The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Mule Power in Disaster Response – Mike Toberer of Mission Mules

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Mike Toberer, founder of Mission Mules and owner of Mountain Mule Packers, joins us to share how pack mules have been used to deliver critical supplies in real disasters. After Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, Mike and his team took mules into areas where roads had collapsed and no vehicles could reach. He shares powerful stories from the ground, including the heartbreaking loss of several mules and how Samaritan’s Purse stepped in to help them continue the mission.We also discuss the team’s work in Texas after major flooding, where they supported river recovery crews and began exploring new ways to combine mules with drones and communications for future responses. Mike also talks about their international deployment to Jamaica, where they delivered and set up a large-scale water filtration system. This episode is filled with real-world lessons on low-tech resilience, faith in action, community response, and practical preparedness strategies. In this episode we cover:How mules were used during Hurricane Helene reliefThe emotional and logistical challenges of the missionWhat the team did in Texas flood recoveryExpanding capabilities with drones and technologyFaith, community, and “prepare for the worst, pray for the best”Links & Resources:Mission Mules: https://missionmules.orgPrepper Camp 2026Season 5 Changing Earth Audio Drama – Part 2 now droppingBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/prepper-broadcasting-network--3295097/support.Support PBN and become a MEMBER of the PBN FAMILY! Free courses, Members only videos, reviews, and podcast! The Prepper's Medical Handbook Build Your Medical Cache – Welcome PBN FamilyJoin the Prepper Broadcasting Network for expert insights on #Survival, #Prepping, #SelfReliance, #OffGridLiving, #Homesteading, #Homestead building, #SelfSufficiency, #Permaculture, #OffGrid solutions, and #SHTF preparedness. With diverse hosts and shows, get practical tips to thrive independently – subscribe now!Newsletter – Welcome PBN FamilyGet Your Free Copy of 50 MUST READ BOOKS TO SURVIVE DOOMSDAYSupport PBN with a Donation 

Welcome back to the Changing Earth podcast with author Sarah F. Hathaway and co-host Chen Gibson. Blending survival, fiction, and fact to bring you entertaining education that will help you dream, survive, and thrive. And now here's your host, Sarah F. Hathaway and Chen Gibson. Hello, and welcome back to the Changing Earth podcast. This is episode number 493. I think we're in season 18 or something. I don't know. It's been too many years.

But I got Chin here with me. Hey, Chin. What's up? Hey, what's up, y'all? And I got Mike here with me. Hi, Mike. How are you? I can't wait to get into our interview.

I'm doing real good. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to have you here. I'm one of those preparedness freaks that thinks you're just doing amazing things. so I can't wait to get into it. Before we dive in, a couple of announcements, season five of the Change of Earth audio drama, Part 2 just started dropping last week.

These are some of my absolute favorite episodes and the videos turning out really cool. So we'll have four episodes in this block. So get out there if you haven't been listening. You need to get caught up because stuff is getting wild. It's getting crazy. crazy and you won't want to watch these episodes if you haven't got caught up yet. Chin, you know where we're at.

You were like, what? All right. Yeah. We also have prepper camp coming up. I'm going to be getting my book order in. We're getting excited. We're getting ramped up. It is just so close on the doorstep now because it's in August this year, guys.

So keep in mind. We couldn't wait. My wife and I have been doing dates. date day. She's been playing hooky for half a day. We've been running over there seeing all the horse competitions. It's awesome. Such an awesome place. It's so cool. Pitting up a different restaurant every time.

Oh, okay. Yeah, because there's like three, right? Three there's. No, there's more of that. There's more than. Five, six. There's a bunch. Holy smokes. Yeah. It's just really cool to have such a salad place this day. Not that, you know, we didn't always enjoy ourselves before, but excited to have that have that on the docket so yeah all right mike so let's get into it um no changing earth news today typically we do a piece on the changing earth what's happening over the past month

on our planet and uh we haven't you know there's been some big disasters but we haven't seen anything that's like really breaking the norm of what the seasons should be right now solar activity's been good so we're going to jump right into the interview with mike and we're going to use up every bit of time that we can because I just have so much that I'm interested in. So Mike, go ahead introduce yourself, just a brief, brief bio where you've been, and we'll pick it up from there. Well, my name's Mike Tober. I'm the president of Mountain Mule Packer Ranch. We were, what we do is we're a training company for the military. That's how we got our mules out from California to here. And then, of course, we were responded to Holyfield.

and that's where our mission mules came in to play. And now we have a nonprofit called Mission Mules. And I've been packing. I'm 59 years old. I've been packing for a good 40 years now. And I come from California. We packed our permit area where the outfit I worked for was our south boundary was the north boundary of the Yosemite. Kind of give you an idea of the range we were in there.

I've been doing it for a long time. That's so cool. So when you were young, did you always like, what did that look up? What did that look like for you in your years? When I was young, I used to go into the back country in the immigrant wilderness with my dad and my cousin generally. And we would always do week-long trips and we would just make big circles along through that. Most of the immigrant wilderness, the basin down there along the Huckleberry border. And that's where we spent most of our childhood.

and that's how I got into it. We watch cattle for different ranchers up there, and I decided I wanted to be a packer after, because there's two pack outfits where we come from. And to me, as a kid, those were just the coolest guys ever. You're like doing a little heroism there. I think that you turn yourself into a bigger hero, for sure, as far as it goes. I don't know about that.

So you are a fellow refugee from California. you. You know, yeah, I don't say that to too many people. Right? Yeah, I hear you. You know, my family moved there in like the late 20s, early 30s. It was a great state to grow up in, but it just, it's so screwed up now that we got out in 2012. It came over by Fort Bragg to work with the military, and we figured we'd stick around here three years and then go back.

And after watching, it seemed like it progressively got worse fast. So we decided to stay in North Carolina. And we really like North Carolina. We like the people here. The mountains are a little different. They're a lot different, a lot more bush in these mountains versus where we come from, Cali. Yeah. But, yeah, I miss my mountains.

I got a little bit of family there and miss them. But I like it over here in the Easton. I think a lot better now. Yeah, I have to agree with you. It was beautiful country to live in. I lived right between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe up there. So it was like an hour and a half to the snow, a couple hours to the beach. And it was a good country.

But unfortunately now, just to watch what's going on out there. And, you know, this whole thing with their election, everything is just so corrupt. Yeah. And it really always has been in California. I just think that now it's just blatant. It is. They don't care. They don't care. They just do it. Taxing their people into a corner and then incentivizing people to be poor, basically. Yeah.

The best kind of prisoner is one who doesn't know they are a prisoner. That's right. So how'd that work? So you had to bring all the mules out from Cali, trail in them out? Yeah, we did. We in 2012 is when we made the move. We kind of prepped for it for a couple. couple years. My sister and her husband, my sister came out to North Carolina and joined the military when she was 18 and then she went to dental school afterwards and got married and had a family. And at the time, her and her husband had a body armor company called Paraclete. Okay.

And they made body armor and they sold that company. And shortly after they sold it, they built the skydiving wind tunnel there just outside of Fayetteville. Okay. And that's what they asked us to come out. because we wanted to do training, but the way it was set up, the money for travel was such that they just, it wasn't cost effective for them to send them out west

to get meal packing training. And after looking into it for a couple of years, we decided that we just needed to bring our show to the schoolhouse there on Fort Bragg. So do you parachute your mules in? Just one time. I'm just joking. No, we don't parachute.

the mules. Now, you know, I've heard stories that during like World War II. They did that sort of thing. With horses? Like the survival rate was just you know. Yeah, their legs. It's not something that

that I've ever witnessed or whatever thinking. Now, we would fly, we could fly mules around and as long as they could offload the back of a plane or a Kosser or something like that would work. But as far as you dropped them out with parachutes, that's

that's out of our Yeah, that sounds crazy. So I really, you've told us how much you, you know, growing up that you were always involved in it. I've never really thought about, I thought about horses in the grand preparedness scheme. But, you know, there's a lot of care that goes into a horse. They're kind of prissy, right? Some can't be, yes, man. Right?

So, and then, you know, on the movies, they're always like, oh, we're going to hook the horses up to the cart, and it's just magically going to work, and people don't realize that, like, it doesn't work that way. I don't know how good it works, but it will go and usually go pretty fast when it doesn't go. Right, yeah. Yeah. I'm like, that's not reality. Like, if it was a grid-down scenario, you can't just take any horse and hook them up and do this. Uh-huh. You can't.

Or even put a pack on them, honestly. That's exactly right. They don't know that weight, that any of what's going on. So as a little animal. Just like Gus, you need to know what's expected of you. You got to know what you're doing. You got to be taught what to do when they knew this. It's same with the mules or the horses.

They just have, once they learn it and they know it and it's not going to hurt them, then they will work for you. But it takes time. It takes years. You know, we lost some mules during Haleen in that same time area, time frame. Because of the storm? Well, you know, we were up in Asheville. The mules were down in Mount Ola, a resting pasture down there, and a storm came through and blew a tree down.

And the way it knocked the fence down, it didn't come down directly on it, but it laid it over, so there was no wires sticking up. And I think we had nine mules in that corral, and four of them got out, made their way to the highway. Simi hit three of them and killed him and clipped the fourth one. And we still have him, but he's crippled. up. He was the one I used to ride. Oh, God. He was the one I rode.

So then we got after that happened, we, you know, we weren't sure how long we were going to be doing this. You know, God put us up there. You know, and how it started is we, the storm coming in, we had a training set up with Marsock

down to South Carolina. And of course, the road's flooded. He got canceled out. But we had a trailer load of mules. We had supplies for a week for the mules for my team. And once a power came back on down where we were over by Morseville, we started seeing what they were saying was inaccessible areas and what was going on. And we decided, all right, we're going to leave in the morning. We can help with this.

We can just replace the weapons and the ammo and guns with food and water. And that's what we'll do that for a few days, see how we can help out. So we headed up there. And we just went. And like the first run was 11 days. we had to rest every place to get different mules and then we kind of but five months later we were still taking supplies up there not by mule but by truck so it wasn't just a quick in and out like we thought it was going to be like we can land in and then fill the void we were trying besides you know how long do we do this you know because i worked for a couple ranches and i trained the military uh and like those ranch jobs were going to go away here soon if i didn't get back to

My wife worked for insurance company, and she pretty much was going to lose her job. So we were just figuring, you know, when is God going to tell us we've done what we needed to? And then we got those mules that got killed, and then we decided, okay, that's telling us. It basically cut my workforce down 30%. So now I'm down three mules, four mules, actually, so I couldn't train the way I need. So I need to purchase mules. We figured this is that this is where we get all. off and go back to life, try to recoup our jobs and all that.

And next day, we got a call from Samaritan's purse. And they had done airdrops for us in Rhone Mountain and, like, Elk Park, North Carolina. Yeah. And that's how we met them. And they'd heard about what happened. And they basically said, you need to keep going. We want to replace your mules and then some. But you need to continue what you're doing.

That's amazing. And so that's what that's so we never did get out. That was our sign. Right. Change our lives up. That's amazing. What, what a hand, you know. Hey, Mike.

Can I for a second? So I got the privilege of meeting you in person. You came to talk to our cert group on a monthly meeting. And we actually had, you had a video and stuff. Can you kind of describe like what your mule setup looks like? and you had like a mule train and just so the people get a kind of understanding of really what you did?

Yeah, so like if you're looking at that picture there's two sadders. There's a pat saddle on the left and a riding saddle on the right. The pack saddle is designed to hang panniers on the side, which are the side boxes or bags. They could be harder to soft and that's what all the supplies

or whatever your hauling goes into. And what you'll do is you'll string those mules out. We were stringing them out. We were stringing them out. six and seven long in the beginning. And that changed pretty quick. Because when we started, we were up in Montreat in that subdivision. We were packing and insulin ice.

Montreed is what one second after, right? Isn't that where that book was set? I think you're right. Yeah. The college was where the book One Second After was set. So that's a little more prepper

fiction in there. Yep. Yep. And so what we did We got our orders. We had a call coming in. Now, you got to understand, we didn't really know where to go. We knew we were just going to go help and we were reading. But once we posted it on our website, and my website for Training Special Forces was small,

you know, 150, 125 people. And once we started posting and going up there and working, we grew to like 200 and some thousand, like in a few days, our Facebook page. And with that, what happened was we were starting to get a bunch of information like, I have family at this address. This is what we know. It's what we don't know. So that's how we started getting our direction on where to go. And the first call was to go up to Montrere. People had their insulin, but they didn't have ice because they didn't have electricity.

So they needed ice to keep it cool. Some needed both. And so what we did, we started up with those meal strings, five and six long. But what we found is when we got up in the subdivisions, we couldn't hardly. get the mules turned around to come back down because the driveways and parking area was so small. And you were to say that the roads were washed out. So like the mules and the roads were like collapsing underneath? Yeah. So they run in that situation. They ran the drains and water lines, sewer lines right down the middle of the road. And water got under there and it basically washed that out. So all the sinners and then pretty much all of them that we come across were all collapsed in.

So on each side of the road on the shoulder part is where there's a little duff tread there. You could get the mules through. Then you'd have to cross over that asphalt every now and then. And just the sound was different. And that was a whole other deal for those mules. They knew there was nothing under that asphalt. And then it would start to break out on us. And so then the mules not are getting to where they don't want to walk on asphalt because it's going to collapse under them.

And even if you could, like, run chainsaw? crews, like cars and trucks and, you know, motor vehicles couldn't get through because you said the condition of the roads. Yeah. So the mules could actually find, yeah. Yeah, the mules. So we can move the chainsaws up there. It's fuels, all the, everything they needed to do the handwork.

But, yeah, when we got there, you know, that was the subdivision. That was the first part. And that wasn't bad. That was pretty easy because there wasn't a lot of deadfall because the roads were cleared, but they were just collapsed. The next day we were out there on the back side of the water. treatment plant in the subdivision that was cut off and that was a different deal there was debris everywhere and we have some because of our our facebook stuff my wife started posting we had

some green berets from west virginia they drove down and met us the next day and basically they ran chainsaws in front of us because what would happen is when a big hardwood tree would go down uh usually on a situation like that you'll go up and around or you'll go down and around and you'll get by, but in this situation with the storm, there was no up and around. There was no down and around. It was gone. So you had to go straight through it. And some of those logs were a couple feet in diameter. So what the chainsaw guys would do, they would come and if they were under three foot around, they would drop it in like a six, eight foot section and just let it hit the ground. And then my mule string could hop over that. And that's how we got in there. The side by

sides couldn't quite go over the top of that. But how it worked, how it just ended. ended up working as we cut our way in there, we dropped supplies, did a wellness check, and then we moved on, and we kept track of it, and then the side-by-sides would come up behind us, and they would finish clearing it so they could get their rigs through. And then once they did that, then they're so much faster than we could continue hitting the places they couldn't access, and then they would come clean up behind us. And chainsaw crews, side-by-side crews, and my mules were... were probably the, what would you call the formula for what we needed there.

Didn't even think about that with the roadways going out and then how that would affect the animals. Just not only in that scenario. You remember Sarah, because we were actually at Preper Camp that year and we were camping through Helene. We actually, Sarah was there as well. So you remember, you and your husband and a group of guys got in the back of a pickup truck and went out with like hands saws and stuff. Yeah. Clear.

Yeah. And we got through like 90% of it, but, you know, just like it says, those big ones were the challenge because you got to have the big saw in there. They were clearing in reverse. They were clearing from the top of the mountain down. Right. Yeah. There was a lot of that going on. People were working from all different directions.

Say you were cut off. One of the areas we're into, we were like, there's a mini excavator there. And we're like, you know, how the hell would that get here? But the guy lived there and he was in between the office that were cut off. So he just would jump in and he started just clearing which direction he thought was best. And that what we found is in other areas, the same thing. People were showing up. Literally in the beginning, they were showing up with shovels, wanting to dig the churches that got covered with mud.

They wanted to dig their people out. And people were shot up with shovels, a little bit of equipment that was in the area. just ground cruising. There's a lady. She showed up with a table and started making sandwiches. And just giving us food. Everybody could do something. Everybody, yeah.

If there was something you can do, people did it. And it was probably, for me, that was probably the most impressive deal out of the, out of the whole thing is that how everybody just came together. It didn't matter if you were left, right, whatever. It didn't matter at that time. Now, give it 10 days. That shit all changed.

So how well do the mules like hold up? Because obviously that's a higher stress load than they're probably used to. It was hard on those mules. They, Like the trains rugged even. I mean, just that in of itself. And the biggest thing was like crossing the rivers.

We crossed the rivers when they got crossing. Not when they were raging, of course. Yeah. And, you know, we'd go through and we were working it. night a little bit and we'd come through in the morning like just holy shit we just cross that there's rebar

there's concrete there's there's people there's animals everything about water and we they tend to be a little eerie around like my horses were always a little bit eerie around the smell of death like if we had a deer hanging or whatever they're like what

yeah and a couple of the places we put some vicks in their nose like we do for like bear hunts and things like that because yeah it affects them they it's a different smell and they act different for sure yeah I was just thinking about because I grew up a lot

with horses as well and no like that's got a major at one point you were able to rotate your team so you have yeah so people loaned up the mules and then we were and then we started taking out small and what we would do is like like I was saying in the beginning

up there when we had five or six and we couldn't turn them around as easy so what we started just breaking them down into two and three meal strings. And so when we were doing that, I didn't always have a packer, so those two or three meals would stay at the camp. And they would kind of like an athlete. They had to have a little less time. Yeah.

Like changing the line on an ice hockey team. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because two things will happen. They don't want to work, and then they don't. they just don't want to work.

And they get tired and they just want to cooperate. Right. We didn't want to work either. We were getting tired and irritated as well. And then all the bees that came out was just crazy pants. Oh, yeah. The bees, the ground, the ground wafts. Yeah, the yellow jackets.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yellow jackets were a thing. Yeah. It was like, that was like an epidemic. That was like a plague from God. I'm not even kidding. Like I've been attacked really bad by them, so I have a little bit of, and that I couldn't handle it. I was going off.

So I couldn't imagine that the mules would be very happy about the amount of just wastes that were there as well. Right. Yeah. No, they, yeah, it all kind of played. Now, one thing I will say, though, with all the amount of water there was, there wasn't as many. Because usually around July, the yellow jackets are horrible. We don't even train unless we actually have a team that wants to train from July, August, and November up in the mountains because of the yellow jackets still it freezes. But with all the water that moved through, really, you think you'd see more snakes, but a lot of that, like, through that debris, we didn't see any snakes at all, actually.

Yeah. Crazy. Yeah, that's true. There wasn't. Everything, man. There was so much, you know, we just, the stuff you saw was just unbelievable, like treatment plants for the septic system. They weren't just overflowed. The whole concrete structure was gone.

Yeah, it's It was amazing. Yeah, to be out in it too. That's so. It was incredible. Go ahead, Chin. I mean, we're talking about Helene, like Sarah and I have first-hand experience on that one, but

you've also done, what, West Virginia and Texas and. Yeah. Yeah, we can't. You've done relief, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead. No, I was going to say, you've done relief all over the, even out of country, right?

Yeah, so, six a year, what year, going on two years down, we've deployed the mules six, seven times. We did do a deployment to Jamaica, but we did a, because of all the exposure we got from Haleen, different organizations. We weren't in, we're still moving food. We're still moving jackets. We're still moving a lot of that type of stuff. That wasn't really what we started off as, but as we got more popular. I guess you could say, different organizations would say, hey, man, we have this stuff that's, you know, we don't deal in any use closing. It was all new stuff. And they say we'll have this stuff and we'd like you to get it to the people who need it.

And we started off like, yeah, well, you know, we got somebody else that could probably do better and they wouldn't do it. They wanted to go with us. And basically, what it came down to is they wanted to make sure that their product, whatever it is, got to where it needed to. be they didn't want to put on a on a FEMA truck they didn't want to do with with the government and that yes it was kind of interesting coming from that side um so we that's how we got into the food because this organization out of a Nebraska called the orphan grain train they're a Lutheran group and they're huge they give i mean they're not as huge as samaritan's purse but they have planes and they're big they're all over the country all over the world actually um they're They, for Jamaica, they met us here during Helene, and they helped us out.

They just got us supplies that we needed. And then when that passed enough, and then West Virginia hit and then Kentucky hit, we were able to get like 4,000 gallons of water delivered from them, from Nebraska to Kentucky. And we started working that way with them and got a pretty good relationship. Then when Jamaica hit, they asked me, are you going? I said, we're leaving in the morning. We're not sure what we did.

You took them to do them? We're going to leave. And they're like, can you, what do you think they need? And I said, from my guys, the intel guys that we deal with with the military, they're going to need water, probably more than food. And they're going to need both, of course. And I said, so I'm guessing a way to make clean water. So he says, get me some information on those types of filters. So we've called, we talked to Samaritan's person.

We asked them, what are your wash teams? What kind of systems do they run? And they run up. It's called an aquifer, 4,000, Cadidine Filters. who makes it. It pumps out. If you run it 24 hours a day, you can do about 4,400 gallons a day of fresh water. And it's a decal. So it'll take the salt out and everything in between that. If you're not dealing with salt water, it'll still take the other racks, whatever. And they're about 50, 60 grand to get them here. And he called me back and says, hey, I got, what do you got? I told him. He

called him. He said, all right, I just bought one. Can you get a team that can take it and not get it stolen, get it set up, get it handed off to somebody that will continue to run it and won't steal it. And that's how we went to Jamaica. We went up there and we went through customs, got their machine out, took it across the island to St. Elizabeth to Great Bay and started

pumping water in two days. And we did it a little different because there were other wash teams there before us that still weren't pumping water yet. And some of it was just the alligator or the crocodiles were still in the stuff off the pier and that sort of thing.

But the biggest thing is they were waiting to get permits and approval to go ahead and set their machine up to run. And one thing that they told us, they said, we don't want you to wait for permits. You need to go there, set it up. And we did that. And the rep I had from Caddenines

done this for 10 years in pretty much a lot of Caribbean countries. And he's saying what you do, you set it up, you start running. The water ministry will come by. They'll test your water. If it's good, they're going to let you keep pumping. and they're not going to shut you down. So we went ahead, and that was what we decided we were going to do,

and sure enough, it worked just that way. We were pumping for two days. They showed up, checked it, and give us the thumbs up. I think it's done now, but it pumped for probably four months after that. It got moved to two different locations after that. I find it amazing that it's almost like the scammers. Like scammers are everywhere, right? And so for you to, yeah.

Looking for the opportunity. Yeah, and for you to say like the government, you know, like these companies pivot away from the government and ask you to do it because they know it'll get from point A to point B. Respect to you for making it happen. But how sad is that that, you know, you can't even trust. I'm starting to get a vibe. I don't really know where I'm getting it from. But I feel like, and I don't know if it's just because of just we have. new leadership now, but I

feel like in North Carolina we were over by Elk Park and I rolled in we saw a lady, a house has been pushed off, it was an old house, it was sit up on stones and it was pushed off, the front windows were

broke out. There were some kids, younger, not kids, but younger people milling around trying to just see what was up. And there was an old lady in her 80 sitting on the front porch holding a little 22 rifle. And I came up and I said, ma'am, I said, I got some stuff for you.

And she says, let me ask you. She says, are you from FEMA? And then she says, are you from the government period? And I said, no, we're not. I said, we're from over by Morseville. I said, we're just some mule guys. And so she said, what do you got? And I told her, so I started dropping it.

And I told her I had 150 pounds of just all miscellaneous stuff for you. We got five mules. We're going to make our. around up this mountain. And she took about half of it. And she didn't want anymore. And I told her, that's just a couple days. You know, nobody may not be back here for a week.

Yeah. And she would not take it because she had kin on the other side of the mountain. And if she took too much, they wouldn't get it, get what they needed. Somebody else may need it more, right? And I'll tell you, back in those haulers like that, I've never really knew much about them, but they have their own order back there. Yeah. And the government's not really in there.

plan for anything. And they take care of their own. And what pretty much the consensus that pretty much every place I hit was just they took just what they needed. They didn't want to be sure not to take too much. As it should be. Yeah. And so I talked to her and I said,

now what would have if I'd have said, you know, I'm from FEMA and I have a way to fix your house and I have a way to make your life whole again. She says I would run you off. Get the step in. I said, really? I said, after everything, she says, for one, the government's not going to give me $10,000. But she was pretty adamant that she just didn't want help from the government at all.

And that was pretty much that. And she has family and she didn't want to short nobody else. Those are the two. That was the biggest message I got out of the haulers. And I'm talking from West Virginia, Rhode Mountain, Tennessee, East of Tennessee, all the way up through North Carolina. and all the people back in the mountain and said the same things. Is that the same lady that you kind of

befriended? There was one older lady that you kind of went back and forth a couple times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, she was a cool lady. Now, that was up there by that was in Rome Mountain, just above Rome Mountain, Tennessee on Walnut Road

there. And we come into her place, and it's just devastated, man. And we get up to her house, And she's inside. We see her. We're talking to her through the window because a tree had blocked her door so she couldn't get out. So we cut the tree out. And she asked me, you know, what are you doing with mules in my yard?

We had that big storm. She said, I know we had a big storm. But what are you doing? I said, well, we're just taking, we're checking on everybody and bringing supplies for you. And you're the last one on the, on the power grid out here. So you're our last stop. So all this is for you. and she says, what happened?

And I said, we're looking around a yard. And she said, we got a lot of rain. I know that. And I said, well, I said, you can get a lot of it. And I told her what had happened. But she had told me that when there's just a regular storm roll through where she lives back there, it could be eight, ten days. She's out of power regardless.

So to her, she didn't know what had happened. And then I showed her some pictures and told her kind of what the amounts were. And then she came to the conclusion that they had 10 inches before. the storm actually hit. And then I asked her, I said, why do you all build these houses so close to these streams like that? And she says, when her family moved to those mountains, not that particular farm, but the mountains in that area, they were just Scottish settlements. And she says they've never done this.

They've never, the one time we got this many inches and it took out part of the chicken coop, and she pointed me. But she says what she saw come over, that bluff man was two foot tall and then it grew from there. And so she knew they had a lot of rain, but she didn't know it was just devastated like that. So we kind of, we took some pictures with her. She was, you know, really into, she liked the peanut butter and cracker. And so when we're up there, because we train them, we work with special forces. We train up there. We have a lane up there, not far from her place.

So when we're up there, we will go ahead just for the hell of it, pack up some mules, put some peanut butter and crackers on there and go to her house. Nice. Visitor. And now we're trying to have a thing. she doesn't quite get my name right any of the time. When you're training with special forces, did they actually use or are you just hauling equipment for them? Do they actually use the mules like in their operationals?

Or are you just following? Yeah, that's why we moved out to North Carolina, 2012, was to work with the military. We started working off Fort Bragg. We did some work with 80s. We do a lot with third group off of Bragg. And yeah, they use them for. When we started, it was mostly moving weapons. Now it's moving.

And we do a lot of space force type work. So there's a lot of Pelican cases with comms in it. We do a lot of mountain teams, calm teams. And we're got good first. Would they literally like send the mules as like a supply team when the guys are out on operation? Combat logistics battalions use them the most. Okay. Because say you got a team embedded.

They're 50% low running down. They're 50% depleted. They'll call in and they need this, this and this. These guys figure out whether it's helicopter, mules, side by side, on their back, whatever. They figure out how to get it to them. But, yeah, they're used more than you realize. You know, we got into it during Afghanistan, and that was kind of real popular. They rode some horses and all that.

That was cool. But most of these countries, they run on pack animals, whether it be a mule, donkey, horse, camel, llama, whatever, goat. Commerce runs on their back through those mountains. trucks don't go, especially when weather or war or prohibits. That's interesting. I never even thought about the logistical usefulness of still having an animal. Yeah, and we do a lot of work with helicopters and door bundles just because, like, a lot of times you can drop this stuff right at the edge of the trees.

If you start dropping them into the trees unless you know exactly where you're dropping, and a lot of times you'll just hang up into trees. and they won't even try to drop. Got you. So they'll drop at the edge. We'll rendezvous with them and then we'll take the equipment into where it needs to go through the trail systems

or we'll cut brush or whatever it takes. Yeah. That makes sense though. It's just kind of a joint effort. Yeah, because you're taking the pressure off the animal by giving them the least amount of time they have to carry all that gear and everything. And plus just the, you know, you may send a string out five days ahead of time

to make their way to that coordinates, and then the helicopter will come drop and then get out of there. And then that way, then the mules can take it in. You know, they still are working hard getting there, but they're empty a lot of times getting up there to a door bundle. Now, there are cases where they've got to hold up, drop it off, and then come back and meet the helicopter

and get that gear and then take it in. And do it all over again. That's very... It's just like, it's logistics, just like, like Amazon. or UPS or like the semis go out to distribution and then the last mile is like the guy's car contract yeah man the guy's got to carry it up your mile long driveway yeah yeah so that's kind of what your meals are so and that works too you know when we were at in burnsville we were in Pensacola there in the little valley outside of burnsville and we'd uh this is that we've been

there six days seven days working and we came out of the mountains and we went to a command center Pennsylvania, North Carolina, right? Yeah, yeah. That's not the floor. And that's just out of Burnsville. Our command center was up in Burnsville. We went up there to just get some orders, and they said, hey, man, we got the 82nd Airborne down there trying to distribute supplies, you know, can you help?

Do you think you would help? And I said, yeah, I said, we could work good together. So we get down in there, and those guys, we would fill up 120-pound packs for them. And what we would do is, see, what would hurt us is we would be rolling along along with a string of mules or two, two mules at a time, different guys. We'd come to a driveway, and then, so up that driveway, a half a mile,

three quarter miles is where the house was. So you'd have to make your way, and that's usually what was rutted out, is their driveways. And you would get up there, trying to work your way up there, and it just took forever. You know, and then you'd have to work your way back down, and then go to the next one. So in a day, he may hit five

or six houses, one guy, and then the other guy might hit five or six houses. With the 82nd there, what they did, is they drop their guys at every driveway and then we dropped the supplies at the end of the driveway. Some of it was by mules. Some of it was by their I don't know what the vehicle was called,

but they had some vehicles that could make it to some of these driveways. And basically they said we can give you a mile. You give us 120 pounds, we'll take it a mile upheeled, downhill, up or rope, whatever. But that's what we can do. So we dropped that at the end of the driveway and we cleared that whole valley

in like seven hours. Because we had 150 guys packing almost as much as a damn mule. Up these mountains. No kid, man. These guys are just, they're, and they're beasts.

And it's not just 80 seconds. All the soft guys that we deal with are just bad. Just in a way, a different kind of badass than what we normally would think is. They can overcome mentally. It's like they tell you, your body, your mind's a lot stronger than your body.

But it convinces your body to be strong. Yeah. Or the other way. Yep. And so I wish, So now our whole thing now is we're trying to get training set up with local services. Because if we would have had one or two guys that could have just led a mule up and hit two houses for us, we could have sped everything up.

And that's what we treat. When we train the military, we teach them to handle one mule, two mules by themselves and to take care of them and to go do jobs. That would apply. The overlap was just incredible once we got sat back in a little. looked at as like what we've trained these military guys to do for the last since 2012 is exactly prepared us exactly for what we did during Haleen and then from Lilleen we went to West Virginia twice we went to Kentucky after that we went to Maryland well this is all within just a few months and then of course we went out to Texas and that was a whole different deal

there it wasn't it was every bit horrific but it was all concentrated along the river for the most part. That was the one where that camp got washed out. That's where we started. Right there just down below Mystic. And that's where they started us. And we worked the rocks up there. And basically what we did there is we took chainsaws,

fuel water down to the crews that we're doing. They were doing recovery. Search and rescue. Yeah. I was wondering about that. That makes sense. And then so we're there. So that had went on for about three, four days.

And then we were like the mule work was pretty much done. that really, you know, there was some stuff we could do, but it wasn't the first strike type stuff. And so what we decided is that we were waiting. Nobody had dogs. We were waiting for dogs to show up. So we went ahead. We have a bunch of our mules that you can ride also. So we started putting people that we knew on mules, and we started doing recovery with the mules.

Yeah. And that's when we decided we need to expand how we do this. So the mules are good for up to a point. We have an asset with these mules that can cover ground on foot like a horse. We need to have guys with the drones, with the micro drones, with the coms, everything they need to report back where they've been, what they see, what's there. Because in Texas, if you found body, you didn't touch it. You had to call law enforcement and then go through those channels.

Right. But still, that's neat because the mule can get into an area where most, you know, cover ground faster at least than a human. Yeah. And then they have little drones and stuff that the riders using to expand their perimeter. That is, how that worked is you would take and you'd roll through. Like, we had a lot of cedar that was down. So we were literally, we had some guys.

And these guys were Marine Raiders that happened to live in Texas. We had like a federal marshal from Georgia that was friends with and they served together, that sort of thing. And they linked up with us in Sandy Creek over by Leander. and started chainsawing through the cedars for us. And basically then what our orders were, see how it worked there, is you'd bring a dog out, you'd search these piles, because the debris piles would build up, and that's where everything would collect on these turns.

So the dog would market it. You'd get a lot of different sets out of there, but if it was a body, they would mark it, and then they'd bring a second dog out, he would mark it, and if he marked it, then they would bring in the equipment and start taking out layer by law. layer. They were very delicate when they exude people out of that brush. They didn't just pull shit off. They were, and it was specialized teams that did that. Dignity was what they thought

about the most. That's what was important to them, is that they give these bodies. That's Texas for you. That's Texas. And the children. So while we were waiting for dogs, we actually would go out And when the wind was right, you would pick up descent. And I don't know how accurate we were, but our orders were just, if you smell it, mark it. Well, then no matter what, if anything deads in there, you mark it. And then they'll bring a dog out, then they'll bring a second dog once they get there. And so we did that for about six days straight until FEMA got there. And then dogs started showing up, more dogs.

There were dogs, some dogs there, but not where we were working. Right. And not enough. The tools actually, we want to look into this a little more because we know there's scent tracking horses and that sort of thing that these different people are playing around with. But we could tell the mules acted different when the wind would blow and we would have something dead in those piles. But we weren't sure if it was just because they'll act that way with just other dead animals. Right. But we just, we did enough of it over and over and over.

We could almost tell like, I think we're going to find something in this pile the way that animals. The animal. Sure enough. Yeah. Now, like I said, we don't know, you know, the human sense different. But it'll fool you with, say you got a pig in there also or a cow or something, it'll fool you. And I'll tell you, I didn't sign on for that type of work. But it was kind of one of those deals.

You have to do it. You're there. You have the resources. And it's just why do you show up if you're not going to do it. The families need you. I would have much rather done a thousand other things than doing recovery, but you just get through it. Yeah. Amen to that.

So you even lost some animals during Haleen, which is interesting. I wanted to ask you if you had like special tips, you know, with the wildfires in California and stuff, being able to move your animals as like a big deal. Yeah. To be able to, you know, have that rapid response. you what's some like the things that you know maybe with a clean retrospective or you've owned them for a long time kind of stuff you deploy um that others might be able to apply to their animals yeah you know we did a little wild land fire work while we were in California when we left California it wasn't on fire year around like right yet every two three years you'd get a big fly

fire there's a couple of mule strings that work through the forest service up there I worked for a packout in the immigrant wilderness and we did some work with on some fire lines there. And really, I kind of forgot where I was going with that. Being able to get your animals moving fast. Like if you saw that the storm was incoming. During that time where we lived was at the base of this year, Nevada, pretty much cattle country. So anytime there was fires in the area,

everybody would mobilize their trailers and they would be, because Holland, people like, us and other ranchers, they don't have one or two horses. Just a standard ranch will probably have eight to ten horses or more. That's a smaller ranch. We have 15, 20 mil. So we would, that's something that we try to do. We didn't go out to California on the Palisade fires because that's one really a big need for moving horses around there. That wasn't a horse country. A little bit more urban environment, yeah. Yeah, but we will move around to help if there, if there's a need for that. We have big trailers. We have 32-foot trailers so we can

haul 12, 15 in, you know. So, basically. Is that how you got to like, Texas? Is that how you get your mules around? Do you have your own equipment or do you like leave or have equestrian moors? We have two big trailers and then we have some smaller trailers. We have a few trucks. But yeah, you have to be able to haul everything yourself.

Your own stuff, yeah. Even that is a huge logistical thing. Those animals can't be. Penske doesn't have some like equestrian hauling unit. No, but I. enterprise we uh we rent trucks from there because we're the enterprise we use in morseville north carlanta is big nascar country so they rent the trucks and they rent trucks that will pull big trailers so for different events or if we have or we'll like texas we'll rent a truck for a

month and go down there uh but yeah you can rent them um it's it's actually cheaper to rent them than it is to own them uh the extra trucks just because uh you don't know when you're going to And if you have to sit a trucker, you know, and we have a nonprofit meal. And we really watch how much money goes out because we have to stay. Because deploying is very expensive. Yeah. It's very expensive. So we just don't want to be making a payment and insurance payment on trucks when they're not working.

And we did math. We did the numbers. Even though this was like a crazy two years as far as disaster response goes, it still made more sense to rent these trucks. for a month at a time than it was to keep them for 11 months out of the year and not use them. Everything go boils down. You know, you got to, you know, when we started this thing, we weren't, being the nonprofit was the furthest thing. We had no idea what it was even really. It didn't interest us at all.

And when we were working Helene, we just could not believe how many people out of the goodness of their heart were doing things, nonprofits everywhere. and the more we got into it, we were thinking, ah, that's bullshit. There's not a lot of people out there. There's a lot of scammers out there. Yeah. And that was the rude awakening right there because, you know, we thought what we would do is when we got to this point, because money had come in, people were supporting us financially. And we were mountain meal packer ranch.

We were a company for profit and it was going through there. So we had to change that. So we got hired some CPAs. we got some good advice from like samaritan some other people get some get some CPAs separate the two and run them either start a non-profit or you donate the money somewhere and at first we were going to just donate the money and then the more we looked into it it's like we felt that we could do a better job with that money and we decided to go ahead let's we're just going to do a non-profit and do it ourselves. And we started doing that and it went good, but then it just got so overwhelming trying

to work and run that and train that we finally made the decision. We need to just either jump all the way in or get all the way out. And we decided to jump all the way in. And it's, nonprofits are different. They're hard to, they're hard to keep alive. If you want to keep doing good, you have to feed them. And so that's what we work on. That's what we've been working on. And we're doing pretty good with that. We're comfortable with our model. We're hoping to make it better and to get a little different funding so we can get some specialized equipment that will work with the mules. But that's what we decided that we can do a better job with the money. So we started mission mules and we've been doing it full time ever since. That's cool. Yeah,

the ebb and flow of that income stream has got to be a challenge. It is. It's, you know, like I said, I don't know a lot about it, but it's all doable. But the organization that we've worked with, the most, they told us, bottom line, you do good, you keep doing good, and you just don't waver from that. The money, the support will come in. And I believe that's kind of where we are right now. Isn't that what Jesus tells us? You know, that's it.

That's it. So. So what kind of advice would you have for people if they were waiting for assistance kind of thing, you know, for those folks who are like, oh, the government's going to come and save me. And, you know. Now, do I know they said that before I got there? I'm just talking about, you know, there's a lot of folks out there. You know, I'll tell you. The biggest thing that I've learned out of this is you need to be prepared.

And whether it's, I don't think you can overprepare, but I believe having, if you, if you think you can be cut off, even if you don't think you can be cut off, you need to have a certain amount of supplies on hand. You have to have either water or a way to make water. Yeah. Those are the, those are the two things. I just, I just feel like you just got to look into your area, what you need to have. So if you're cut off for 10 days, you can get by, your animals can get by. with very little disruption. So you know, you want your generators, you want your fuel,

if you can make solar. It's not something you can just go out. And then I'm talking not from experience, but what I've learned and meeting people like you is this isn't something you can just go out, drop a credit card and buy everything you need, and you're good for the next lane. This, you have to have, it's got to be a mindset.

You have to start looking how things are, how things have progressed, and then what do I need to say? to sustain my self and my people for X amount of time. And a lot of the skills and supplies overlap. You know, you might be planning for an ice storm here in the mountains, but a hurricane comes through so you could still do the,

you know, or like your one lady that was always out for 10 days. But you still have food. You'll still have power, you know, backup. So a lot of stuff overlaps and skills overlap. I believe water is probably the most important. You know, I'll tell you. Out of all the things I've done with the mule since,

Saline, going to Jamaica doing that wash plant, or doing the washing team, the desal, to me, and that made the most sense as far as going out there, and that just kept working, kept working. Even when you weren't, the three guys set it up, we did the whole process, set it up, and it was kicking out 2,200 gallons a day, because we'd run it three days a week, eight to ten hours a day.

and that was pretty much with that community needed. But to me, that just having that type of system on hand made the most sense that you should have water. Always have a way to make water. Speaking of water, that's got to be like the challenging, one of the most challenging items to carry in because of the weight, the movement of it. Yeah. Yeah, you almost got to have a way to make it because like for meals, like meals drink a lot of water. and if you had to clean their water, you couldn't carry enough water in.

And it's same for a family. They, you know, a couple cases are going to get you by for, depending on how many you are, but you need to have a way to make water, whether you're purifying it with boiling it or anyway. And even boiling doesn't, like in Jamaica, we got there, you know, people are drinking out of puddles. They're shitting all over themselves,

because they got Zoria and all that. Yep. And then some of them were boiling the water, but what's in the water, the byproduct when you boil it was making them a little different kind of sick. So it really wasn't even clean that way. It had to be filtered.

Yep. Yeah. Or distilled. Distilled's the one I found that. Yeah, that works. Yeah. That's when I found that works the most. I'm an expert on it, but I saw what I saw.

Yeah. That's why I like the hands-on. because, you know, in Jamaica, you know, they, I don't know if they like us or don't like us. My feeling was if we weren't there helping, they really didn't want us there. Right. And, you know, they, we had one, we had a Raider doing security for us. You know, they tried to steal our shit two different times in one day. Oh, gosh.

And the time we left customs, we had to go fuel up 250 people at this gas station, two pumps working or whatever, something crazy like that. and the guys just don't pump to pump trying to steal shit. So we had to deal with that, and then we got out of there late at night, had to go across the island. They tried to steal our shit again. Once we got there, we didn't really feel welcome until we started making fresh water. And then we were in there, you know, we felt comfortable. We felt safe, you know.

But up until then, it's just, they just wanted to see, you know, it was hard because they had nothing, man. You're going down the road. There's lined with people. The huts are all gone. They're trying to make and make something to eat, drink. So I understand trying to rob these trucks as they come through, but it didn't make it any less terrifying for me. Right. Not going to laugh.

And that's why I always try to tell people like that. You as an individual need to have that certain amount of preparedness because they're not coming for you. They're going to come to try and make water for everybody or get a big infrastructure back online. and not you on doing your thing. They don't care. Like, they don't have time to care, honestly. Even if they were, like, best-hearted people, they just don't, you know, I'm sure you are. But you couldn't sit there and help everybody along the way

or else you'd never get to the point where you could go and help everybody. Yeah, you could. Right. Yeah, that's really neat. You're doing some incredible stuff, and I'm glad that the Lord put you back on your track there. You know, the biggest thing for us, you know, Mountain Mule Pats, my business is increased with the military because of the storm, which, you know, that's all in God's hand. Because if he wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't be able to do this full-time.

Right now. The response full-time. But like for us, we need quality volunteers. Prior militaries always seems to work the best. And we just need to just keep our funding coming through on a steady basis. And that's really, if you can get those two things. you can do a lot of good. That's what it's going to be my next question.

I saw on your website, Mike, you have spots for eight donations and how to get, you know, you have like an Amazon wish list kind of thing. And he also had spots for like volunteers and signing up there. So there's a lot, if we could go to your website, there's a lot of places we can go to find out how each person can help. You know, is the lady sat up the table, you know, making signatures or is it somebody, you know, humping in, you know, backpacks, whatever? Right. Yeah. No, Mr. Mules.org, that's all that information's right there.

Yeah. I will put that in my. And every bit helps. You know, we would, like, when we come back from a deployment, we'll have volunteers here to help us get the trucks unloaded, get the mules taken care of, just because our guys are smoked, because we're a small outfit. So when we go, we maybe have four or five guys in the trucks, and then we link up with people when we're there. But, you know, like to Texas, you know, And that was a huge drive. Yeah.

You drive all the way out there to go and work. And that Texas had to be really rough on the heartstrings. And the thing is, you know, there's a job for everybody. Yeah. We have a lot of older people that come and they help do our Christmas stuff. We still do like, because of the exposure, we got jacket companies, donate jackets. So we, while we were in West Virginia, those haulers, we saw how poor the haulers in West Virginia were. And so we started working with the schools and we provide food up there.

We do a Christmas program. And I think for the one district, we did like four or five hundred jackets this year for them. So we're constantly doing that. So we have roles for people to help us with packaging, sorting through, like getting the orders to go out as they come in. And that's where that wish list comes in. When we have a need, we'll put that wish list out there like we're looking to get this many jackets for the school district in West Virginia. And then so people will do that. And then as they come in, the volunteers will process that, get them categorized so we can ship them or haul them up there on our...

That is phenomenal. So now it's not just about the mules and it's not just about the rescue. Now you're actually expanded out into the community that's helping the community. Yes. Yeah. And if there's other groups small like us that are helping and doing good help, we help with them, not always with money, but, We'll put some of our resources to help them. Because like in West Virginia, there's a lot of little groups there, but they don't have a lot to work with.

But they do everything they can. So we help them out, whether they're doing food for kids. What we started doing is working through the school districts providing food to go back to the haulers after school hours. Okay. And that's like the one that we're working on right now. water we have a company that donated a bunch a thousand-gallar

tanks for collecting rainwater so we're helping some of those people get their rainwater set up where they can collect off the roofs and that sort of thing rather than pull it out of the ground because the cold country the water is so screwed up there it's not drinkable

it's brown I mean I saw it with my own eyes man it's something and that's all just yeah we just trying to do all the any opportunities that come into us because of our exposure that we can pass along. We try to do it. We try to hand the programs off to like somebody else. Because running food, because we were running for a while,

there are a 40-foot container of food, like literally 60 grand worth of food every 50 days. That's a lot of distribution, a lot of handling a product that we really weren't set up to do. So we'll try to hand that off to like some churches or something in that area. And then these organizations will just ship that food directly to them. That's amazing. So you're kind of working as a now a networker as well to connect. A little bit. Yeah.

And mostly just so we can focus on what we do. Because our whole mission, like, and we implemented it the first time in last February, in West Virginia, you know, what we always found is, man, everybody's getting there too late as far as we were concerned. They were getting there as soon as they could, but like if you know something's coming, and we tested this out last February, we went up to West Virginia the day before the storm hit. They put us up at the Armory downtown in Welsh there, and then the storm passed the next morning, or the next afternoon as soon as it cleared enough, they sent the snow trucks out, they plowed the roads, and they got us to the three haulers that we needed.

So our whole goal is to try to, and we have what's called the Discovery Teams now, and they're mostly Marine Raiders, a lot of special forces guys on these teams, but their job is now is we're seeing something come in to get out there or to get as close to it as they can until it passes, so they're on the ground

hours after the events. Gotcha. That's our mission. And we're going to get bid. I know sometimes you're going to probably deploy out and then it's going to turn out to not really be what it was supposed to. So it's not a wasted trip, but you don't

activate after that. back. And I know we're going to deal with that, but I think the fact that if you can get there and hit one right, the amount of working and good you can do will supersede the inconvenience that going there and not actually working. And it takes a lot to mobilize your setup. I mean, like people, I don't think people really understand how hard it is to transport a horse or a mule across the country. Like, you know, transport 15 of them. Yeah, right. You don't, you don't So we're running a 32-foot trailer, a 28-foot trailer, a 16-foot box trailer, and a flatbed trailer. And you can't just, like, drive straight through.

What's that? You can't just drive straight through. No, you can't because not all volunteers drive like we drive. So you have to, you can't go over 10 hours. And then you got to shut down for the night and then go again. So now we're good because of all the exposure to people. Once they know we're on the move, they'll start off. offering up places to stay on the way.

That's cool. Which is awesome because the big orcrant, we can just roll in. Yeah, Corral, we can kick our stock out, we'll sleep in the barn or whatever. They'll feed us generally. If not, we cook. And then we get back. They make it real easy on us to not lose time loading and unloading. How good.

You know what? That is just, I'm so glad you came on the show today because that is just like, it just lets you know the backbone of America is still there. I believe that is the backbone of America. American. Yep. Yeah. It's still mobilized.

It's still there. And every place that we've stopped and laid over where we had to, like Louisiana when we're going to Texas, they prayed with us, they fed us and they made sure of our animals were taking care. Man. So, you know, doing what we do, you can't ask for any more than that. That is awesome. Well, I am definitely going to make sure that everybody gets a hold of this episode.

we get your message out as wide as we can. Before we wrap up, let me know if there's anything else like that's upcoming or that you really need, you know, assistance with as far as it goes. You kind of went through it or, you know, whatnot already. But like, what's that most burning thing that you want people to know? And then give them your website again. And I'm going to post it all over the place as well.

Well, I appreciate that very much because it does small organizations like ours to help that people like, you can give and do for us is you can't even measure it. I mean, it's just, you get it out there. It helps us. And like I said, our main, we're trying to do a few things. We want to have our discovery teams out early. So we basically have some things that we're looking to buy.

We're saving up. But one of them is a discovery vehicle, small four-wheel drive that three to four guys can move around and camp out of while they're doing their work in the beginning. It's just stuff like that. But really, it just fund us and follow us. And if you follow us, you can kind of see exactly where the money's going on each purchase. And, and, Rand, really just if you got to feel like you want to do some volunteer work, we would love to have you.

For sure, and you go to mission meals.org, and you'll be able to find a place to donate, place to volunteer, and just information about us in general. I love that. So guys, you know, one of the big questions we had going through Helene and that is literally who do you give your money to where it's going to actually make a difference on the ground. Samaritan Purse stepped up. There was a couple other ones at the time. But Mission Mules is 100% that. I would highly recommend your guys' company.

You're a gem to talk to. It's been my honor. And thanks, Tim, for hooking us up today. Absolutely. Like the real deal. I was, I mean, he's an awesome guy, and I couldn't wait to get him on the show. Yeah. Appreciate you having me.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, guys, keep in mind, we've got the drop of the audio drama going on. Sign up for Preper Camp. We're trying to get Mike out there, just so y'all know. He's a busy guy. And thanks so much, Mike, again, for coming. on the show.

Yes, ma'am. All right. Until next time, remember, dream, survive. Thrive. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for listening to the Changing Earth podcast.

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