INCH Bag List | 44 Essential Items

Sometimes, a typical bug out bag just isn’t enough. And a home survival kit is not mobile enough. Enter the INCH Bag.

Designed for long-term and long-distance survival, self-reliance skills are stressed to help you meet your goal. Using experience and survival gear together can give you the edge to last indefinitely away from home.

You’ll need a big bag and the best gear to permanently bug out. Like any survival kit, an INCH kit can be personalized to your abilities and situation. The bags we show are my own, so keep that in mind when you pack your own bags for your own threats. Essential gear overlaps with our bug out bag, even though with INCH we don’t have a set up bug out location.

Below, we break down what an INCH bag is, how it differs from a bug out bag, and share an INCH bag checklist you can download, print, or save in multiple formats.

Contents (Jump to a Section)

What is an INCH Bag?

INCH stands for “I’m never coming home”, so an INCH bag is a bug out bag variant that helps you leave home permanently.

When you are developing your emergency plan and want to be flexible with a target Bug Out Location (or not have one at all), that is where an INCH bag comes into play.

An INCH Bag is designed to sustain you indefinitely using the contents of the bag/kit combined with natural resources. It is meant to help you live off the land itself and/or assist in getting a completely new off-grid homestead set up. As you can imagine, this is no easy task and makes its 72-hour bug out bag counterpart look like a cakewalk.

You would use an INCH bag in a severe national or global catastrophe when you need to permanently and quickly relocate. This could be triggered by many things, including super-scale natural disasters, asymmetric attacks (nuclear/biological), or any permanent societal disruption (warfare/cyberattacks/financial collapse). The need for this type of kit depends on your situation/location, and risk tolerance.

Most people confuse bug out bags for INCH bags and don’t realize that they need more resources and survival skills to realistically survive on their own indefinitely.

INCH Bag vs Bug Out Bag

INCH bags are designed to meet different goals than bug out bags. For starters, they are designed for different lengths of time. Bug out bags are meant to be used for 72 hours, or to go from point A to point B if you have a planned bug out location.

INCH bags are designed to live away from typical resources for longer periods, all the way up to indefinitely.

Because of this difference in time, INCH bags are much larger (or are transportable kits instead of bags), and they are packed full of renewable and reusable resources that provide more value over a longer time. My personal INCH kit is more than double the size and weight of my bug out setup, but makes up for it with renewable resources and survival essential ‘runway’ to give my family a fighting chance.

If you are looking for our top-level guide with all supplies related to bugging out to a specific pre-planned location, check out our bug out bag list:

Bug Out Bag List

INCH Bag Essentials

As far as mobile survival kits go, an INCH bag is the largest and the biggest I’ve built. Oftentimes, you’ll need a vehicle, cart, or some sort of wheels to be able to transport all of the gear unless you get a massive backpack and are extremely selective in your gear picks.

For my INCH kit, I use a rolling duffel and treat it as an add-on for my already large bug out bag. This duffel contains INCH-specific gear that is highly reusable, more of the essentials, and family-sized gear to support indefinite survival. Ideally, this would go in one of my bug out vehicles, but it is transportable on its own.

Bigger and Better Gear

The duffel I use for INCH is a rolling 120-liter solution from my military deployment bag days. It is plenty big to fit our massive family tent, additional food reserves, larger tarps, more cordage, and other gear we’ll simply need more of if the bug out plan is likely to fail.

Here are the bigger solutions this kit relies on:

• Large Duffel: SOC Rolling Loadout Duffle – over 120-liter (4,720 cubic inches) gives me plenty of room to store more essentials and additional gear.
• Family Tent: – Fit the whole family and make a home away from home. This could very well be your new living quarters for a long time, so make sure you are familiar with it and that it’s big enough for everyone. If you plan to use bushcraft to improve it or build a makeshift cabin, be sure that you have the practical skills to back up that plan.
• Emergency Food: Augason Farms 30-Day Bucket (from the best emergency food supplier review) – While these aren’t very sustainable, they will help buy you time. Food rations are used in smaller kits, but you will need more time to get your sustainable food situation figured out.
• Solar Solutions: Jackery Explorer 300 Plus (from the best power station review) – I use the small portable Jackery for my INCH bag, with the folding Jackery SolarSaga Panel that drapes across the bag perfectly while I’m on the go. This combo easily powers all of my electronic equipment.
• Sleeping Bag: Skip the emergency bivvy and go with an insulated sleeping bag. It is the number one piece of gear that Alone contestants wish they had invested more in. It’s not just about comfort- temperature regulation at night can seriously affect your sleep quality.
• More Cordage: Titan SurvivorCord 620lb (from the best paracord review) – While you can make cordage in the woods, it’s time-consuming and can be frustrating. Pack extra as you’ll end up using it.
• More Clothes: A single skivvy roll isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to need plenty more clothes for survival.
• More First Aid Supplies: Add more first aid supplies, prescription meds, and medical tools- they are hard to come by later on: Survival First Aid Kit List
• More Ammo: Don’t let your hunting or self-defense solution become dead weight early on.

INCH-Specific Supplies

There are a handful of specific gear choices that work exceptionally well for an INCH Bag, but not others. Because the INCH concept is so focused on long-term and long-range on-the-go survival, the gear that stands out is usually reusable, renewable, and requires some skill.

These suggestions are either found exclusively on INCH lists or are prioritized higher:

• Takedown Bow: Samick Sage Takedown Recurve – similar to a takedown rifle in use, but its limited range is offset by the fact that arrows are quiet, highly reusable, and more easily replicable ammo.
• Snares: Southern Snares (from the best snare wire review) – reusable trapping supplies excel in INCH situations.
• Survival Seeds: Open Seed Vault 32 (from the best survival seed kit review) – renewable food at its finest if you have a green thumb.
• Axe or Hatchet: Estwing 26″ Campers Axe (from the best survival axe review) – shelter becomes a much stronger priority, whether that is constructing an actual shelter or gathering firewood.
• Shovel: SOG Entrenching Tool (from the best survival shovel review) – a shelter and gardening staple.

As we said, these are simply additions to our standard bug out bag list, which is pretty comprehensive to begin with. Items we merely suggest considering for a bugout bag, like a takedown rifle, are much more important for an INCH bag.

Threat-Specific Gear

Being away from home can separate you from some key resources that may be needed depending on how the world continues to evolve. If a catastrophe sets you on a course to using your INCH Bag, you may also be subject to domino effects further down the road.

For that reason, it sometimes makes sense to include niche equipment that can be the difference between life and death. Although your assessment may not have required them for a bug out setup, the unknowns you will face with an INCH situation make them worth considering.

Here is the threat-specific gear I pack:

• Gas Masks: MIRA CM-6M (from the best gas mask review) – If I’m leaving and not coming home, I’m bringing gas masks. Whatever instability has caused me to leave could easily chain into a CBRN event down the road.
• Geiger Counter: GQ GMC-300S (from the best Geiger counter review) – A nuclear event could be undetectable until my family shows symptoms of being sick. Checking background readings occasionally is easy, doesn’t use much energy, and will give us peace of mind.
• Potassium Iodide: iOSAT (from the best iodine tablets review) – A blister pack of iOSAT takes up virtually no space in a kit, so it’s included mostly because there is no drawback. In the extremely rare event that I need to load up my thyroid to prevent radiation absorption, I’ll have what I need.
• Sandbags: UpNorth Sandbags (from the best flood barriers review)- Empty sandbags can be super useful if you plan on building, diverting water, or hardening a structure against firearms (or radiation).

Packing Your Bag

When you pack your INCH bag, you can pack with storage efficiency and weight distribution in mind rather than quick access (unlike EDC/GHB/BOB). The sheer amount of gear you’ll be hauling requires good packing strategies.

Regardless of the bag you selected to carry your resources, you’ll want to layer your items with the heaviest items at the bottom. If you are using a cart or rolling duffel, it’s ideal to envision the ‘bottom’ of the bag as if the bag or cart is being actively pulled.

I pack the dense food storage and tent at the bottom of my duffle, with lighter-weight clothes and tarps at the top. In the sides, I keep longer-handled tools, which allows for quicker access and helps the bag be more rigid in transport.

Ideally, your INCH bag can have a home in a bug out vehicle. If you find yourself without transportation, an INCH bag will severely limit your mobility. Whether your last-resort vehicle is an RV, bike, or something in between, make sure that you can quickly add your kit before you hit the trail.

My INCH duffle easily fits into my Bug Out SUV and my last-resort bike trailer.

INCH Survival Skills

With an INCH bag, you are going to need to rely even more on survival skills. This might seem counterintuitive at first because an INCH bag contains more gear and more supplies, but when you are surviving indefinitely off of those resources, they are just a drop in the bucket.

Survival skills bridge the gap between your typical 10 days’ worth of food and water you pack in an INCH bag and, well.. forever. You need to be able to quickly kick-start your resource gathering, shelter-building, and remember your survival priorities.

Full INCH Bag Checklist

A perfect INCH bag doesn’t exist- what is right for you depends on your situation and risk tolerance. That said, we have as close to perfect of a starting point for you: our comprehensive checklist.

Our checklist is available as both a PDF download and as a Google Sheets/Excel file where you can check off items yourself, and even add and subtract items from the checklist.

Printable PDF Checklist

If you are looking for the simplest way to print and use the checklist above, download our printable PDF version. It is two pages long on 8.5″ x 11″ paper and makes creating an INCH bag extremely easy. Once you open the INCH bag PDF checklist in your browser, you can either print it directly or save it through your browser.

Checklist Excel / Google Sheets

If you are looking for a comprehensive way to track your INCH bag contents, open our Excel / Google Sheets version. The sheet is shareable, and you just need to copy it to your own Google Sheets account or download it to Excel to edit it. We also keep the best-reviewed item for each category linked to simplify shopping for any equipment you may find yourself missing.

Maintaining and Updating

Like any survival kit, you should plan to revisit your INCH bag at least once per year. Ideally, you will pull it out and use the gear more often than that, especially the tools.

When you revisit your kit for maintenance, run a quick inventory checklist to make sure you haven’t grabbed any essential gear for other projects and forgotten to replace it. Also, check perishable item expiration dates on things like food kits, prepackaged water, batteries, and survival seed vaults. I always find it best to just replace anything close to expired and use the expiring items up with either training or a project around the house.

Another important update to note is whether anything has changed in your life. Whether it’s medical needs, growing kids, or new pets, our lives are constantly changing, and your INCH kit plan should reflect that.

Lastly, store your kit in an area that prolongs shelf life and doesn’t damage your tools over time. This is usually a low-humidity, room-temperature area.

The Next Step

Whether or not you’ve chosen to build an INCH bag, our next step in this guide series stops off at EDC, or Everyday Carry. What you have on you when an unexpected disaster emerges can determine whether you can even make it to your INCH bag.

Check out our Everyday Carry Guide here:

Keep exploring, stay prepared, and be safe.

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The post INCH Bag List | 44 Essential Items appeared first on TruePrepper.