A couple of years ago, we were planning our first road trip as a family, driving from Texas to Florida, and while surfing the net to find out how to cover the needs of our then one-year-old, my wife and I for 18 hours, I came across several lists of things to bring. One of them was the humble shovel. This seemed an odd thing to have in a car! But as it turns out, it had lots of uses for general travel and emergency use. Let me share some with you.

1. Digging your car out of trouble: The most obvious reason. Those of you who live in snowy areas probably already know how important a shovel is for digging your car out of fresh snow in the morning. Especially important if you get stuck while traveling in snow, the shovel will speed up the process of clearing your tail pipe so that when you try to stay warm by momentarily turning the car on, you don’t inhale trapped fumes. This also applies to dirt roads and other soft soiled, muddy situations.

2. Chopping wood: Not all shovels can do this but if you have one those tactical folding shovels or in my case, the Cold Steel Spetsnaz shovel, it comes with a disgustingly sharp edge that will make preparing wood for an emergency fire a fairly easy job. That being said the nature of it being a shovel is that it does hit the wood awkwardly, so really for emergency use only.

3. Digging cat-holes: When nature calls, and no bathroom is near the proper sanitary thing to do is to dig a hole in the ground to do your business. This is why you also need toilet paper in your vehicle also!

4. Fire-Poker: If you have got your fire set up at your campsite, then what better way to safely push around the logs for maximum heat than with a shovel?

5. Self defense: This will hopefully be a very rare occurrence, but anything that puts distance between you and a threat (human or animal) is useful.

I picked the Cold Steel one because I like the idea of a simple constructed, easily repairable tool that does all the above things, including cutting and chopping. Those folding tactical shovels are also good I hear, especially from a storage perspective, as they don’t take up space when not in use. One caveat however, is that with all this folding also comes points of failure. Coming from my experience as a designer, each fold and hinge that it has is a stress point that can break after repeated use. That being said, the military issues these shovels to our armed forces, so it can’t happen too often? Long story short, don’t buy the cheapest one on amazon!

I have included some links below as examples of shovels that you could have. There’s no need to buy a full size/length shovel, as it still needs to fit in your trunk. There are also a ton of different types of shovels out there, so I would do further research as to which best suits your needs.

Until next time, be somewhat prepared.