Protecting Your Shelter From Intruders

When camping in the woods, whether in ordinary times or in time of calamity, you should be conscious of the protection of your life against strangers. If you have a shelter to speak of, you have to protect it by placing a rope around it. More likely you have no rope for that purpose. In another thread, there was this topic of making cordage out of plants. That’s what you have to do – locate some plants that can be used for the purpose. That means whether you use a rope or improvised cordage, surround your shelter with it. And after installing the cordon, tie some noisy objects like tin cans that will create noise when the cordon is touched. Just like the ninja days in Japan, they have an early warning device.

 

first line of defense is stealth, silence and if you are in troubled times, sleep shift guards 2 hours guard duty...4 person in a group should suffice for such a task

 

I've made all sorts of line tripped alarms over the years. Some of them have been of the type you would never want to use in normal times. Think booby traps. But the trigger systems can still be used for less harmful things. A mouse trap can make a lot of noise if it is slapping a bell. I have made a few that were wired to small firecracker poppers that will wake you AND scare an intruder half to death. I like monofiliment fishing line for a lot of these. Paracord has 7 smaller strings inside that can be pulled out and used after you dye them darker. To me paracord is a MUST for camping and survival.

Go to ebay and look up "military trip wire". I have a lot of this and it is great for such use. I use bells, cans with rocks or even quiet indicators like little lights that come on when triggered.

More on this later my wife says it is time to go to bed!

 

Basically you can set up your trip lines and t triggered by the trip wires. hen attach them to the same sort of trigger pieces that you might use for a spring snare. This can be anything from a peg in a hole trigger or notched trigger that is holding down a bent sapling or holding up a can of rocks. Or if you are more worried you can set up all sorts of deadly traps triggered by trip wires. I have seen traps for taking down deer and hogs. They would do the same to anything that tripped them.

For a simple warning you can run the line to your bed so that it just wakes you up quietly. Then you can decide how exactly you wish to greet your visitor. Since I am always well armed I never feel the need for a protective barrier and only want to be alerted. I lean towards the quiet type for the post apocalyptic times and the noisy ones now. Now I wouldn't generally kill someone for stealing small things from my camp site. I will be happy to scare them off. If the world has gone into the pits I don't want an intruder knowing what I have or take a chance on them coming back. In that case my response will be rather terminal.

Read up on snare traps. They are a world of knowledge about different types of triggers. I really learned a lot from a book by Tom Brown on wilderness survival when I was young. The SAS survival manual also has a lot of good info along this line as well.