About a month ago, I drove to a new place without GPS; it wasn’t that far away, maybe 20-25 minutes. No phone map telling me what to do next. Just a general sense of direction and whatever I remembered from looking at a map before I left. Yeah, it was scary!
I eventually made it there. But the whole drive had this uncomfortable edge to it, like I’d forgotten how to do something I used to know how to do. Seems my phone has been my crutch for so long that navigating without it felt almost foreign, even on roads I’d technically driven near in the past but maybe hadn’t paid that much attention to.
Truth be told, I rarely go places I haven’t been before, and if I do, I have my phone map open and barking orders. But on the way home, I decided to push it further and took a different route than the one I’m used to. That’s when things got interesting. I passed a set of ball fields I didn’t know existed. I drove right by the local Amazon warehouse I didn’t know was there, which is why I get most items delivered the next day. I even ventured onto a back road I’d never had a reason to take before, and found a stretch of roads that could serve as an alternate route if my usual way to get to and from home was ever blocked or for a bug out situation.
None of that showed up on my regular drives. I’d been driving the same handful of roads for years and had no idea what was barely five minutes away. It’s almost shameful on my part.
Knowing Your Area is a Smart Move
Preppers spend a lot of time and money on gear, me included. We like our bags, filters, food storage, radios … the list never really ends. Fewer of us spend time actually studying the place they live in, and that’s a real problem because you can own the best gear on the market and still be lost, literally, the moment your usual routines or routes break down.
Just think about what an area might look like after an earthquake or tornado or hurricane hits; it could be a real mess and most of the usual landmarks could be missing, and if you have no clue where you are because you’ve never been there, it could make the situation that much worse.
Thankfully, an area study isn’t complicated. It just means knowing your terrain, your risks, and your options well enough that you’re not guessing when it matters. My purposeful detour was a small, low-stakes version of this because I found back roads and useful landmarks by accident, simply because I forced myself off autopilot for a single drive. It makes me wonder what else is out there.
Your Bug Out Route Might Have a Weak Point
A lot of bug-out plans depend on a single route working: one road, one bridge, one path out of town, with no backup if that route fails. Sure, we have backups routes, but let’s be honest … they’re not what we’re going to default to when SHTF because they’re not what we’re accustomed to driving.
I read a story recently about someone whose planned bug-out route depended on one bridge. When flooding damaged it, the short drive to their land turned into a several mile hike instead. That’s the type of problem that happens when your entire plan rests on one piece of infrastructure holding up.
Still, sometimes it’s unavoidable.
When we lived in Washington state, for example, specifically on the west side of the Puget Sound (across from Seattle), there weren’t many options besides bridges and ferries if we needed to get a long distance away from the area. Sure, we could venture a dozen or more miles in any one direction, but we eventually ran into water.
Anyway, my detour home where I live now rekindled that lesson on a smaller scale: have more than one way to get out of dodge. But you can only do so if you know the area. And the only way to truly know the area is to get out there and find roads you didn’t know were really there. In my situation, I wouldn’t have known about them in an emergency because I never explored them ahead of time.
It’s not like I don’t know this. And, truth be told, I do have my bug-out plans on paper. The problem is that they largely rely on the major roadways, which I’m afraid everyone else will be relying on, too. It’s those smaller gravel and dirt roads that I’m mostly thinking about now. But that’s where I live. For you, it might be less-used residential roads in the suburbs for all I know.
Know What’s Actually Likely to Affect You
Part of an area study is being honest about your real risks instead of the dramatic ones. Tornadoes, floods, winter storms, and hurricanes are far more likely to affect your bug-out routes than your home, which means you need to consider how they’ll impact your evacuation. For instance, flooding might only impact low-lying areas, but tornado or hurricane winds might also block roadways because of downed trees or power lines. A winter storm might make the area “look” fine, but roads become impassable a mile down the road because of excessive snow or ice. These are the types of things to know when really considering bug-out routes.
It’s also worth understanding how those threats connect. A power outage doesn’t just mean no lights. It can mean no water pressure, no fuel pumps working at the gas station, and traffic signals down across town. A winter storm can mean frozen pipes, no heat, etc. Add in what an evacuation might look like under these circumstances and one overarching problem cascades into three or four more.
Building Your Own Area Study
You don’t need to take this to an extreme. Just start driving unfamiliar routes on purpose instead of defaulting to familiar ones or relying on GPS every time. Maybe keep a paper map in your vehicle, since a dead phone won’t help you find an alternate road when you need one most. Most counties also publish disaster response plans that already lay out local hazards and evacuation routes, and reading one is a fast way to shortcut a lot of the guesswork.
For what it’s worth, I go into a lot more detail on route planning and bugout strategy in my book on bugout preparedness, including how to build in real alternates instead of assuming your main route will hold up.
None of this takes long. My local area study happened during one ordinary drive, but really only because I chose to make it happen. But I wasn’t trying to prep for anything, either. I was just curious about a different route, and I came away knowing a bit more about my own area than I had in years of driving the same roads on repeat.
Will this actually help me during a bug-out event? I don’t know. But it does tell me that I don’t know my local area as well as I thought I did. Lesson learned.
So, how well do you actually know the area you’re prepping for?
