An Illustrated Guide to Bugging Out

Don't forget your pets.

This weekend, I got to work on the bugout guide. It’s something approachable, and yet it’s something many people avoid. Packing is hard enough for a normal trip. It can get overwhelming when you start to think about all the things you’ll need during an emergency. Even for someone who’s been doing it for a while, the list of items can start to get out of control. For me at least, the task became easier to wrap my head around with a visual list of items, organized into loose groups.

This guide also starts to address some other questions, like what you can do without carrying a lot of weight. Camel packs, fanny packs, and vests can still hold a lot of items without adding a lot. Then there’s rolling suitcases...

Bugging out doesn’t always mean heading into the woods. In fact, I suspect many of us will be throwing stuff in a car and heading for another city, in which case you might not always need sleeping bags or tents. Until doing this dive, I’d seriously underestimated the value of camel…