Preparing Deseret, one blogger at a time
Just a quick post today. With the severe wind storms some people have found that they are not prepared for an emergency such as spending a single winter night without power. KSL posted an article this morning with some useful information on how your family can weather such an emergency.
Also, it might be a good time to refer to articles we’ve done about emergency kits, off-grid power, lighting, and heat.
Take a few minutes to read through it.
When I moved to college in Idaho as a teenager, I had a really quick introduction into a new world of snow and ice. While the snow I grew up with was wet and heavy, and usually melted away pretty quick in the moderate temperature. Idaho however introduced me to the bitter hard-freeze that left our campus with an amazing array of forms of ice that were completely new to me. I, as with many of my fellow students, became intimately familiar with this ice while performing the splits, or landing on my back when trying to hurry between classes.
In that time, I saw a few people that had some nifty attachments for their shoes allowing them to get traction on the ice. Along the lines of higher end crampons used in ice-climbing, they strapped on over any shoes and allowed the user to dig into the ice a bit more. Over on one of my favorite sites (Instructables) there are some instructions for creating a simple version of these yourself.
More about Winter Vehicle Preparedness Info.
To With more than half the country being inundated by massive snow and ice storms and much of the rest of the country having below freezing temperatures, people are at a very high risk for Hypothermia. Knowing what Hypothermia is and how to treat it not only prepares you to help yourself but most importantly, to help others. I’ve consulted several resources to try to put together a very comprehensive overview of Hypothermia. Those resources include the Mayo Clinic, my EMT Training Manuals, the CDC Guidelines for Hypothermia and the State of Alaska Cold Injuries Guidelines (Alaska knows more about Hypothermia than anybody, their standards are what we use here for Search and Rescue). Continue reading “Hypothermia – Signs and Symptoms and Treatment”
This past weekend several friends and I got together for some fun in the snow. About 50 of us (including kids) converged on the West Desert area of Utah for a couple days. I had some new winter camping ideas that I wanted to try out, I’ll go over those results here. I took a “barometer” of success with me for my experiments (being somewhat of a Polar Bear myself, I needed a better judge of my success). I have an 18 year old daughter that HATES the cold – she sleeps on a heater vent at home as often as she can, she wears heavy snow clothes when there’s an old inch of snow on the ground and it’s sunny.
As some Utah residents may be aware, current law prohibits collecting rain water on your own property unless you also own the water rights for that property. While this seems a clear violation of private property rights, there are some movements afoot to change this law. And the good new is YOU can help!
Continue reading “Collecting Rain Water on YOUR Property a Crime?”
This is the final post in our 3 part series, Winter and Snow Driving Preps. The first post, Prepping your Vehicle, can be found here followed by our second post, Supplementing your Gear.
To wrap this Winter Prep series up, let’s go over a few winter driving tips. I’m not trying to teach you how to drive, but just some good techniques to use while driving in snow and ice conditions. Continue reading “Winter/Snow Driving Preps, Part 3 of 3, Driving Tips”
This is the second post in this series, the first – Prepping your Vehicle – can be found here.
Winter vehicle emergencies can be pretty harsh. If you breakdown, wreck or slide off the freeway that’s one thing, help should be there soon.
But, if you’re on the road less traveled and it’s late at night and something happens, you could be stuck there for a while. If for some reason you can’t start your vehicle in that situation, you have about 20 minutes before it starts getting cold in your car. You already have an emergency kit in your vehicle, right? Just in case you don’t, we’ll be covering that in a later post. But, from here we’ll assume you’ve got a basic 72 hour survival kit in your vehicle. These are some things you should add to it for the winter:
Continue reading “Winter/Snow Driving Preps, Part 1 of 3, Prepping Your Vehicle”