February was our first box we received from our Apocabox subscription. Apocabox is a survival school in a box that teaches various survival skills and project challenges.  Apocabox is a bi-monthly subscription and is shipped six times a year: February, April, June, August, October, December.

Each shipment of Apocabox has a different theme.  The box contains a few survival gear items, has a main survival kill challenge kit, sometimes a second challenge kit, and also several additional skill challenges to master through various written challenges such as in the pocket field guides and exclusive subscriber videos.

To learn more about Apocabox and how it works, please check out my first story and review of Creek Stewart’s Apocabox where I went into more detail about Creek Stewart as a survival instructor and details about the Forager box from the 2017 themes.

Mass Exodus

The theme of the February 2018 box was “Mass Exodus”.  This box was all about learning skills that could help you survive in a mass evacuation situation.

A few questions to think through in a Mass Exodus situation:

1. If you suddenly needed to evacuate from home, school, or you office, what have you prepared ahead of time (food, clothing, first aid, navigation and plans) and what skills have you mastered, that could help you in that situation?
2. Also if everyone was leaving a specific area at the same time, and the roads were bogged down with traffic and wasn’t moving very fast (or at all), and your vehicle got stranded on the road, what skills do you have to get your car going again?
3. If you had to live in your vehicle until you were rescued, what resources do you have with you to facilitate shelter, water, fire, and food?
4. If you had to leave your vehicle and start walking, what skills have you learned that could help you stay alive?

Contents:

• Mora 511 Knife and Sheath (useful for multiple tasks and food prep).
• Pocket Field Guide: How To Survive Being Stranded In Your Vehicle.  Includes 12 Vehicle Survival Skills
• Exodus Stowaway Backpack (folding backpack). Easily pack food and a change of clothes or other gear in this light weight backpack.  Folds down small enough to fit into your glove compartment when not in use.  
• Exodus Necker Wallet (wallet with a strap and is worn like a necklace under your clothes): store valuables, ID, money, etc inside your shirt.
• Last Ditch Ankle Stash (wallet worn around your ankle): store valuables inside your pant leg on your ankle if you need to leave your vehicle.
• Exodus Hammer (cuts seat belts, breaks glass, etc).
• Go Cubes (chewable coffee cubes)
• Apocabox Newsletter (large, high gloss pages, you can whole punch and put into a binder): with a complete contents list and full explanations, detailed skills challenges, pictures of other subscribers completed December Apocabox knife skills challenge, and more.

Mass Exodus Skill Challenges:

There were two specific skill challenges in the Mass Exodus Apocabox, and both of these skills were described in detail with great illustrations in the Pocket Field Guide.

1. Make a Roycroft Pack: improvised Canadian military backpack made from three sticks, cordage, and a tarp to carry your belongings in if you had to take off on foot.
2. Build Bug Out Gas Siphoning Kit

We completed both skill challenges.

Skill Challenge #1 We learned how to lash three poles or sticks together and attach the tarp and fold it with our belongings inside to create the Roycroft Pack style backpack.

Skill Challenge #2 We also made the gas siphoning kit.

• Gas tank funnel
• Siphon with tubing
• 1 gallon gas can.
• 36″ tubing
• 72″ tubing

We purchased two different siphons with tubing for this kit.  One is a small squeeze ball siphon like Creek Stewart suggested in the field guide, and the other is a pump siphon similar to a bicycle pump.

Pocket Field Guide: How To Survive Being Stranded In Your Vehicle

This pocket guide contains 12 survival skills to master:

1. Turn Your Vehicle Into A Super Shelter
2. Start A Fire Using Battery and Pencil
3. Get Unstuck With A Tank Tire: Make tracks for tires.
4. Car Mat Muklucks: Upcycled Snow Boots
5. Avoid Suffocation: Automotive CO
6. A Modern Day Fire Horn: How to safely transport a burning coal to a new location to transfer fire.
7. Improvised Signal Mirror
8. Parabolic Fire Start: Using the bowls of headlamp reflectors (or a parabolic lens) to start a fire.
9. Make a Roycroft Pack: improvised Canadian military backpack made from three sticks, cordage, and a tarp.
10. Build Bug Out Gas Siphoning Kit
11. Reflective Vehicle Dash Shade
12. Two Pole Flip Wench
13. Vehicle Emergency Kit

In addition to the two skill challenges mentioned earlier, we also completed some of the other skills from Pocket Field Guide:

• Created a Vehicle Emergency Kit. All of the items in the Mass Exodus Apocabox can be added to the vehicle emergency kit, plus you will want to add many other items too.  Our kit contains gloves, hat, socks, blanket, water, food, cook stove, metal bowl to boil water, food prep knife and cutting board, tarp and plastic sheeting for super shelter, paracord, emergency whistle, first aid kit, lighter, fero rod and striker, candles, flash light, tow rope, duck tape, and the gas siphoning kit skills challenge we made.  There are several more items we still want to add such as back up charger for cell phones, portable toilet, flares, road cones, etc.
• Purchased items to turn the vehicle into a super shelter if needed.  We haven’t yet completed the task of creating the actual super shelter in the vehicle.  But we have the resources on hand if needed. Essentially what we will do is use clear plastic sheeting, and a mylar blanket to create walls that capture the heat from a campfire outside on the ground and retain the heat inside the shelter.
• practiced fire starting skills to make a campfire,
• learned how to transport a fire tinder coal to move a campfire and start the next fire from the coal,
• purchased a reflective dash shade and added it to the vehicle emergency kit for multiple uses: heat reflector, sleeping liner, ground pad, solar stove, signalling tool.

Final Thoughts:

I found the Mass Exodus theme to be very thought provoking.  Due to the condition of our world, mass exodus from various locations within the USA and around the world have become common place.  Fires, economic crisis, bad weather, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, droughts, food shortages, unclean water, riots that block city streets, riots that block highways and interstate roads, and in many places around the world there is war and rumors of war.  I truly believe we are living in the latter days the bible mentioned.  Even now, many people have become homeless and displaced just in the past few years after these major events, and too many don’t survive mainly due to lack of safe shelter, clean water, fire, and food.  If you have to leave your house or office, and can’t go back to the house to get things you normally use in everyday life for a while, having a few survival items in your vehicle, and knowing a few basic survival skills could make a huge difference for many people in the days of tribulation that are soon coming upon the earth.

Mark 13: 5-8 “And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.  And when ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.”

Mark 13:14-27  “But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains: And let him that is on the housetop not go down into the house, neither enter therein, to take any thing out of his house: And let him that is in the field not turn back again for to take up his garment. But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! And pray ye that your flight be not in the winter. For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be. And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days. And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or, lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.”