Suppose you’ve bugged out. You’ve arrived at the chunk of land where you have decided to stay — maybe for a few days, maybe longer — and it’s time to set up a place to rest your head. You don’t yet have a nifty refuge with all the amenities set up, so you need to set up your bug-out location (BOL).
What are some of the important considerations? The general choice of where to go is beyond the scope of this article (although we do talk about bugging out to the woods in general here (clicky)). Once you’re on the right chunk of land though, just where should you place the shelter?
BOL in the open or under cover
Salty and I faced this question when deciding where to put our cabin at The Place. We could have put it on top of one of the hills, down by the pond where it would have three sides to woods and the fourth facing the little draw half filled by the pond, or in a compromise position at the end of a long but narrow cleared ridge with its back to the woods. We went with the hilltop, after thinking about several issues.
- View and Concelament: We could see best from the hilltop, see one direction from the ridge, and see little from the pond. On the flip side, we’d be best concealed in the draw and least on the hilltop. Our BOL is also our weekend retreat and we think attack from outside has a very low probability, so we went with the most enjoyable view.
- Breeze: Hilltops and open ground get the most, depressions and woods get the least. This is a big deal if you’re going to be in a hot climate without air conditioning.
- Shade: Woods provide shade, obviously; but also consider that draws get far fewer hours of sunlight if the sides are steep. Our pond, for example, is only in full sun about seven hours a day even at the height of summer.
- Bugs and other critters: As these other organisms also favor coolness, shade, and concealment, we’d have a lot more company down in the draw
- Branches falling on your head: Not as rare as you’d think when you tuck under trees. In the gust front of any summer thunderstorm, I can sit on the porch at The Place and hear significant deadfalls coming down in the nearby woods.
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Siting the BOL cabin down here would have given shade and concealment, but little breeze or view.
Water at the BOL can be good or bad
- Runoff during heavy rains: Have you even been camping in a tent, and at 3 a.m. when it’s raining cats and dogs discovered that you’re at the bottom of a runoff slope and you hadn’t thought to dig a drainage ditch around yourself? I have. Not fun.
- Flash floods: Those burbling, cool streams can be very attractive; but you’d better think about the terrain. Watercourses can get very high very fast during heavy rain, especially when the ground’s already saturated or naturally sheds water easily. The western desert areas are notorious for this, as pop-up thunderstorms miles away can cause very sudden and violent rises in water levels. You don’t want your BOL to become a stream bed.
- On the other hand, it sure is nice not to have to walk far with collected water.
This is what it can look like to park and camp too close to a stream just before a rain.
Close to the roads or tucked away
As with the open/concealed question, this is potentially a tradeoff between BOL security and logistic problems. The more tucked away you are, the more likely you are to encounter problems when getting in or out. We talk about the travel hazards to be found off-pavement in the podcast and post below:
On a related note, also be careful about game trails. Siting on or very near a game trail invites animals into your camp. Sometimes they won’t go around, either because they’re tearing along at high speed or because they just don’t care.
Having one of these guys mosey through your camp makes for some very tense, quiet minutes, for you. The skunk isn’t bothered. *
* Thanks to http://www.birdphotos.com [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons