I’m en route to west Texas to rendezvous with a few old friends. We’re going to meet at Monahans Sandhills State Park (where one of our party is the honcho), spend the night discussing tales of derring-do around a fire, then get up and head south to the border. The put-in for the trip through [...]
Jack Mountain Bushcraft Blog
We’ve had a bunch of registrations recently and I wanted to let people know where we are with regard to available spots in our spring, summer and fall immersion programs for 2024. 2 Spots Remaining. Spring Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester (4-weeks) 2 Spots Remaining. Summer Wilderness Bushcraft Semester (9-weeks) 4 Spots Remaining. Fall Wilderness Bushcraft [...]
I have updated my contact info our our Contact page. As time has gone by, the phone has become less and less useful to me. Spam texts, spam calls, dealing with Google Voice, etc., have all made it a less-than-pleasant experience. More like an annoyance. So in a bid for simplification and to avoid the [...]
It can be expensive to buy all the gear you need to participate in outdoor activities, especially when you’re starting from scratch. If you’re coming to the field school, you can rent most of the camping gear needed to participate. This is a great option for those coming for a few days to a few [...]
I’m adding a stop on my trip north after the Rio Grande trip in March; A Buffalo river trip in Arkansas in April. In 2008 we had a student on a semester course who lived off the grid near the Buffalo river in Arkansas. When we were out on the Allagash he told me several [...]
I don’t like to comment on gear until I’ve had it for a few years and used it hard. And I am wary of gear reviews on the internet. Now, after several hard years of use, I’m ready to spill the beans on something I bring with me on all trips. (Note: I don’t get [...]
We are (slightly) changing the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester for 2024. First, we’re adding a new subtitle to reflect what the course is, the Maine Guide Traditional Canoe Expedition Leadership 4-Week Training Course. I considered changing the course name, but we’ve been running this program for a lot of years, and changing the title would [...]
It’s been ten years since Brian Kevin’s article The Survivors, about military veterans attending the Wilderness Bushcraft Semester, was published in DownEast Magazine. Of all the media coverage we’ve had over the years, this article is my favorite. The author came and camped with us, got to know the people he was writing about, and [...]
Recently someone asked me if I had ever paddled the Big Black river. It is a major tributary to the St. John, flowing in across the border from Quebec. It joins the St. John just below the appropriately-named Big Black Rapids. I told them not only had I been down it, but it was written [...]
I learned a new term yesterday for something we have been doing for five years. The term is Daylight Drive, and it is used to describe an off-grid solar power system that doesn’t include batteries. When you are charging off of our solar panels at the field school, we recommend that you bring your own [...]
We’re currently in the planning stages of a canoe trip through the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande river along the Texas/Mexico border. A few friends did this several years ago, and I’m really excited about it. We’ve got dates on the calendar for mid-March, and we’re currently looking at shuttles, prepping gear, etc. I [...]
You can follow us on the Fediverse at: @blog.jackmtn.com@blog.jackmtn.com I’m not usually one to prognosticate about the future of the web, but I am often thinking about how to make our stuff available to our audience, and to give good advice to our students and those just starting out running a business. For years I [...]
I just read The Compost Toilet Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. If you are coming to the field school you shoulld read it because this is the dry toilet system we’ve been using since 1996. I still recommend that teacher read the humanure handbook as well, but this book separates out the how-to information from the [...]
The JMBS pot system is designed to be functional and economical. The biggest item lacking is a properly-sized bowl for eating out of that nests with the rest of the kit, because the 6-inch pie tins, while they work great as pot lids, are not sized well for use as an eating bowl for an [...]
When I first met Mors Kochanski in 1996 he showed those of us on the course his collection of books. He had a lot of them. At the time he had been teaching a course for the University of Alberta for 25 years or so, had written extensively, and was a lifelong student of everything [...]
The woods are white now, covered in snow. Watching the changing moods, the changing light of the natural world has been one of my lifelong passions. I work to become a better photographer in order to share what I see, but the images my eyes see are often not well-represented with what my camera sees. [...]
It has snowed off and on for the last five days, and as I’m writing this it is -6 degrees F and there is 8 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Winter has definitely arrived, and I’m getting excited for winter programs in February. This photo was taken a while back, showing a line [...]
Learning how to wash your clothing by hand with limited or no infrastructure, such as when on a long expedition or living off the grid for a length of time, is a useful skill to learn. It is one we are adding to our long-term programs because as the years go by, fewer and fewer [...]
Maybe the rest of the world is catching on. Here’s a link to an article about the use of human urine as fertilizer to contribute to food security: phys.org. From the article, :”Urine contains nitrogen and phosphorus, two essential nutrients for plant growth. Urine can thus serve as an almost cost-free and locally available nutrient [...]
Many of our alunmi have become Registered Maine Guides. A guide license is necessary in Maine to receive any form of payment for your services in the field. It is a state license which is granted at the end of a testing process. In recent years students on long courses have tried to get all [...]
The USDA recently updated it’s hardiness zone map with data from the last few years, and northern Maine is getting warmer. On the older maps, Masardis was zone 3B. On the updated map, we’re zone 4A. It’s an indicator of changing times. It also opens us up to a wider variety of perennials we can [...]
It has been cold and snowy in Aroostook County this week for the Autumn Woodsman course. We’re past the halfway mark on the course, and thus far we have covered a lot of ground, including axemanship, fire making and management, fire by friction, navigation, hot tents and stoves, woodstove lighting and management, and a bunch [...]
A small shelter next to a long fire, spending the night with no sleeping bag in the cold. The details all matter: The size of the fire, the quality of the fuel, the width of the bed, the distance from the edge of the fire to the back of the shelter, the overhead volume of [...]
One of the shelters students spend the night in on the Wilderness Bushcraft Semester is one with no insulation, just a fire to keep warm. This image is from that night a few weeks ago. It is a great learning experience with regard to the use of fire to keep warm, the science involved with [...]
I’m currently in Austin, Texas for a week visiting family. My son is a freshman in the film program at the University of Texas at Austin. Today a film of his is being shown at the Austin Film Festival as part of their Young Filmmakers Competition. So I’m spending the day as a proud father [...]
I was interviewed on CNN last night, on the show Laura Coates Live. They wanted a Registered Master Maine Guide and survival instructor perspective on the fugitive from the Lewiston shootings, potentially hiding out in the woods. It was an interesting experience. Here’s how things like this work, or at least how it worked for [...]
The parking lot is empty. The people are on their way to Austria, England, Thailand, California, Colorado, Illinois, etc., A day to clean up camp a bit before I hit the road for Texas to see my family. We had a great finish to the fall, 2023 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester with three new Journeyman certificate [...]
It is Friday of week 8 (of 9) on the fall, 2023 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester. Everyone has been hard at work and the finish line is coming into view. What remains to finish are some practical exams, the solo, and a night spent in front of a fire with no sleeping bag or blanket. The [...]
We’re at peak foliage in northern Maine right now. The nights are cooling off and it feels like fall. I have been seeing a lot of animals as they get ready for the cold season. Yesterday morning I jumped a deer while riding my bike, and in the evening I saw a lynx crossing the [...]
I picked up a new piece of software called Retrobatch that batch processes photos and went through all the old hard drives full of photos to make an archive. My rough count is around 37,000 images that I’ve shot over the years. Not all of them are mine; maybe 1000 were taken by others, but [...]
Last week we were out on the St. Croix river, which forms the border between the USA and Canada. We had a great week of high water, peak foliage, and warm water. It isn’t often that you get to swim every day of an October canoe trip, but we did. As we begin week 8, [...]
Congratulations to the newest Registered Maine Guide, our own Tessa Storey. Wear that patch with pride because it was earned. We are all proud of you. #fulltanglifestyle
Today is halfway day for the fall, 2023 semester. To celebrate it we are heading out on the Aroostook river for a few days in canoes. We have had the wettest September I remember, and the rivers in northern Maine are near or at spring flood levels. This means that traveling downstream will be easy, [...]
Dutch ovens have been difficult to find since the pandemic took over American life. Because we design our gear list to provide you with useful items, not just things that will get put in an “outdoor gear” box and collect dust, we’re changing our recommendation for a dutch oven for students. In short, we’re removing [...]
We’re adding the Autumn Woodsman, session 2, to our schedule for this November. This course is a great introduction to living in the cold, but without the difficulties that deep snow and deep, midwinter cold can bring. The weather in northern Maine in November can be quite cold, but usually we do not have enough [...]
This morning the parking lot is empty for the first time in 14 weeks. We finished the summer Wilderness Bushcraft Semester with three people receiving their Journeyman Certification. It was a challenging course. June started cold and rainy, then got very hot, humid and buggy. But it was a solid group of people and they [...]
We bought an inexpensive drone this past winter and have been getting some aerial photographs. This image is shot directly above Moose Vegas, looking toward the pond, Guide Shack, big field and the river on the right. We are excited to get better at using it so as to get some great canoe expedition photos.
On expeditions and long courses there are many things we have no control over. These include, but are not limited to, water level, weather, wind, bugs, etc., and the list goes on and on. I frequently tell our students that we are not in control when we head out into the woods or on the [...]
We’ve reached halfway day on the summer Wilderness Bushcraft Semester course. We’ve been busy with camp projects and making things, and today everyone will be bringing their newly-made canoe paddles and poles out on a three-day trip. I love it when a group of individuals become a team, and that’s the point of the course [...]
I’ve guided a lot of trips over the years, and some stand out in my mind, often because everything didn’t go as planned. Like the one in this picture. It was the second week of June, 2018, and a small group of friends and I were on the Gaspé peninsula in Quebec, coming down the [...]