was beautiful, the view was beautiful, the whole thing from start to finish. Of course, the time spent with my son, you know, you'll never forget it, you'll always be grateful for it, and the whole operation start to finish. Like I said, I'll tell you what though, I truly did think that the BIVV and the sleeping bag was gonna work. One percent. I one hundred percent thought this is going to be a hack. That I go back to the BBN audience and tell them, like, this is what you do in cold weather. But if you cannot create space between yourself and the ground, it's just not gonna work. You know, it's not gonna work. And that was my biggest sort of survival takeaway, because I was I was debunked. But at the end of the day, it was, you know, twenty four hours something like that, twenty seven bucks, a couple of sleeping bags, a tent, and a camping stove, and some essential provisions that really amounted to a wonderful experience that neither Carter nor I will ever forget, you know. And I think what I want to convey beyond the sort of survivor of survival, prepping, camping, bushcrafting acumen, was that these things are at the fingertips of every American citizen. And if you're going into twenty twenty six feeling like you need to do something big, you need to save up for something big, you need to do something you know, you really mind blowing, you need something big in your life. I'd really like to really like to impress upon you the value of just going camping, you know, going camping, getting somewhere, getting going to a place with a view, going you know, if you can't get to the mountains, and maybe you can get to a valley with a great lake or with some beautiful waterfalls or something along those lines. You can get to the beach and camp. Maybe you can get to whatever. Go somewhere that's gorgeous. You know, you got the power of the internet. You can see where you're going. Oh that looks nice, we'll go there. Camping is cheap, it's it's a wonderful way to spend some time. And like I said, if you are into press in survival, like if you can't minimally you will. You will find out how good you are at making fire. You will find out how bad you are at making fire. You will find out it how how effectively and how quickly or how slowly you can boil water. Right you always talk about like sourcing water and boiling it to make it. Okay, Well I can boil this much water this fast. What if I had to boil ten gallons of water? It's a different operation, right. I want to thank you all folks for everything. We got some changes coming to the network here at the beginning. Bear with me. If you're already a member, please bear with me. We'll get you all shifted over to the new speaker side of things. Until then, pbon Family is still up and running pbonfamily dot com. You can get everything that you get normally as a member over there, But now is the time to jump from your current plan to the spreaker five dollars a month plan. Most of our supporters are five dollars a month supporters anyway, so it's not really that big a change. The link is down below in the show description. There is a great podcast out today from the Next Generation Colin and Ryan Buford, all about Firewood Essentials. I mean, you know, one of the greatest podcasts of all time, the Next Generation. You're gonna love it if you haven't heard it. If you have heard it, it might be a wonderful trip back down memory lane. See how old Colin is in that episode. Expect more of that stuff from PBN in twenty twenty six. And we are powering up. We are gearing up for a twenty twenty six round table next Monday, whatever the hell that is, Monday the twelfth. Okay, so Monday the twelfth of January will be sitting down with myself, Jay Ferg, potentially Dave Jones, the NBC Guy, and some other hosts to talk about what we want to do in twenty twenty six and what we think is coming in twenty twenty six. And then you know, come the end of twenty twenty six, we'll wrap it up and see how things went right. Thanks for everything, folks, I do appreciate you. Don't forget to buy the Preppers Medical Handbook from doctor William Forgy, our longtime sponsor here at the Prepper Broadcasting Network. You can get it at Amazon dot com. That's the Preppers Medical Handbook, all right, Talk to you soon, folks,