Throughout much of North America, tree sugaring time is near or already underway. Depending on the weather and your latitude, you will have trees with running sap between January and early March. Some of these trees can be sources of water if you get caught without anything to drink. Other trees can provide live-saving calories at one of the roughest times of the year for survival.

Meteorologists are predicting a massive blizzard will hit the Northeast bringing high winds and up to two feet of snow. The storm will likely hit the New York City area Thursday night and continue into Connecticut and Massachusetts through Friday. 

According to ABC News: "Forecasts called for as much as 9 inches of snow across central Michigan, a foot and a half in the Hudson Valley region of New York, and 2 feet or more across coastal New England. Possible hurricane-force winds off Massachusetts and Rhode Island also made flooding a threat."

There are countless different survival kit iterations out there, both on store shelves and assembled at home. Many of these kits include a few multi-use items—like needles, duct tape, and dental floss—that can be used for gear repair.

Since your gear can literally save your life if you run into trouble, why not take gear repair a little more seriously by building a dedicate repair kit within your survival kit?

In case you don’t pay much attention to the goings-on of the nation’s urban areas, Brooklyn, NY, has become a fertile crescent of sorts for a now decade-long handcrafted/artisanal movement. These days, you can’t swing an ironically bearded and bespectacled inhabitant of the borough without hitting a beeswax candle maker or a chocolatier or a haberdasher of some stripe or another. And to be honest, a lot of the stuff these folks are making is of remarkable quality, if also remarkably expensive. And as a 10-year resident of Brooklyn, I take a certain amount of pride and satisfaction in being surrounded by such creative and hard-working types.
   
This movement has also spawned a cultural paradigm in which eating locally-sourced, organic, and/or wild food is de rigueur, and participating in activities like gardening and even hunting—activities that people who live in the country classify as “everyday life”—have become trendy and cool.
   
And then there are the nascent businesses that aim to supply these budding bumpkins with the wares they supposedly need to lead this sort of lifestyle. Take for example, Bush Smarts, a New York-based online purveyor of gear for the modern urban woodsman. Co-founder Kevin Sterling writes on the company’s web site, “As someone who goes out of his way for black market raw milk, Amish chickens and bio-active beer, I was bored with buying gear at chain stores that I would break and replace without a second thought…John [Davidson] and I launched Bush Smarts to put some soul back into outdoor gear as a cottage industry.”