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our family has fairly indepth camping experience and has spent up to three weeks at a time out in the woods in the BWCA with out having outside contact.
i would not carry MRE's there are a lot better- tasting lasting and packing meal available for lots less money. we carry cooking oil, rice, (twenty five pounds of rice will feed you for a long time). instant oat meal. instant mashed potatoes, pasta meals. all those soup in a pouches you see at that grocery store are great and easy to make. flour and dry powder milk, salt and pepper, sugar, brown sugar and butter melted together and then poured into tubs. emergency rations if no heat avaiable and great to put a bit on pancakes or oatmeal. We bring packets of gatorade too, mix that with water for a better drink after canoeing all day. My wife usually carries a squeeze bottle of iced tea concentrate so she has something different. i carry some squeeze bottles with some condiments in it. one with lemon juice, one with worchestershire sauce, and one with parkay liquid margarine. What we look for are the small packets of food that are dehydrated and light. We only carry enough water for the day. we purify the water we drink on a daily basis for wieght consideration. We play on catching fish when we go but only allow for 25% of meals to be based on "found food" each of us carries a stove in out packs, we carry MSR multi fuels Whispers, and one canoe carrys a multi fuel coleman stove. These stoves will burn almost anything flamable, white gas, unleaded, kerosene, diesel, paint thinner. So they are good for SHTF scenarios. We got into the habit of carrying multiple food packs. breaking the food down into smaller heavy duty ziplock bag and splitting it up so that if one canoe got dumped or something similar, and we lost one food pack the other pack would be able to at least create edible meals. It is amazing how much food is availabe that is very suitable for long term room temp storage. We rarely if ever but the expensive back packing food for our trips. 25 pounds total of dried food and essentials will feed us very nicely for a week. Forty pounds will cover two weeks easily.
After we go camping, after our stuff is washed and dryed and aired out and finally put away, each of us reloads our stuff into our packs and the other suff all gets loaded into a few hockey bags with the packs. each of these hockey bags will support the owner for a long time. combined we can live really nicely for at least a month without outside intervetion.
Yeah we all have an extra month of meds. two of the packs have fairly complete medical kits in them, with antibiotics, burn medication, suture kits and a surgical stapler in them. The basic cost of this stuff is really pretty low, the bulk of the first aid kit was found in a first aid kit for hunting dogs, for a cost of about 25 bucks. the rest was probably no more than 50 bucks and that included the perscription cost.
As for as what is the other stuff, two bags carry a sven saw, a very useful collapsable saw, two carry small axes, one is a northwoods pattern cutaway, the other is a riggers axe. one side a hammer and the other a hatchet blade, this is a very useful tool. We all carry some sort of a sheath knife, there is a larger filet knife in the tackle pouch. We carry two 5 inch vise grips, and two multitools, between that we have been pretty lucky in fixing what ever breaks. In the boundary waters, I carry a stainless model 65 S&W 3 in HB round butt, will do what I need up there and we usually see no one after the second day, so we do not carry much more. If we go else where or if it was a SHTF type scenario. I would probably use Two AR's and two M1'A's and carry 9mm and 40's for the reason of availaility of military and police ammo
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