In this second part of Outdoor Survival with Fred, topics covered include the best hiking footwear, water filtration, and some of Fred's hikes he has planned for the Summer.
When it comes to water filtration Fred states..."My absolute favorite is mechanical filtration. And I use a system basically that consists of a plastic bag that is made for scooping water out of a streamer like you hang it up on whatever you got that you kind of elevate the bag...If I just want to do a gallon I can do that... or I think it will hold up to three. If I want to do three gallons at one time, I can do that. And I like that flexibility."
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Nick: Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the Practical Prepper Podcast. As promised, this is part two with our hiking veteran Fred. We're going over all things food and water this time around, and there's a lot of really good information in this part, so I highly suggest you listen and I hope you enjoy. Here we go. Let's talk a little bit more about the gear. What are your top three things that you always have in your bag, no matter what, for how far or how long you're planning to travel?
Fred: Sure. So I've got this one pretty much down, and this is what I learned from just trial and error. If I have to have three things in my backpack, it's going to be number one, it's always water because I get dehydrated easily. It could get hot. The trip could take a little bit longer. So I always have water, two snacks, because food always makes the trip better and keeping your energy level up helps with positivity and just keeping focus. And number three is dry socks. Even on a perfectly sunny day, the likelihood that you might have to cover a Creek or something or you step in a big mud puddle, it sucks your shoe off. Wet socks are just a ticket to misery. So I always have dry socks in there, too. And that's any trip, I will guarantee you I will have those three things. Even if I take a walk around my neighborhood, I typically have those three things in my rucksack.
Nick: Yes, the dry socks things. I would have never thought that. But as you were saying it, I can feel what it feels like if you're out on even a rainy day and you just like that feeling of having a compressed foot in a shoe with a wet sock and you're just getting that terrible Pruney feeling on your foot.
Fred: Yeah, it's pure misery.
Nick: Yeah, that skin softens up and the next thing it rubs a bit and you've got blisters. I know we were talking a little bit about the walking types in part one. Can you kind of break that down and let us know what you meant by that?
Fred: Well, yeah, it's something I could talk about. It's one of those things it's almost harder to talk about than to show. But when you’ve walked for a while, you'll start to feel in your own feet and in your legs and your joints that different areas just start to get tired or you might feel underneath your feet like, wow, I'm really walking a lot because you're climbing a lot uphill and we tend to dig in a lot with the toe box area of our shoe. Well, in a lot of cases, what you'll have are open enough areas where the ground is more of a walk with your knee almost locked at times. And it helps to actually relax some of the muscles of your legs and give them a little bit of a break the weight more up or more of the work into your hips and into your glutes. Same thing going with how you're walking. And I actually had this happen to me. I was walking down in Virginia about a week ago, and I was on a pretty flat trail, and the balls of my feet started to get really sore. And it had been a while since I had walked a good walk this year. And so I just transferred my weight and deliberately started thinking about when I plant each foot. I want my heel to make contact first. And so it took a lot of that pressure off the ball of my foot. And I probably only did it for about ten minutes. And it just gave a chance for the ball of my foot to get some relief. At a certain point, I think I just got back to my regular stepping, and it just happened naturally. But it did. It's just a way of shifting your weight. And there are special ways that you might use if you're walking up and down slippery terrain where you may want to walk more using more of a side step than typical, just reach out and step forward because you're using the way that you're balancing your weight to go up or down. And you're also using the traction of your shoe in the leading edge of your shoe to help grip the ground. So if you can imagine, the point of your boot is, say you're going downhill and you put that boot point down, that's only what, maybe five inches at the absolute most that's pushing down. But if you're walking down a steep decline and you've turned your boot to the side and you're walking down, that leading edge of your boot is now at least a foot long. So you're giving a bigger area for traction and to get some gripping force in there and spreading that weight, that leading edge out a little bit more. Those are techniques that I've read about. And I've played around with my head and my son and I have talked about them a lot while on trail, but it'd probably be hard for me to teach that through a discussion. But that was hopefully give you some idea of what I meant by changing the style of walking.
Nick: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely easier shown than it is talked about. But yeah, I get exactly what you're saying. And I can even picture in my head kind of doing the side stepping and the different pressures on your feet to kind of relieve some aches and pains when you're thinking about footwear, is that something that you consider? Obviously you consider it. But is that a big thing to you? Like you got to have the right footwear?
Fred: Yes. And there are certain times that you can wear a huge range of footwear. So if you're in your local park, it’s sunny day, the ground is dry, you might be anything from one of those Birkenstocks with the straps on them. They're like just fancy sandals to a full fledged hiker, which you're going to get more support out of. But it's going to be a warmer piece of footwear to wear. So I've worn vibram Five Toes on the trail before, which looks like all you have is a pair of toe socks on, but they really do have some nice rubber tread under your feet.
Nick: It's a different way of exercising.
Fred: Yeah. It's like a glove for your foot. And it really does exercise all the different areas of your foot a lot better because you don't have the structure of the boot or the shoe spreading out the force the same and containing your foot in the same way. You can actually feel the muscles in your bone structure and your foot move differently. It's a pretty neat feeling. I think water and temperature are the two biggest players in how I decide whether or not I'm just going to wear a lightweight hiker or if I'm going to wear a full fledged boot. Also, if I am in an area with venomous snakes, I do tend to wear full fledged boot, especially if I don't have great eyes on the underbrush. And I know I'm going to be going through a lot of areas where I just can't see below the ankle or I might be getting stepping pretty close to something like that. I like the idea of having a thicker shoe there that is going to take the bite versus my foot.
Nick: Yeah, absolutely.
Fred: So there's a huge range of footwear out there. But truly, for someone just getting started, you can get a $60 pair of hikers or boots and do a backpacking trip and have them last year a summer, but they may not last you much more than that summer, and they start to break down and fray and get in pretty bad shape. Or you can buy a nice pair of boots from a major brand and maybe have GORE-TEX in them. That's going to keep the water out unless you step into something really deep, but it keeps the water from just absorbing through the shoe, let you splash around a little bit more going to keep you a lot warmer. The downside to that is, though, if you are hiking and you're out and your feet tend to get hot, when you wear a Goretex boot, your feet are going to stay hot and it's going to get a little swampy in that boot, and you're going to want to air them out a couple of times during the day because they don't transfer the moisture out very well.
Nick: Yeah. I think there was one time where I bought a pair of hiking boots. I believe they were Meryls, but I think they were Gore Tex, and they might have been insulated, and I didn't really take that into account. And I wore them hiking somewhere and it was kind of like the wet socks thing, just like it changed the dynamic of those changed everything. My feet were so unbelievably hot the whole time, but it's almost all I could think about. Oh, sorry. It was brutal. It was so brutal.
Fred: Yes. So definitely something you want to think about for the future and maybe for you. People's feet do run hot and cold. Some people have chronically cold feet and would love something like that, and other folks just wouldn't want to do it even in the fall or spring. The only time they might wear something like that's on the snow.
Nick: With the Vibrams. I'm curious as to when you wear them. So technically, obviously, you can't really wear a sock. So are your feet always kind of perpetually wet or do they have some sort of like, wicking? Is that material in there? Make it so your feet don't get sweaty and swampy.
Fred: So what I typically do if I'm actually going to do a longer walk, like if I know I'm going to walk 6 miles or more in one of those, in a pair of those five fingers or five toes, what I will do is I will typically put on something that is like an anti-chafing cream bicyclists use it to keep from chafing on long rides. People might just play sports, other types of activities where they may be chafe under their arms or their sides from the rubbing of the equipment or whatever. There's a lot of stuff out there. Bodyguide is one of the names for it, and that stuff works pretty good. And there are several different things that I've tried over time. And there's this stuff called Chami butter that I use that cyclists use, but I like it and I'll just lubricate my feet up with that. And it also provides a little bit of that moisture barrier to where unless I really drenched my feet and they're in water a lot, it'll keep them from chafing if they do happen to get wet and rub a lot in there. And I wouldn't wear those on a backpacking trip. If I'm going to throw extra weight on my back, I'm going to want some more support and better coverage for several days. But I might throw them onto my pack if I'm going up and I'm like, okay, I'm going to have a couple of nice campsites where I want my feet to be able to relax but still have some level of protection under me so I don't step on a sharp rock or a stick. That's a good camp option. So you might take them too.
Nick: Yeah, it's a good point. I've always been curious about those. I know people, they run in them, they train in them, they hike in them. And I've always wondered but yeah, I guess they're not really an all the time accessory, I guess.
Fred: Yeah, I'm sure some people manage it, but yeah, but not for me. I do especially like them, though, for Creek crossings or when you got to go in the water, you want good grip because you can't see what you're stepping into and you also want to bang up bare toes against the rocks. And so those will get you some good grip even on some pretty slippery rocks. So I do like them for when needing to cross water like that.
Nick: So speaking of water, I've been excited to talk about this the whole time. So there are water in the wild. There's two kinds. There's the kind you can drink and there's the kind they can kill you. So why don't you break down and kind of tell us how you can tell them apart and what to look for when it comes to questionable water and what the course action is around that.
Fred: You know, I want to make sure that I understand when you're talking about potable water. Do you mean water you can just immediately reach out and drink?
Nick: Yeah, we're just going from the basics. If somebody's out there and they don't have water and they're thirsty and they really don't know anything, what's the easiest way to be like, I can drink that or I should probably stay away from that.
Yeah. So the easiest way is going to be when you're in your Metro Park and they've got one of those really nice water fountains. Some Rangers are cool with this and others aren't. But sometimes you'll find a Ranger station, like in the national parks or somewhere like that, and you can tell they got a hose there for filling up something. Typically the water coming out of those is drinkable if it's next to a house or something like that or where it looks like they have regular activity. But really, I think the smartest thing to do is consider, unless it's really labeled for consumption and you can tell it's a water fountain or meant for that purpose is don't treat it as though it's drinkable. Only drink it if you know it's absolutely safe or you've been able to treat it because there is so many opportunities for like that example, I just have a random hose next to a Ranger hut. Well, you know what? That Ranger might have pit toilets right there. And that Ranger might know that there's pit toilets do eventually Leach down into that water source. So he would never drink that water, but he might be using it for maybe watering some of the new gardens in the park area or some other maintenance need. But they would never advise someone to actually drink it. So you just can't tell when you're out. And unless you're carrying a microscope with you, how would you know these tiny bacteria floating around that you don't need many of them in your water source to get them into your gut. And next thing you know, you've got horrible diarrhea and you're dying of dehydration that you're losing fluids from vomiting and expelling waste so quickly, not to mention running a fever and all the rest of the infections that can happen within your body. There are so many opportunities to get sick and that's even we think about the area that we're in here in the area of North East Ohio, that's not specific to us. There's literally nowhere in the United States that I would go and drink the water without treating it if it came from a natural source. The only thing that I have ever done and it might say, yeah, you go ahead and do that is freshly fallen snow that's fallen on top of other pretty clean snow, not snow directly off the ground, because that basically had to go through a process where it turned into just H two o in the sky and came back down. It was water, but even after it's been laying there for a few days, who knows what's crossed over it and what's blown around on top of it? So, yeah, I think filtration or boiling or using a chemical sterilizer. They're all methods that I've used and they're all very valid. But just using good practice and a little bit of that planning of when am I going to get water next and where am I going to find water on the route helps give you the confidence that you'll get there in time and you'll know what method you're going to use. So you can plan to maybe have a little bit of water left in that bottle by the time you get there. So you're taking your last sips as you're getting your next water ready helps make that process a little bit less frantic and you don't feel as rushed to get through it in a die hard situation. And this is advice I've heard several times from people much more experienced than I. If you're out in the woods and you're really afraid that you're going to be out there and you're in a really hot environment and you're afraid you truly are going to dehydrate and you absolutely have to have water then drink it. But understand that you really should be in an emergency situation if you're doing that, because the likelihood is you're going to end up causing more damage by getting dehydrated and potentially getting disoriented from not having enough fluids. That could be more damaging than getting sick over the next 24 to 72 hours from whatever else you ingest. Hopefully you're getting out by that time, then you got to worry about a hospital bill.
Nick: Yeah, yeah. True, true. If you had to pick one, the boiling or the filtration system, if there's no water fountains and your own water source aside, what are you picking?
Fred: My absolute favorite is mechanical filtration. And I use a system basically that consists of a plastic bag that is made for scooping water out of a streamer like you hang it up on whatever you got that you kind of elevate the bag. And then it has a hose that runs down to a filter. That looks like these new sawyer filters that have been coming out. Looks like almost like a small. Half the size of a Coke bottle. And the water passes through that in only one direction. It's got a bunch of filaments inside of it. That filter that water out. Then it comes out into a collection bag. And the other bag only has clean water in it. And then you can dispense it from that bag. That's good. If I just want to do a gallon. Or I think it will hold up to three. If I want to do three gallons at one time, I can do that. And I like that flexibility. It's really just a mechanical process. And if I even can't get that back down into scoop from the water source. I can find something else to scoop that water and get it into the bag. That will then feed it through the filter. And it doesn't require batteries or anything. And it doesn't leave any aftertaste. So I kind of prefer that. And you're not using fuel. You're not getting out of stove and boiling water. And then you got hot water. I don't know about you, but I don't like to drink hot water. Not on a hot day.
Nick: Right. My next question was, so after it goes through this filtration system to you, it's ready to drink. Like, you don't have to boil it. Now that it's done. That it's good.
Fred: Yeah, it's ready to go. That system is basically what they call a gravity system. They've got other ones with little hand pumps. Or you use different methods to mechanically force it through that filter. But that one, it's easy for me. That's convenience. And it collapses really small in the pack. It's just a great way to go. The thing, in case you're curious, it's called a platypus. And it's a pretty good system. I also use some chemical filtration or not chemical filtration, but chemical treatment. I've got a pen that even the US Army has used. Or maybe even still uses. When I bought it. It was made by a company called MSR. And it looks like a fat Magic Marker. It's got this big camera battery in one side of it. It's got, like, rock salt in the other. Same stuff. You use it for table salt, but bigger chunks. You pour water into the cap of this thing. You shake it up. So it turns it into basically salt water. And then this pen. You fire this button on the side of it a couple of times. And you watch them. It's sending jolts of electricity through the saline solution. And it creates essentially, like, a bleach compound. And you can take this little tablespoon. And pour it into several gallons of water. And it does take about 45 minutes. For everything in that to be, like, dead, dead. And then that water is drinkable. It might look kind of cloudy. You might see some floaters in there, but nothing's living in it at that point. And you can drink it. That's a pretty compact thing and it's fun to use, but you got to worry about the battery typically. Then carry a backup battery and then you got the time to wait.
Nick: Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't really heard of any technology quite like that before, but I have to look into that. It's pretty cool. What was I going to say about the. Oh, now I guess this kind of disproves this and maybe it is kind of true. Maybe it's a myth. I don't know if there's running water and it's like kind of coming downhill and it's going through rocks. Like how they say that it's like a nature's filtration system. If it's ice cold water coming down, going through rocks, you would still be like, absolutely not, I'm not drinking that without if you think that that water is going to be tasty?
Fred: How likely do you think a deer or a rat or a bear thought that water was tasty? I don't think they mind taking a pee or taking a crap right next to the side of that water either. Not where we would be mindful to walk away from it. So you don't know what's in there. Plus, look at all those rocks. Look at all the stuff growing on those rocks. That waters tumbling over. Some of it might be giving a filtration element to it, but yeah, that water is not what most people would consider safe to consume.
Nick: I was curious about that because I know I've heard that many times before that's some sort of I don't know, it's got to be a myth then that it's like some nature's filtration device.
Fred: It is a myth, but there may be a grain of truth in there. Like I said, maybe something about it running over the rocks or passing through mosses somehow helps it. But no, it's not really cleaning that water to the degree that would be that most medical people would say, yeah, that's safe to drink and you're not going to get sick from it.
Nick: I have seen in some cases where people will boil water, but it still makes them sick. I've always found interesting.
Fred: I think the trick to it is to boil it for long enough and then obviously be careful with what you do with your water after you've purified it or filtered it. But the big trick with boiling the water is you can't just get it to a running boil. I think there's a certain amount of time that you should boil it, and that changes based on your elevation also. So higher elevation not only takes longer to boil, but I think you have to hold the boil for a little longer because some of the little critters, they can really hold up against the heat for short periods of time.
Nick: Yeah, that's interesting. I never really thought about it like that. The higher elevation. So now that we've kind of got your water source covered, let's talk about food. And what kind of food do you pack for your trip? What does that process in selecting food look like? Do you use pre made meals that kind of break that down for us? If you could?
Fred: Sure. So I'll try to keep this specific to backpacking or long day trips. And when we're talking about actual meals and where I am right now is I've gotten over the romantic ideal. If I'm going to carry a cast iron pan in my backpack and I'm going to have these fresh eggs and bacon over a campfire, I leave that to the car. Campers people want to set up in the state park, wherever it is that they want to park their car in and carry that heavy stuff out of. And I also kind of gotten away from trying to assemble complex meals on the trail because I want to make the most of my time doing other stuff other than meal prep and cleaning up messy utensils and things like that. So what I really, really have come to appreciate are the dehydrated backpacking meals. So some of them are branded specifically for that kind of activity. Some of them are more general for preppers and people that are planning for survival type situations. And those foods, in my experience, are very easy to rehydrate. They've come leaps and bounds from where they were 20 or 30 years ago. You can get chicken Marsala, you can get mushroom risotto, banana and banana. And what did I just buy? I just bought some banana and peanut butter oatmeal packs. And you don't have to dirty a single dish with these. The way that they package these. Now, almost all of the companies will actually provide them to you in a bag that you basically just rip off the top of it. You pour in the right amount of boiling water, you seal it back up because it'll be like a little ziplock on the top of it. And then it'll rehydrate. Some of them happen really quick. It'll take any of them take more than about 20 minutes, and you've got a very nutritional meal. And it's that easy. You eat it right out of the bag at that point. So, yeah, you probably have a dirty spoon. I carry a titanium spoon spark with me. It's got a real long handle so I can reach down into the corners of the bags. That's what I do. Now one of the things I'm going to start trying is using different dehydrated foods that didn't come in those specific for backpacker packages. What you're doing is you're just putting the water into that the same way on the trail. Those bags don't hold the heat as well, but still, you only really need about 15 to 20 minutes of really warm hot temperature to make it kind of rehydrate well and still be enjoyable. It seems to me that you do need some heat just from trial and error, that you don't want to just put cold in there because it doesn't soak up as well. But anyways, the method seems to work really well. And so when we go out in June, I've already gotten some dehydrated foods that we're going to try on the trail then and see how it goes. But it'll be new to us. I think anybody has that chance to learn something new, to try something new. You just make sure you're taking enough calories to keep yourself happy and well fed and so you're not miserable. And then you're debating how much weight do I want to carry? So do I want to carry a bunch of cans of tuna? That will be great energy and it might taste good. But now I've also got a sloppy can I want to carry around, right? Not me. I want to roll up my little backpacker meal bag, throw it into my scentproof pouch, cinch that thing closed, and then be done.
Nick: Well, this is a pretty good segue into this. So I have here a 72 hours kit from Valley Food Storage. We kind of talked about this a little bit before we went on the air for part one, but we're going to send it to you for you to try.
Fred: Oh, cool.
Nick: You had never had the Valley Food brand, so obviously it's 72 hours worth of food, but it's got all kinds of breakfast and entrees Irish cheddar soup. I believe there is a rice pilaf style, like that mushroom you were talking about. There lots of really great entrees and stuff. So we love to hear what you think if you give it a try the next time you're out and about
Fred: food looks really tasty. And again, with trying new ways of rehydrating in the field, I think this will be fun.
Nick: Yeah. We look forward to seeing what see which things that would be cool.
Fred:Yeah. I'll take some pictures for you.
Nick: Yeah, that'd be awesome. So what's the trip you have planned out in June? What's next on your schedule?
Fred: So the one that's coming up in June is with my son. And it's a trip that has actually been one years in the making. We're going to hike a section of the Atlantic Coast that every year or two we go down and we go to this wildlife refuge, and we typically will just walk about maybe about 3 miles down the ocean. Then we walk 3 miles back in the car and leave. And we've always kind of like daydreamed. But what would it be like to just keep going and camp somewhere way down the coast? And so we're going to finally do that and we're going to start in Virginia, end up down in North Carolina, and it'll be just a cool way for us to get down there and finally do what we said we were always going to do. And we connected with some of the Rangers to figure out how to it's actually going to be a state park that we had to reserve ahead of time. They had a ticketing system for being able to reserve these sites. Even though they're very remote, they still don't want overuse of the back country. So there are only so many people are allowed out there at the time. So we were able to get in and get tickets. And we're going to head down there and we're hoping to see a cotton mouse, and we're hoping to see all kinds of maybe seals or turtles are still there this time of year. Yeah. So we'd almost always see Dolphins down that way jumping around in the water. And I think there might be wild horses down there, too. And, of course, lots of birds anywhere you're at on the coast, typically, you just got all kinds of wildlife flying in and out.
Nick: Yeah. That'll be amazing.
Fred: Yeah.
Nick: It's a little different than the normal when people say they're going to do a hiking camping style trip.
Fred: Yeah. So it did bring up some new considerations, like, well, what footwear are we going to wear? Are we going to end up with sand in our boots, or we just walk the coast barefoot all day and that'll tire your feet out after a while for the same reasons those five toes that we talked about, we'll do that because you're actually distributing the weight of your foot and your body different. It's got some new considerations. But the other big one is, well, we're not walking under a tree canopy anywhere, so we're going to be right on exposed coastline in June. So we're trying to think, okay, well, what do we got to take as far as sun protection? And what if it does get really hot? How are we going to get out of it? Do we take an extra lightweight tarp to just set up as something to set up as an intermediary break during the day when we eat just to get out of the heat of the day? Because a little thing like that, you might think, well, that's an extra pound and a half of my pack, but that might get you an hour to a respite in the afternoon to get you good and relaxed. And then you continue on that trip and have a really good time with that because you did get a good break from whatever the elements were.
Nick: Yeah. That could be a real game changer. There's a lot of different stuff to think about. Yeah. Or even like the walking styles. I mean, when you're walking in sand and it's constantly just falling out from underneath you, the strain on the feet and the muscles has got to be a lot different than hard ground.
Fred: Yeah, you're absolutely right. As my daughters like to remind me, dad, we only walk 3 miles down and 3 miles back, but it felt more like 6 miles down and 6 miles back.
Nick: So when you do your planning, do you just shoot for one big one a year, or do you try and do like, I like to do one in the summer, one in the fall. How does that work?
Fred: So if we're talking about backpacking, because I hike as much as I can every week, so I'm out walking, hiking, whatever it is, as much as possible. The bigger trips, though, because we're in Akron, Ohio, there's not many options other than the Cuyahoga Valley right there. And there's only one or two places you can really stay overnight there. There's not many overnight options, quite frankly. So you got to kind of drive to plan that out. That means most of your weekends, it's going to be a two to, so you got to have to plan it ahead for most of these things. And every now and then it's like I just get that itch on a Monday. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to call off on Friday. But it'll be typically that kind of thing will be okay. That's going to be Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania or maybe Virginia, just somewhere you can get to within a few hours, get out there and enjoy a couple of great nights and then get back. And that is so you got to kind of look at your map and go, how far can I reasonably get? How much time do I want to spend on the car versus being out on the trail? And those other places also should be familiar to you because if it's a new map and everything else, we need more time to plan for that.
Nick: Very true. All right, Fred. Well, I think we're about time limit here. Probably wrap it up. But I just want to say thanks so much for doing this part one and two and taking the time out of your schedule to hang out with us and talk and trying to educate people on hiking and all the stuff you should consider when it goes into that.
Fred: Yeah. You're welcome. Nick, I appreciate you asking me. This is something I've enjoyed my entire life. And if you couldn't tell, it just really is a lot of fun for me to share stories and any other information that I can.
Nick: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to talk about before we part ways?
Fred: Not really, no. Okay. I think we're good.
Nick: I just like to leave that as the ending question just in case there was something like I really had this great story or I don't like to miss out on anything good.
Fred:Yeah. Well, I know you've got a pretty diverse audience. One thing I would roll out there is that the outdoors. This is a space that can be used by preppers who love to Hunt and eat that stuff with their hunting and they enjoy that kind of outdoor activity or it could be used by your conservation minded people that are going to fret every time they kick over a rock because they thought they just disturbed some microclimate. Okay. And I don't mean to pick fun at either of them but there's a variety of people out there and I think there's a lot of opportunity for fun meeting round in the middle so I encourage people to have those conversations and to branch out so even if it's not just talking about the hiking or how many miles you covered, maybe there's something else that you can learn or share about the sport of traveling in the outdoors that you can find when you talk to different people
Nick: yeah, that's a great point. That's a great way to look at it. All right, well, I'll let you off the hook here and maybe we can have you back on after your coastal camping trip and we can go over that.
Fred: All right, cool. Let's talk about that.
Nick: All right. Sounds good.
Fred: Thanks, Nick.
Nick: Thank you. Bye.
Nick: There you have it ladies and gentlemen, that's the end of part two and the end of our series with our hiking veteran Fred. Hope you really enjoyed this. I know I did. There's a lot of things that I discovered that I would have never thought about or that I thought was true, that was definitely disproved and would have landed me in some pretty sticky situations and might have tried it out myself so hopefully somebody else is like me and you learn something before we go, I wanted to shout out our friends at Valley Food Storage. I know that you heard during the podcast we're providing Fred with a 72 hours kit it's one of their top selling kits that's got a low price point but it's three days worth of food and the food is absolutely delicious and it's actually recommended by the CDC that all households have at least three days worth of backup food so that's the perfect kit for any home, either single or family and if you'd like to get one for yourself you can use the code “practical15” at checkout and you can take 15% off so head on over to Valley Food Storage.com and check it out for yourself alright guys, see you next time, bye.