Consider this, the Donner party ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains with no knowledge of the land, with not enough food to last but a month or two. Got snowbound and starved, eating the saddles from their horses and some ultimately eating their own dead. But all the while they were surrounded by Miwok Indians who were not preppers, but people who deeply understood the land and all its inhabitants in that area. They didn’t “survive” there, they simply there with the resources the land provided.
Well, in one sense they were preppers in that they did, like the squirrels and other animals they prepared for the long cold months by caching food during the warmer months. They had a good store of dried fish, acorn, pinyon nut, and other foods. Like people who rely on wood heat today, they had a store of firewood and they stayed toasty warm in their small conical houses, in many cases insulated with thick tule mats and warmed by a small fire, all the while wrapped in their thick rabbit skin blankets. Consider also the story of Ishi, the last known wild Indian who stumbled out of the woods half starved because just before winter set in, a group of white trappers came upon their hidden homes, took all their food, and even took the rabbit skin blankets!
I see prepping as knowing how to return to the old ways. Yes you should have some things stocked, but more importantly you should have the knowledge and the tools to live off the land in the area of the world you find yourself in. I myself live in the southern Sierra Nevada. I know the cycle of life that people once followed here; I know what was harvested when. and I count among my friends people whose ancestors lived here for ten thousand years before the Europeans came.
