What Do You Pack in Your Bugout Bag? What Do You Wish You Could?

This year, someone asked me: “Do you have a… bugout bag?”

Do... I… have... a… bugout… bag?

LOL.

The idea is entering the mainstream, for a lot of reasons. Bugout bags aren’t just for your paranoid prepper cousins anymore. There’s a lot of virtue in having a prepacked bag with you, ready for a range of situations. It doesn’t have to be an urban combat zone. Your car could break down during a heat wave on the way to pick up your kids. You could run into a brushfire on the way home from work. You could end up in a hundred-year flood while buying groceries. You could get a phone call in the middle of a bad week and have to drop everything for travel. The state of the world today amplifies the problems we already deal with.

So I’m making a bag for that.

According to the lore of conventional prepping, you’re supposed to pack a light bag so you can run around dodging sniper fire.

That’s not our reality (yet).

My reality is picking kids up from school, traveling to take care of elders, running errands, and encountering disasters along the way. I’m not packing for a Cormac McCarthy novel quite yet. What I need is this:

It’s not a bag for a post-apocalyptic novel.

It’s a bag for the preface.

See all that? That’s what I’m going to put in my Brushfire bag when it’s ready. Right now, I’m using a camera bag. It’s a bit heftier, and it’s a little hard to fit into a front seat. It doesn’t come with drink pouches or modular packs.

This bag will have all that built-in.

What you see above is my ideal packout. It’s got a fire escape mask and filter from MIRA Safety. It’s got a couple of half-face respirators with P100 cartridges for passengers. It’s got some heavier tools like an SP-16 SPAX and tactical flashlights. It’s got a weather radio and some emergency glow sticks. It’s got a plastic bag with smaller items like matches, ferro rods, lighters, etc. It’s got a multitool. It’s got some portable power banks and hard drives.

It’s got pepper spray and a stun gun.

The front pouch is going to hold a full medical kit:

That’s also a good place to put some heavier tools and defense items that you don’t want just hanging off your bag for everyone to see.

Over the last few months, I’ve seriously rethought the notion of trying to pack freeze-dried meals into any kind of bugout bag. That’s what they’re marketed for, based on their long shelf life, but I think it’s a bad idea. Those meal kits take up way too much space. So we’re moving to meal ration bars. They’re much denser and easier to pack. They contain a ton of calories and nutrients.

The side pocket can hold medical masks, hand sanitizer, nose sprays, etc. The modular cable/tech pouch holds extra charging and data cables, flash drives, hard drives, security keys, and a portable power bank. It’s double-sided, so you can add all that same gear twice over if you want.

There’s endless possibilities with this bag. The padded dividers let you arrange the main compartment however you want. So if you don’t want to pack a bunch of fire escape gear, you can reserve space for a change of clothes, Ham radio equipment, whatever you want. The back side has an 18” pocket. In the first design, it was a little smaller, but we upgraded it to run the full length:

So, that’s my bag so far. That’s the bag we’re making. That’s the bag you can have once it’s ready. We’re getting close to our fundraising goal. We’ll tweak the design based on feedback from the soft goods designers, but it’s pretty locked down.

Anyway…

What do you pack in your bugout bag? What would you pack in your perfect bag? What situations are you packing for?

What would you do with this one?

Tell the circle.