Crashstead survival requires deep personal preparations. I have not really found that many people who have given this a lot of thought or more importantly, gone to the extreme lengths that are necessary to put these preparations into action.

It is not enough to simply “plan” what you’re going to do when the time comes, you must implement those plans (now) with time, effort and some money. In particular, you must identify where you think you are going to wind up. Are you going to stay home, calling your existing dwelling your crashstead? Or are you going to head out somewhere else?

Those that think they can “bug out” and survive in the woods have my blessings. I have written on this subject before and do not advocate a bugout approach to surviving the crash. For most people, it will not only not work, it will kill them quickly (which may be a good thing).

If you’re persuaded that you can bug out into the woods and survive off the land on your own, I suggest you stop reading right here, grab your bugout pack right now and head for the woods. Most of you will be back (very soon), tired, hungry, possibly sick or injured, and out of supplies.

Now extend this over the coming winter conditions, through rains, sleet, snow and freezing cold. Living off the land is hard, and very, very few people can actually do it for any time at all, let alone through entire seasons or even year round. I’ve covered before why this is, lack of education, training, skills and a depleted environment. This is not the same thing as camping for a week or two with a stuffed backpack full of freeze dried food.

Bugging out really means you need someplace (else) to go to. A destination is pretty much an essential. Would-be wilderness survivors are going to be limited to the skilled, young and healthy. This eliminates much of obese America and the Xbox generation. The many that will foolishly try the wild-living approach to crash survival will mostly self-eliminate. Almost all of them will rapidly return to civilization and will thereby, be in worse condition then when they left, new slaves for the ruling elite.

There is another possible approach. The following is not to be considered advice, legal or otherwise. It is also not for the faint of heart.

Crashstead survival requires a crashstead. A place to be, live, exist, survive. A place to stay warm, hide, and live outside of the fascist police state. It can be considered your base of operations if you intend to expend a little effort (or a lot) on fighting back against the system. Whatever it is to you, it is a place to be.

For those who are not going to stay put in their existing homes, apartments, townhouses or mobile homes, here is some ideas on what you can do. Bear in mind, this is entirely up to you, you WILL accept all the consequences for taking these actions (which you will anyway when you think about it, staying put has consequences, as does continued adherence to the system).

Crashstead Survival – Personal Preparations

There is a lot of public land in America, which is considered the exclusive domain of the government. This is both federal and state owned lands. You are permitted to walk on it in some places, observe it, hunt on it and visit it, but you are not permitted to live on it.

This is contrary to basic human natural rights, the idea that a place must be owned to live on it is against all of nature.

Public land is your land, you own it, we all own it. The government is supposed to be entrusted with its care and management, but instead, parcels it out to big business (timber and mining companies) for exploitation and (their) use. When this happens, as it very often does, you can no longer enjoy it for yourself, these areas of activity are now often off-limits to you. So what was once in the public trust and ownership, is now in the private domain of a faceless corporation who is making huge profits off of your land.

It doesn’t matter how you look at it, the land has effectively been stolen from you all. You can steal it back if you are smart, crafty and willing to take the risks involved.

These huge tracts of public land are governed by various government agencies such as the BLM, Forest Service and even the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). They are thankfully, chronically understaffed and grossly incompetent. Land management is essentially one of their main tasks, but it’s not being done with any real ethics.

Simply said, the land should be given back to the private persons (the public) and withheld from the corporations. This way, land and a place to live would be returned back to the people, for free. At one time, for tens of thousands of years, this was how humans lived here, the land was not owned by anyone, it was simply used by tribes and passed on to the next generation.

Since all the native tribes were wiped out in genocidal wars by the American government and their survivors forced to live on wasted reservation lands, the lands passed into the hands of the federal and state governments. You can live there if you so choose, and you can also prepare a crashstead there.

Not everybody can afford land today. This is in actuality, an artificial “market”, propped up by banks, mortgage companies, land speculators and developers. Essentially, they want you to remain an indebted slave all of your life, beholden to the banks and banksters, always paying and never owning. Those that own their land are still forced to pay taxes to the State for all of eternity, as if this ‘privilege’ of land ownerships belongs to the State who punishes those that own their land.

Even land ownership however, has it’s drawbacks. You are “known” there. People know where you live, sometimes the wrong kind of people. The collapse is going to bring out the very worst, far more worse then most people are willing to imagine. Staying on your land, whether you own it or not, may not always be an option.

The alternative then, and necessary for a lot of people, will be going someplace else. This too has its drawbacks. Outsiders are not always welcomed, and will be viciously “denied” (ie., killed, attacked, robbed, assaulted, even enslaved) by the local residents when all the chips are down. Those that believe in the kumbaya “love your neighbor” future should stop reading right here, it’s definitely not going to happen like that.

There are plenty of examples of how the crash could progress in this country by simply examining how deep collapse has affected other countries. Genocide, murder, cannibalism, expulsion, massive refugee exodus, starvation, robbery, rape, race wars and theft are some things we can look forward to. It CAN happen here and it very well might. Oh, I forgot civil war — count on it.

The point being, if you are a refugee or an “outsider” seeking to land somewhere and plant your feet, you may very well be rejected (and with good cause). Nobody really knows you, and you will not necessarily be trusted. Or even needed. Your land might already be occupied by other squatters and your preparations already divvied up. Those that think they are going to be “welcomed” are in for a serious shock. They might be — but depending on the depth of the collapse at that time, they might not. The worst CAN happen.

So if you need land, and a place to go, establish it now. If you haven’t done this already, you’re at least two years behind schedule.

Public land can be used for a place to go. But it should be a crashstead, a prepared location that will permit you to survive.

Obtain several maps. You are looking for several things by doing so. Public land often borders private land along one or more borders. There are also tracts of public land ranging from tiny acreage to huge parcels that are entirely surrounded by private lands. And of course, there are entire national forest and state parks. For our discussion, these are not being considered here, although they would work also.

What you’re looking for is a slice of public land that borders private land, in a unvisited location. This is land that sees little traffic on both the public land and the private land. The best locations are private land where the land owner of this parcel is never around. You can go to the county courthouse and find out who the owner is, this is a public record and you have the right to find out.

Absentee private land owners are common. Many live out-of-state. Some never visit or have even seen their distant land. Others visit very rarely.  Find out who this person is, where they live and how to contact them.  You can learn a lot once you get this information, the country clerk will help you with this, that’s their job.  Tell them whatever you want, you’re going to buy some land or you spotted an old junk classic car on the land you want to buy.  Get creative.

Bordering this private land is the public land on your chosen investigation. Public land is routinely marked with boundary signs, affixed to trees and posts in most cases. There are also survey markers buried in the ground, these are metal pipes with survey seals affixed to their tops.  They are hard to remove!  You can however, pound them down out of site in some cases, but they’re not always found, they are spaced widely apart (a mile I think) and you may not have to worry about these.

In many cases, there are also roadways that border the edges of public land, but not always. Some of these roadways are fairly well used (avoid these for obvious reasons), others are closed or rarely used.  Good locations have either no roads or an old skid trail.

What you are looking for then is the ‘perfect combination’ of public land bordering ‘vacant’ private land, with little to no traffic, no neighbors anywhere around (or home), no visitors and marked with easily movable markers. Those signs tacked onto those trees can be moved. If you’re really energetic like I am, you can even move the entire road if there is one. What you are doing is creating a new property line that appears to be private land. You can do this in such a way that nobody is really going to notice, not for a long time and maybe, not ever.

GIS systems (geographical information systems) are in widespread use around the nations agencies that manage land. Some of these system record entire forests of trees and rely heavily upon satellite imagery to survey land from space. Anything you do can be “seen”, so bear this in mind. You can make small, incremental changes over time, which will still not be invisible, but won’t stand out too much either.

A hypothetical scenario then is to move the public property line a hundred yards or so, extending this as far as you need to (another few hundred yards would work sufficiently). Picking the right locations to do this is important, if the existing line borders a used road, it will be reasonably obvious to someone sooner or later that the markers have been moved. You can do this out of sight of any roads or walkways if you walk these lines and examine where it might be done.

Another idea is to put up a obsolete “for sale” sign or some other such device on your chosen slice of land. Or build a rusty barbed wire fence and enclose it. Anything to make it look like private land. The absent owner-neighbor may never know you’re there (do your research on them first and determine if they are likely to sound the alarm). You can even claim you bought the land if need be, it came up for sale and you are now the proud owner.

Any markers need to be moved to push back the existing line to suit your needs. The best way to do this is to extend the left-right edges pretty far beyond your slice, say a mile or so. A gradual loss of land extending just a few degrees over a mile will “make” a nice-sized slice of newly freed land in the middle of that line.  Pick a slice between survey markers (those metal posts in the ground) will be easiest.

Bulldoze or hand-build a road into your new lot if needed, or much better, make it look quite old by replicating an old logging trail (a lot of work, but it can be done). Stick up a few rustic outbuilding (shop around in the paper for free barn wood or buildings that are to be torn down and use used materials to blend in better as “aged”) if this will “help your case” and make things blend in right. Rusty barbed wire can be had for free, along with old fence posts.  An old corral is a good trick.

Get creative, but be wise at the same time. Making your efforts look established will blend in better and your efforts won’t stand out so much. No fresh cut trees! If you drop a tree, cut off the stump below ground level and bury the stump with a few inches of dirt, but bear in mind that GIS systems are in widespread use now, even inventorying every tree.

Lock the roadway, trail or path with a cable or old gate or something and keep the casual investigator out (or have no entrance road/path at all). If you do it right, nobody will even notice, most people are asleep anyway.

This approach does not give you any rights of any sort and will of course, land you in serious trouble should anyone decide to investigate.  You can always claim you thought this was private land (see the signs???) and be guilty of simply squatting, not a big deal. But collapse IS serious trouble, except you cannot wait until collapse finds you to have a place to go. Having a place to go must be prepared well in advance. Bear in mind that you are entirely responsible for your own actions, there are many gray areas of survival that will be quite necessary when your life is on the line.

Do NOT attempt to hook up power, water, sewer or septic with such an approach. Public utility companies will demand proof of ownership, which you would have to provide. Frankly, even these documents are all quite possible, but you would need a example set to copy from and create your own. These firms do not know what is public or private land, except general knowledge, but anybody could check the county records if they wanted (and they might) and discover your slice is not on the county platt map and you’d be found out.

You could always squat on public land in the middle of the forest too, except this is also obvious to rangers, hunters, hikers and such like and you could be quickly reported. There are a number of people in America doing this right now, but they are forced to move on fairly frequently, which is really what your trying to avoid.  If you simply want to squat on land and live there temporarily, then just pick a spot and do it, but realize you won’t be allowed to stay there long.

There is also State land, and large timber company land. Private company land might also work in a collapse situation like this (which has a certain type of satisfaction to it), but it depends on the management of the land owners. Some timber companies almost never visit their land except to see if it’s ready to log again. Since many years will have passed, the employees for this land will have been replaced and they will not have a clear idea (if you’re smart and you moved the markers wisely) of any “slices” missing.

GPS (global positioning systems) are also in widespread use and you can fully expect these to be in the hands of anybody these days. But that doesn’t mean you’re appropriation won’t work, maps and records are full of all kinds of errors, including entire slices of “unclaimed” land not actually owned or managed by anybody! These are usually fully surrounded by other owned parcels and as such, have difficult access for your type of plans, but they can be found with diligence and hard work.

Markers that are moved should be carefully replaced using the existing nails. Use a splitting wedge or some such tool (hard plastic) between the hammer and the nail to keep the nail rusty looking with no strike marks showing up shiny and bright. You WILL probably need to take down the old marker trees, many have more then just signs on them, but are “blazed” (slashed) with old blazes that indicate the property line. Your new sign trees won’t have any blazes (unless you get lucky and find a few that do). New blazes will stand out, so I would not bother with them. The new line just won’t have any blazes.

Keep your crash stead construction small and low-profile. Underground is best (imo) and will be less obtrusive to everyone, including satellites. Now you can work on your ‘private’ land and it won’t stand out too much.  Stick your chimney pipe through a hollow log or something. Plant some bushes around that to blend in, native plants from your area are best.

This approach makes you look like you ‘belong’, and important concept, while not being on the records anywhere. I would not park a vehicle nearby, as this invites investigation or at least notice (ride a bike, or park your car on the vacant private land nearby). Remember, you are blending in, it’s just an old parcel of land with some run-down structures on it (or nothing at all, it’s all underground), but ‘private’. Old signs can be found as needed, just look around.

Creativity, cunning, risk and hard work are required. Not for the faint of heart, but you can wind up with something you didn’t have before, a place to be.  Not without risk or effort, but possible.  In the collapse, your crashstead will be established and importantly, look established.  You may very well be permitted to stay there as long as all the attention is diverted elsewhere.

This concept of ‘diversion’ is pretty important, officials are looking for whatever stands out.  If you go into a government office and complain, you stand out.  If you start blabbing on about the new world order (anywhere), you stand out.  If you make any waves at all (anywhere), you stand out.  Since you are trying to create a place to live, make sure whatever you do, you don’t stand out.  Blend in, be wise, what what YOU expect to see there?  How do you know what land is really private and what is public?

You can stand out elsewhere if you like, just don’t put what you need at risk if you can help it.  Surviving the fascist police state of Amerika is going to require you to break more then a few rules, you might as well get comfortable doing it.