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If Bear Grylls taught us anything, it’s that a successful survival plan begins by immediately drinking as much of your own urine as possible. Once that’s done, you can move on to things like creating a shelter, obtaining food, and navigating to safety. Having a kit prepared in advance can make all the difference. The thing is, you never know what kind of challenges you’re going to face because real-life survival scenarios don’t start with an airdrop into a predetermined location. If you’re going to have a survival kit, you’d better make sure it’s set up to succeed in the environments you’re most likely to encounter.
You can still stack the deck in your favor by doing a practical analysis of the situations you’re likely to face. What’s most likely to present a challenge in your area? Start with the terrain and local climate––factors that are predictable. Pack a bug out bag with clothing that can keep you warm (or cool) and dry while you move to safety. How available is food? If you can’t count on scavenging or hunting, you’ll need to squirrel away enough calories to sustain you for several days at a minimum. Once that’s taken care of, you can start to geek out on the fun stuff: survival gear. As always, don’t forget to practice with whatever you buy. Sitting in a cold downpour on the edge of hypothermia is no way to experiment with a ferro rod for the first time.
Pre-assembled survival kits aren’t what I’d consider all-inclusive, but they’re a great starting point. Establish a foundation with a kit from the list below.
Everlit tactical survival kit
Kosin survival gear
Prep Store Elite Emergency Pack
Aokiwo emergency survival kit
Sustain Supply Co. Essential Kit
Weyland fire starter kit
Types of survival kits
There is no perfect survival kit because priorities must be set and sacrifices must be made. If your kit has everything for every situation, that’s just called a prepper’s basement and it’s too big to carry. You need to decide for yourself what’s most important. Are you concerned about your car breaking down in a remote part of the country? Do you plan on keeping your survival kit on a boat? Are the most likely threats flooding and power outages caused by a hurricane? There are kits built for a range of situations and come in sizes as small as a MOLLE pouch and as large as a camping pack.
Key features of survival kits
- Size: Minimalist survival kits have little more than a fire starter and basic first aid supplies. Others provide food and shelter to get you back to safety. You’ll have to find your place on the preparedness spectrum.
- Sustainability: Survival kits are all designed to keep you alive, but they go about accomplishing that in different ways. Some include life’s necessities, others include tools to help you find them. Which one you choose depends on how long you think you’ll need to sustain yourself.
- Intended use: What are you going to use your survival kit for, anyway? Is this a roadside assistance policy in a pouch or a bugout bag? In either case, you’ll want to customize your kit to get the most out of it, but premade options are a great place to start.
- Features: Most survival kits have some kind of claim to fame, so pick the one you value the most. We found great options that prioritize food and water, wilderness survival, and self-defense.
Benefits of survival kits
The obvious benefit of survival kits is not dying, obviously. But they also save you time and money. Instead of scouring the internet for gear lists, getting sucked into a black hole of forum debates, and spending who knows how long trying to track down the items you want, you can basically pick your parameters and have the work done for you. Kits are also built to be portable, so they come prepackaged and well-organized.
Survival kit pricing
Survival kits are value-added products. You could buy everything in them separately, but that would cost you time and might actually be more expensive because, unlike the seller, you aren’t buying in bulk. Quality options can be had for as little as $30. These are great to keep in your car. High-end kits provide more resources and are better suited to storage in your closet until you need to make a quick escape. These will cost upwards of $500.