Water & food
Ultralight Backpacking Stove
A burner that threads onto a gas canister and packs into a fist. Wind resistance matters more than raw output.
Scenario
Keep moving south. Do not explain why.
The sky went grey and stayed. Nothing grows, nothing is coming back, and the only plan anyone has left is somewhere warmer. The road is safer than the towns and worse than being still, and you will do it anyway.
What kills you
Cold, starvation, and other people — in that order.
Rules
The book behind it
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
McCarthy never explains what happened, and the refusal is the point. The prose is stripped to almost nothing, which is what makes the few warm moments land as hard as they do.
Hot food is a morale weapon. It is also smoke, so you will use it rarely and well.
A burner that threads onto a gas canister and packs into a fist. Wind resistance matters more than raw output.
A warm room you can carry. There will not be another kind.
Warmest for its weight, and useless once wet. Fill power is the number that matters.
Weighs nothing, works on anything, and does not need a fire.
Chemical treatment for when filtering is not practical. Slow, unglamorous, and weighs almost nothing.
Your knees have to last longer than the road does.
Two extra points of contact, reducing load on knees and testing ground before you commit weight.
The phone dies in a week. Paper does not care.
Contour lines showing terrain shape, which a road map does not. What a compass is for.
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