Posts Tagged deer camp
Maintaining a remote camp
Back around 1980 my parents inherited some land from my grandmother (my dads mom). Shortly after my parents got the land, they moved a 2 bedroom 1 bath trailer house behind my grandmothers house – which had been built around the turn of the 20th century. Mom and dad put a septic system down, setup a water well,,, all the comforts of home, except a home phone. Back in the early 1980 cell phones had not been invented yet. So for maybe 10 years, every time we went to the camp, we lost all contact with the outside world.
I would like to share my past 30 years experience with dealing with camps, and remote locations.
Rodents – This includes mice, rats and squirrels. Not only do they chew holes in the eves of the house, in floors, in the walls, and get into your food stocks, they build nest, piss, and poop everywhere. When you start talking about feces, there is always the chance of diseases.
Squirrels are not too bad about staying in the house, its mostly the mice and rats that like to make themselves at home. What is the difference between a mouse and a rat? About a pound.
If you put rat poison out – sometimes they will get in the walls, die, and start stinking. But for a camp that people do not go to everyday, nobody will be around to smell the stench.
There have been times when I have gone to the camp, and found mice in the toilet – dead. I’am going to guess they jumped into the toilet to get a drink of water, and could not get back out.
When those mice get hungry, they will start chewing into everything they can. This includes peanut butter jars made out of plastic, snacks, chips,,,, anything with a plastic container.
Something of interest, I have kept cases of MREs at the camp and rodents have never gotten into them. Why is it that rodents will chew into a jar of peanut butter, but not an MRE? Maybe because the MREs are double sealed? Maybe because the MREs do not have the smell of food on them from being handled? I dont know exactly, maybe its a combination of several factors?
Food Stockpile -Sometimes my family and I will go to the camp, bring some chili, canned beans, spam,,,,, with plans to either it that weekend, or eat it later on. Well, the canned goods get put in the pantry, forgotten, and expire. We may keep a couple of weeks worth of food up there, and its rarely rotated out. So when we go looking for something to eat, a lot of the cans are expired. This is one of the problems with keeping food stocks at a remote location. If people only go there a few times a year, the canned goods do not get rotated out.
At least one thing with the rodents, they force us to rotate out some of our food stocks. Its like the mouse is saying – “this is going to expire soon, so why not eat it before it expires?” A big chew hole in the side of a plastic jar of peanut butter is a lot more noticeable then a small printed date on the top of the lid.
Every bug out location should have some kind of food stocks, but the problem is keeping the food rotated out. When you have a remote location that may not be visited but a few times a year, food rotation becomes an issue. Its not like the dates can be checked every few weeks.
No frozen foods (or very little) are kept at the camp. There have been times when the freezer stopped working, or the power was out for several days and all of the meat in the freezer spoiled.
Butchering station example
This is an example of what a butchering station at a deer camp looks like.
There should be a way to get the animal off the ground, butcher it, and if possible a way to cook the meat right then. Most deer camps have some kind of wood burning bar-b-q pit. Which means there is an almost unlimited supply of fuel for cooking.
The quality of the video is not that great – sorry about that.