Emergency Essentials

So yesterday I went to the dentist for the 6 month cleaning and check up. As usual I got chewed out about my lack of flossing. So after the cleaning they usually send you off with a bag that has a new tooth brush, listerine, and dental floss. And they jokeingly said you wont need the dental floss. But I told them that the dental floss was the most important part and that I deffinatly wanted it.

After the strange looks I explained our I make sure to keep lots of dental floss in my hunting and backpacking gear. One small container of Dental floss holds 55 yards of floss thats 165 feet of great rope all in a small light container. If you haven’t tried yet I challenge you to take a piece of dental floss and try to break it. It is incredibly strong and it doesn’t deteriate like rope because of the wax coating. A few years back I was up hunting Elk and noticed that the string on my bow was fraying pretty bad. I was in an area where we backpacked 4 miles in to hunt and a good 3 – 4 hours away from any place that could possibly replace the string if it snaped. Unfortunatly I didn’t have any serving string with me but I did have my dental floss. So I used the dental floss to serve the frayed string. It worked perfect and it is still on that bow to this day.

Other things that you could use dental floss for in an emergency situation is building a shelter. Gather up the branches you need and use the floss to lash a temporary shelter. Its also strong enough to hang decent sizes of meat from the trees to keep the bears away. So next time you go to the dentist remember to ask for a free sample of dental floss. It can be used in more ways than one.