Hello fellow Trekkers! When venturing off road, you should always have these ten items in your vehicle. Having them may mean the difference between an adventure and a disaster!
1. A good, matching, fully inflated, full size spare tire: Sooner or later you will have a flat tire while off-roading. There is a very slim likelihood that AAA will come to your rescue. Make sure your spare has air in it and is up to getting you back to where you started from. A bald tire or one with previous damage such as sidewall cuts or deep gouges in the tread may not be good enough to keep you going. Also, if you have locking retainers for your spare that need an adapter to remove, be sure you have it with you!
2. A fully charged cell phone: It constantly amazes me where I find cell phone coverage while trekking. The cell phone is your lifeline to help. Sometimes you can find coverage at the top of higher points if it isn't available where you are. Don't call for help for trivial issues!
3. Light: Bad things can happen when the sun goes down and you are still on the trail. Changing a tire by the moonlight isn't just annoying, it can be dangerous! Old style filament bulb flashlights have been left behind in the 20th century; inexpensive LED lights can flood your work area with very bright light and provide all the light you will need to work on your rig. Another advantage of LED lights is the low power draw for the batteries. LED flashlight batteries will last a long time when being used. The two lights illustrated were very inexpensive, both have a magnet in the housing so they can be stuck to a convenient sheet metal spot on your rig to keep your hands free for working, and are durable. The blue light came from Harbor Freight for about $7.
Another source of light that has several uses are traditional road flares but be careful with these: because they are in fact burning they may cause a fire if placed improperly. Do not set a lit flare down in any brush, grass, or anything combustible because a flare will start a fire. However this liability is also a plus as they can be used in an emergency as a campfire starter. Believe me, a road flare will get just about any campfire going! They are also useful for signalling if someone is looking for you at night. Remember that cell phone you brought and called for help with? Never hold a road flare in your hand once it gets going since the flare is consumed as it burns and a magnesium burn is about as nasty as they come.
4. Spare Ignition Key: Many current vehicles have an anti theft feature that employs a chip in the ignition key that must be in proximity to the ignition switch for the vehicle to start. Chip failures have been reported and experiencing this failure while off-roading would be bad. Without the chip your ride won't start. Some folks reportedly cut the key part from the key assembly and retain the part with the chip secreted in the vehicle. If the chip dies in the ignition key, the part with the good chip is held by the steering column while starting. Here's another thought: You are off-roading and decide to park and take a hike through some brush and up to a peak. When you get back to your rig you realize that somewhere along your two mile path your keys fell out of your pocket. If you search and don't find them, at least you'll have a spare key. I keep a fully functional spare key hidden in my Jeep because I am always loosing things. Anyone seen my pocket knife by the way?
5. Jumper Cables: Modern batteries usually don't give much warning before they die. One start too many and all you get is the dreaded RRrrr..nothing. Since savvy trekkers always travel in a group or least with one other vehicle, have a set of jumper cables to get you started and headed home.
6. Simple hand tools: You don't need a full mechanic's field chest, just some basic stuff: hammer, screw drivers, vice grip pliers, crescent wrench, needle nose pliers and wire cutters. Anything more is gravy. Carry a set of work gloves too. You should always have a roll of the stickiest duct tape you can find. In the Army we had OD green duct tape that we called 90 MPH tape because it would hold anything onto a vehicle up that that speed! Duct tape can temporarily patch a hose, seal a rip in your convertible top, and even tape over a sidewall gash in a tire long enough to get you back to the hard pavement - just very slowly with very low air pressure! Also, have a selection of fuses and some baling wire - really! It is pretty amazing what can be held together with baling wire. Those old barn stormers knew what they were doing when they carried baling wire and chewing gum to keep their biplanes in the air.
7. Tire tools: You need to have a credible jack that will actually lift your vehicle, even on a rough surface. I have a highlift jack on my Jeep but a bottle jack will do almost as well. Just make sure that the jack has enough lift to get your vehicle high enough to reinstall a fully inflated tire. By the way, the highlift jack has other uses than changing a tire. It makes a dandy (but slow) come along to pull a stuck vehicle out of where it is stuck. I've used mine this way and while it took a long time to move the vehicle any distance it did in fact work as advertised. More on that in a future post. Have a compressor that is up to reinflating all four of your tires after you've aired down for the trail. The cheap-jack compressors sold at many discount emporiums aren't up to continuous use. A compressor gets hot when running and an el-cheapo can't stand up to long cycles of use. A last ditch item for fire inflation is the old time 'Fix A Flat' in a can. This will seal a puncture and give you enough air pressure to drive a short distance. The downside is that the goo will coat the tire pressure monitoring system sensor and pretty much destroy it which will be a $100 repair to fix when you get back home. Use this only if you have to. Advanced off-roaders carry a tire plug kit which is a great idea.
Finally, have a four way lug wrench and cheater pipe to get the really overtightened lug nuts broken loose. I've encountered lug nuts were so over tightened by a tire shop that the studs were stretched and the effort of turning the nuts off the studs created enough heat in the metal that the lug nuts were almost too hot to hold. I even broke a factory lug wrench when attempting to change a tire that a tire shop bozo used an air gun with way too much torque.
8. Recovery tools: A bumper mounted winch is the best, a highlift jack is great, but with these two items you can frequently get yourself out of many small problems. Have a shovel to dig a path for a stuck tire and a recovery strap for your buddy to pull you out. Never, ever use a strap with any kind of metal hook because if the strap breaks or slips, the metal hook may become a lethal flying object. A long handled shovel is better than a short handled shovel but space constraints may call for a folding military entrenching tool. The one shown is a pre Vietnam war vintage shovel but I prefer it to the modern tri-fold shovel. Advanced recovery tools are lengths of rolled matting to lay down a short track for your tires in boggy conditions, the before mentioned winch with snatch blocks, earth anchors to give you a winch point where none exist, and others.
9. Basic Life Support: Water, food, and warmth are the three items you must always travel with. Keep them in your rig even when you aren't off-roading as you can never tell when a blizzard or a impassible traffic jam may trap you overnight. I keep a 2.5 gallon can of water in my Jeep which I rotate monthly along with several MREs. I have a Soviet army backpack gasoline stove that roars like a jet engine when turned all the way up for my MREs but you can buy the more practical chemical MRE cooker pouch that will give you a hot meal. Keep a couple warm blankets in plastic bags so they don't become impregnated with trail dust and grime. Take a roll of toilet paper!
10. First Aid Kit: Not the least by far. Have a credible first aid kit and know how to use it. Take the Red Cross first aid and CPR class and get refresher training. Over the years I have seen folks hurt while in the wild and fortunately the first aid kit on hand was always enough to provide emergency treatment until the person reached civilization again. Even something as simple as a cut that doesn't want to stop bleeding is annoying when on the trail. Your first aid kit will fix that right up. If you have any critical medication that is needed to keep you going, make sure you have it with you and someone in the group knows about it.
Find a way to store all of these items so that they won't fly about inside the vehicle in the event of an road accident or trail mishap. It would be the height of irony to be killed by a flying first aid kit in an off road vehicle roll over!
Be prepared because things happen when you least expect it!
