The Prepper Broadcasting Network - A Winter Camping Adventure - Mission > Gear > Wins/Loses

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

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Hello. Welcome to the podcast. Present your vaccine passport. Enter your social credit score and be sure you have enough remaining carbon credits to enjoy today's show. James Walton, intrepid commander of these prepper broadcasting networks. And I'm going to talk you about winter camping, okay? Did a little winter camp. I don't want to go over the good, the bad, and the ugly with you. Pull from it what you will. A lot of great information, gear, successes, failures, opportunities in the new year, okay? Before we get rolling, PBN membership is changing.

If you'd like to support what we do here, okay? Go down to the show notes. There is a supporter link for Spreeker support, okay? Fundamentally, it's a $5 a month membership, and you get access right there on your Spreaker player to all of our archived members-only podcasts. You get ad-free podcasts. You get podcasts early, okay?

And as we get online, you're also going to get access to everything that PBN members get. If you are already a PBM member, you'll be receiving an email from me, check your inbox. We're going to get you all shifted over so that everybody gets to enjoy what you – well, some of the things you've come to enjoy and also some new things, right? The access to the members-only podcasts on the speaker app is way better than getting them off the PBN family website, okay? So all that said, let's get to it. Link down below.

Become a supporter today. Keep the PBN train running on full steam. Okay? The beginning of 2026 to me marks a lot. It marks a big moment in my life because 2025 was a bit of a... Well, it was everything. It was kind of a whirlwind, you know, of good and bad. But there was some exceptional lows.

And so, as you can imagine, at the beginning of 2026, I thought to myself, this is where we... You know, you can set a year up. You can start a year off in a way that it's... You know, it's going to work. things are going to work and at least at the very beginning things are going to work right and it's you know set goals and that kind of stuff one of the things dave jones reached out to me and talk to me about uh in the azure force chat room was what are some of your goals what are some of your guys prepper goals in 2026 and one of mine was to do more camping and to bring more people camping who don't go as much as you know i'd like them to family camping friends together camping that kind of stuff because camping in and of itself is probably one of the most underrated, you know, self-reliant, prepping, survival, sort of human skill, events, upgrades that you can do, right?

I mean, if you're pulling up an RV and parking it and hanging out in there and playing the Nintendo Switch, and that's a different thing. But if you're really going to go camping, you know, like pack your gear in on your back, set up your campsite, cook over a fire, that kind of stuff. You're going to do that kind of stuff. Then you're going to learn a lot about your preparedness level right out of the gate. Right. So one of the biggest things I wanted to do was to take my oldest out. And I just got lucky, to be honest, that he was into it and brought it to my attention, which was crazy.

He said, Dad, I want to go out in camp before I go back to school. I want to go somewhere high and see some views. And I said, all right, well, let's do it. And so we wound up at a state park in Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains. A beautiful one. One I'd been to before. One I'd driven by many times. A pretty quick and easy drive to get to the Appalachian Mountains from Richmond, Virginia.

and what our biggest quarry was right was going to be the cold weather like we were facing the cold weather like really cold weather i think the day itself wasn't bad was 45 something like that degrees but the night was going to go into the 20s and feel like the teens for me it's nothing new um you know i've done it in the past i've done it with PBN hosts in the past, we've done cold weather stuff, cold weather ops, cold weather nights out. You know, Gotham Get Out was a terribly cold night. And you survive these things. It is what it is. But I wanted to talk to you guys about it, about kind of what the game plan was, what gear we used, what worked, and what didn't.

And some of the conversations that we had also while we were up. there or maybe one in particular now at the start i want you to understand this whole camp out and this is valuable because listen it's not going to happen for you in 2026 if you don't do it if you don't make it happen this is key to to the whole concept of self-reliance and independence right the whole concept of what we are here at pbn comes down to that phrase it ain't going to happen if you don't make it happen. Period. That's the whole story. This camp out would have never happened if I didn't make it happen. If we didn't make it happen, right? And everything subsequently that happens here on the network happens in my life, happens, you know, fitness and health and skills and family and fatherhood

and husband and everything that exists in life, I tell you all the time it's about reps and none of it's going to happen if you don't make it happen. In 2026, I want that to reverberate in your head, right? In other words, you say you want to do a thing. Well, it ain't going to happen if you don't make it happen. Put it on the back burner. Rolling into this year, there's been about five things that I've done already in six days that have already begun the trance for my year because there are things that have kind of been lingering. They've kind of been lingering in the background of my mind and I had to give my own self a kick in the ass and say look Jimbo it ain't going to happen if you don't make it happen okay so suffice it to say that was

the situation here also you know there were a million reasons not to go but the mission was to get their set up camp right hike in that the campsites are hiking only anyway so that's one other reason we chose the location get there hike in set up camp survived the winter night with the camping stove and the camping stove compatible tent right and you know try to make it as fun as possible and that whole thing it was a it was an overnight it wasn't a big a big deal you know everything could have gone wrong and we would have been fine so the risk wasn't big or anything like that um so we rolled into camp with a lot more gear than was necessary we brought in back

backpacks that were heavy, and, you know, my son's 14. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we packed a little heavy so we could test his might. You know what I mean? It's important to have these kind of experiences as a young man. So, yeah, we had bags with probably too much gear in them. Mine was really a bugout bag that I didn't modify much for this camping trip. I took out some things in order to shove my one tiger's tent. into the bag itself so I didn't have to carry it separately because the camping stove,

the cast iron camping stove that I use, and listen, I'm not, I'll keep it simple. You could go to Amazon and you can search one Tigris hot tent and you'll be able to find the tent that I used, I'm sure, or something similar. It's a TP-style tent with a compatible hole in it for putting a hot flu up, right? You have to have that. You have to have a tent with the, I don't know what it's called, but it's like a little material. It velcroes onto the tent itself.

This tent is designed and comes with it. And it's just a hole in the top of the tent that allows you to run a hot flu through it so you can not melt your tent. That's the basics. My tent is so super basic. It's just a tarp, basically, in a TP shape with some doors on it and some tieouts on it. and that hole, like I talked about, no floor, no ground, which in the wintertime can be a benefit. And we'll talk about that in a little bit on the things that I wish I had done.

We run the flu up, we set the stove up, and then go about our business of sourcing as much burnable material for the night to come. And I think we did relatively well on that. We depended on the campsites woodstock a little more than we should have because it turned out that their wood was mostly incompatible with the size of the stove. You know what I mean? It was simply too long. So that was a problem, you know? That was undoubtedly a problem.

But we set everything up. We used basically those were outside of that in two sleeping bags. that was it that was all we really wound up using mostly i mean we had some some steel cups and water bottles and those kinds of things but the camp itself was extremely minimal in setup i'm trying i'm thinking around to see if there was anything else we really used we had some light of course we had some uh some different lighting options headlamps flashlights but really it was a pretty minimal camp out and that's important for you to remember too

you know what I mean start minimal with camping really start minimal one single overnight and start minimal with camping that way you don't have to look at camping in 2026 and think there's no way I'm going to be able to do this I can't afford to do it I can't afford to get there I can't afford to buy all this gear I can't afford the campsite

the campsite was 27 bucks total with parking for an overnight right so I don't know what that sounds like to you. That was pretty cheap as far as I'm concerned. For an overnight with my son, that's pretty good. And it should be added that this was no backcountry site. This was, they call it the backcountry campsites, but this is not. This really was kind of luxury, to be honest with you.

In my terms, okay? I know there's a lot of RV campers and people who camp in real good comfort, But for me, when I'm used to camping, this, the money that I spent was for a lot of nice things, right? They're literally, I don't know, 50 yards from our campsite probably. There was a non-potable water faucet pump, right? So you could pump as much water as you want, bring it to a boil, drink it, use it for whatever you need to use. Non-potable, so you can't drink it right out of the pump. but you know it's a huge benefit of your camping especially if you're going for a while um you know

you can set up off-grid showers with that you can do all kinds of stuff with just an unending and an unlimited source of you know non-potable water so that was cool and there were bare trash cans there bearproof trash cans each campsite had a bare locker like a bearproof locker for your food which was also really cool. Like this was, in my standards, the campsite itself was pretty prim, pretty nice. You could buy firewood on an honor system right there. You got like 10 sticks for $6, something along, though. I don't know, something like that, if you wanted to go that route.

But you could also take whatever you wanted that had fallen in the woods. You could take whatever you wanted. So, again, it wasn't like showing up at a wild level. life management area like I do finding a spot and going okay you know zero amenities let's do it um one of the biggest goals in the mission was to get up high and to uh enjoy the view from up on high right and we hiked and you know dropped all our all our kits and all that kind of stuff off set up the tent and in the last hours of daylight we headed up this hill got back in the sun raise because we were in something like a valley we had some boot issues that we got

sorted out but again this is a gear thing right this is an important gear thing this is important reps thing um the layering of clothes held up fine in the cold weather we were able to really sit down and enjoy the view which was an amazing view of uh i guess it was it's paris virginia basically looking over at that view and and And it allowed me to have a conversation with my son that was really important one and one that you should have with your children, too, in the world of in-house living, right? Building-to-building living, which is what we do now, our species, largely. Our species is largely a building-to-building operation, right?

We wake up, we leave a building, we go to another building. We sit in that building, then we go to another building. Maybe we spend an hour outside and then we go back into a building. what's been happening to me lately, PBN family, as I walk outside in the 4 o'clock-ish, 4.30-ish hour out of my building. And to the right, at the end of my block, is the sunset. And if I had a day where I really been locked in on the computer

and focused in on things within the house, like the sunset just hits me, man. It just hits me. Like, it just smacks me in the face and goes like, don't forget, there's a world. out here you know what i mean and that was the point i wanted to convey to my son because he's coming to that age where it's a wondering of what life will be and a wondering what he will be in life um and you know all the challenges of life that that a man faces and there's a lot of influence on

sort of giving up or life's too hard or it might suck or maybe it's just this sucky uh dredge for the rest of your life and what i wanted to convey to him and what I did convey to him was as we're walking up this hill and looking back and I could see his eyes mesmerized. You know, I try to talk to my kids in the same way that I talk to you, right? I don't talk to you like, you need to do

X, Y, N Z. Because I don't like that. Personally, I'm not a big fan of people coming up to you saying, you need to do this, this, this, this, and this. I try to convey to him just, you know, the truth of things. The truth of things in the world in a way that he can recognize it and say, wow, that's an opportunity. So we're walking up and we're looking down on this span of miles, right?

Because we can see, you know, miles down the hill and miles headed to the horizon because we're up on a mountain. And it's unbelievable. You know, the cars are like little specks that are moving and I can tell he's mesmerized. And I just told him, I said, you know, this is one state park in Virginia. this is one day this is one state park in one state in the United States of America

I said there is a lifetime there's a lifetime of views and experiences that can be had if you only do this on the weekends right if you were just to say to yourself I want to experience all the state parks and national parks of the United States of America like this could be an adventure of a lifetime i told him because i want him to understand that

i want him to understand that there is so much to be had in the natural world for so little you know what i mean like like to save up money to buy a mazorati to buy do people buy mazoradis anymore that was some stuff they used to talk about the grown-ups in my day in the 90s oh you go get him a mazorati But you know what I'm saying? To buy the material things that people think will make them happier that other people will sort of pat them on the back for is such a crazy way to try and find fulfillment. And I wanted him to understand that. I wanted him to understand that this nation is incredible and it is his, just like it's yours and mine and your children's and your grandchildren and so on.

And the adventure is unending. I don't even know anybody who scratched the surface of American adventure, right? I hardly know a single person who has been to every state of national park in the state of Virginia. Do you know anybody who's been to everyone in your state? The things that you see, the things that you experience just in doing that, you know, and to visit the parks, not even to camp, but to visit them is probably, and it's way less money if any money so there are there are many of these immense adventures that will take your breath away and pull you so far away from the digital gulag that exists

today the woeful and miserable and boring but addictive digital gulag that we're all hooked on it'll pull you away from that and it's dirt cheap if not free biggest goals I had was to get him on top of that mountain and convey that to him so that he could look down on that view and say, oh, I could spend, if nothing else, I could spend the rest of my life going to places like this, taking pictures, you know, taking people who are important to me, and just marveling at the natural world. So we get back and we hike down, we wait for the sun to set fundamentally, or, you know, to mostly set and we get down to to camp and and at this point it becomes real at this point the cold

becomes a thing right and it becomes now the mission is the feeding of this small camping stove and the heating of our small tent to stay warm now where gear comes into play is Carter has a a great sleeping bag okay he's he's working a zero degree and below sleeping bag, mummy bag, from Coleman, I think it is. You get in that thing, you zip up, you, you know, put, and he's got layers on and everything, and it showed, okay, because he was working that bag. I grabbed a new sleeping bag for many purposes, right, for the year of 2026, and it wasn't a, it wasn't a winter sleeping bag.

It was a very cheap sleeping bag. It was like a $25 sleeping bag on sale for $12. And I thought it'd be a great opportunity to see the difference. And boy, oh boy. What a difference. I had long existed in this world where I believed that Bivie's sacks were unstoppable. And I found out that I was wrong for a very long time about that. I had given out bad information here on PBN about that.

that. Now the bivisack made a difference. Before I even got into the sleeping bag, I knew it wasn't going to work. Oh, mind you, I was also not on, I was on the directly on the ground, okay? That changed as the night went on, but I was directly on the ground to start. But I knew the bag was not going to handle the cold. I knew that already. So I immediately took the bivisack and put it completely over my sleeping bag. So now I have this next-to-nothing sleeping bag with a bivisack that goes, all the way up, you know, all the way up the bag. And I thought to myself, this will be fine. This might be too much once I really get the stove rocket. And as I mentioned in prior podcasts, you know, the struggle with cold weather camping with a crappy sleeping bag and a camp stove

is that you're going to, you're going to run out of, you're going to fall asleep for a certain amount of time, and the fire's going to go out and the heat's going to stop. Now, on Carter's side of things he was um wrapped up cozy and warm and that's how you rock it right you take the heat as long as you can get it and then you wrap up tight in a good sleeping bag with whatever however many layers you need to stay warm and carry that on into the morning uh it didn't really work for either of us he popped up around midnight i was kind of up already about 1130 we went to bed really early so we got a few hours of sleep in but i was up up about 1130 nurse and the heat back the cold gravels pad camping pad that we were on the pea gravel

camping pad that was provided by the campsite was winning it was winning in a big way you know what i mean and uh it was fine like i said it was good it was great actually it was great to see it all happened and i was kind of excited um we took a midnight stroll around about the time the bombs were dropping in Venezuela. Carter and I were walking back to the car. He was walking back to the car for a charging cable, and I was walking back to the car for a blanket that I was going to use to separate myself from the ground. And to some degree it worked and to some degree it didn't you know at the end of the day my sleeping bag just was not good enough that was it it was just not good enough for the cold you know and even with the bivisack even with the blanket

I was still pretty cold I had separated myself from the you know the convection of the the pea gravel ground that was just it was never going to heat up it was never going to be anything other than stealing all of my body heat right and that was fine actually the whole thing was fine it was great really because when you can have a when you can have a revelation like that from experience it's good

it's really good but to the credit of the stove okay to the credit of the stove to the credit of our hard work to have plenty of wood plenty of you know ways to start fire and so on when that stove was rocking

it was as wonderful and cozy as a could be it really was it was amazing like it we would go we did one or two uh runs throughout the evening for more sticks right not wood but sticks because they the it's quicker it's quicker to get the fire going quicker to extend the fire once it's going right and there's only so much space so if you have a big sort of like a big piece of wood in the stove but you wanted to burn a little more, you know, it's getting kind of poke it around a little bit, but it's not lighting. You want to have a, you know, a pretty nice pile of small sticks. And we ran out to add to that from time to time throughout the evening.

And when we were to return, and the stove was really rocking, our little tent was, I mean, it was 100% livable, like, beautiful. Like, get out of your camping bag, sit down, drink some cold water out of your nearly frozen water in your water bottle. and enjoy the heat and the warmth. I love that. I don't know. I just love that. I love that you can conquer the freezing cold like that with one of those stoves. It really does make me consider buying one that's a little bigger.

You know, something that is a little bit. But you've got to carry it in so you don't want it too big because it's cast iron. You know, it's heavy. What I would have loved to try, and I didn't try, I should have. Because there's a bunch of ways you can heat yourself throughout. the night. I could have probably used a heated water bottle. That didn't, I didn't even, that didn't even cross my mind. I didn't try it. I didn't even think to try it. Um, there's always this survivalist in bushcrafting and prepping talk about digging your campsite up and filling it with

hot rocks that you set around the fire and then covering the whole campsite and allowing those rocks to heat the ground. That may have worked. I mean, I could have never done that at this campsite they would have killed me for that one of the things i would have liked to do and i should have done is i should have brought in a couple rocks to sit if nowhere else then just to sit on top of the stove itself because there were a bunch of rocks in the provided fire pit but i could have brought a couple of those rocks in sat them on top of the wood stove right and get that thing rocking and get it going so that it's really blazing and as the stove would die out the rocks would still radiate heat hypothetically right and that could have made for an extended

comfortable sleep period for a guy who was unprepared for the cold like I was with that bag and that bivy right that's really about it really I mean that's that's that's really about the only thing I would have changed about the whole operation. It was nice to take our late-night stroll in the cold. The cold, really, as I've noticed in the past, the cold when you are out and moving in it, is kind of a non-entity. You know, if you're dealing with 20s, you know, 20-degree weather, whatever, if you're out there and you're moving around and it's just not as much of an issue as you think. When you stop moving, that's when you get in trouble. So suffice it to say, PBM family, the winter camping trip was, well, it was a blessing, really.

That's what it was. It was a blessing. It was beautiful. The view was beautiful. The whole thing from start to finish, of course, the time spent with my son, you know, you'll never forget it. You'll always be grateful for it. And the whole operation starts to finish, like I said. I'll tell you what though

I truly did think that the Bivie and the sleeping bag was going to work 100% I 100% thought this is going to be a hack that I go back to the BBN audience and tell them like this is what you do in cold weather

but if you cannot create space between yourself and the ground it's just not going to work you know it's not going to work and that was my biggest sort of survival takeaway because I was debunked but at the end of the day it was you know 24 hours something like that 27 bucks a couple sleeping bags a tent and a camping stove and some essential provisions

that really amounted to a wonderful experience that neither Carter nor I will ever forget you know and I think what I want to convey beyond the sort of survival prepping, camping, bushcrafting, acumen was that these things are at the fingertips of every American citizen. And if you're going into 2026 feeling like you need to do something big, you need to save up for something big, you need to do something, you know, really mind-blowing,

you need something big in your life. I'd really like to impress upon you the value of just going camping. you know going camping getting somewhere getting going to a place with a view going you know if you can't get to the mountains and maybe you can get to a valley with a great lake or with some beautiful waterfalls or something along those lines you can get to the beach and camp maybe you can get to whatever go somewhere that's gorgeous you know you got the power of the internet you can see where you're going oh that looks nice we'll go there camping is cheap it's it's a wonderful way to spend some time And like I said, if you are into prepping and survival, like if you can't minimally,

you will find out how good you are at making fire. You will find out how bad you are at making fire. You will find out how effectively and how quickly or how slowly you can boil water. Right? You always talk about, like, sourcing water and boiling it to make it, okay, well, I can boil this much water this fast. What if I had to boil 10 gallons of water? It's a different operation, right? I want to thank you all, folks, for everything.

We got some changes coming to the network here at the beginning. Bear with me. If you're already a member, please bear with me. We'll get you all shifted over to the new Spreeker side of things. Until then, PBNFamily is still up and running PBNFamily.com. You can get everything that you get normally as a member over there. But now is the time to jump from your current plan to the Spreaker $5 a month plan. Most of our supporters are $5 a month supporters anyway.

So it's not really that big of change. The link is down below in the show description. There is a great podcast out today from the next generation, Colin and Ryan Buford, all about firewood essentials. I mean, you know, one of the greatest podcasts of all time, the next generation. You're going to love it. If you haven't heard it. If you have heard it, it might be a wonderful trip back down memory lane.

See how old Colin is in that. episode. Expect more of that stuff from PBN in 2026. And we are powering up. We are gearing up for a 2026 roundtable next Monday. Whatever the hell that is. Monday the 12th. Okay. So Monday the 12th of January will be sitting down with myself, J. Ferg, potentially Dave Jones, the NBC guy and some other hosts to talk about what we want to do in 2026. and what we think is coming in 2026. And then, you know, come the end of 2026, we'll wrap it up and see how things went, right? Thanks for everything, folks.

I do appreciate you. Don't forget to buy the Preppers Medical Handbook from Dr. William Forgey, our longtime sponsor here at the Prepper Broadcasting Network. You can get it at Amazon.com. That's the Preppers Medical Handbook. All right. Talk to you soon, folks.