It’s tax day today.  I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past few weeks working on ours. I always find it a little odd to have a year’s worth of work represented by numbers on a piece of paper or in a computer program. Obviously they tell a very small part of the [...]

If you’re coming to the field school this year and want to upgrade your accomodations to include your own private bathroom, consider bringing your own toilet seat and 5 gallon bucket (or 2 buckets).  These Luggable Loo toilet seats clip onto a bucket.  You can also improvise your own seat or build a toilet box [...]

I’m not a fan of online handles or usernames if there’s no way to find out who the real person behind them is. The anonymity of the internet allows people to be rude and take cheap shots without any accountability. It also provides people with little experience the opportunity to masquerade as full-time professionals, doling [...]

Bark Lean-To As our remaining wilderness areas are logged, mined, and crisscrossed by roads, I think it’s time to reconsider the phrase wilderness survival. The reference to unspoiled wilderness is becoming harder and harder to justify as these places disappear in the face of a growing, resource-hungry human population. A more appropriate descriptive term is [...]

Part of the Journeyman Program will be a remote canoe trip.  We’ll be poling and lining upstream to a remote lake, where the loons will sing us to sleep at night.  Then we’ll take a week heading down-river getting back to the field school.  Along the way we’ll be fishing, camping, and living outdoors. Classroom [...]

At the request of one of our students I’m updating our college curriculum and creating a course catalog for our immersion programs.  This first section is our field ecology and natural history curriculum. Economic Field Botany (3 credits) – Edible, medicinal and other useful plants of Maine and surrounding territories. Aided by an instructor, students [...]

Shaping  a crooked knife One component of our new Journeyman Bushcraft Instructor And Wilderness Guide Certification Program is the craft benchmarks I’ve written about before.  Below is the list of crafts and how many of them need to be completed in order to successfully complete the program.  All of the crafts below are taught during [...]

These two quotations from “The Art Of Outdoor Living” jumped out at me because what they say about experiential education and a realistic assessment of skill through a practical exam apply directly to our new Journeyman Bushcraft Instructor & Wilderness Guide Certification Program. Scroll to the bottom for full bibliographic information. “The training and preparation [...]

A project I’ve been involved in for well over a decade is something I call guerilla gardening. It consists of helping to spread the growth of edible wild (and not so wild) plants on undeveloped and vacant land. These aren’t gardens I spend hours daily or weekly weeding. Instead it’s more along the lines of [...]

Longtime readers of this blog and those who have attended our courses in person know about my fascination with, and extensive collection of miniature ceramic unicorn figurines. As anyone who also collects them can attest, it is more of an obsession than a collection. Sometimes I like to imagine I live on a magical island [...]