After a few months as a stay at home dad I’m doing some spring cleaning this week.  Currently I’m on day 3 of a 7-day water fast.  This means only consuming water, not avoiding water.  So far this fast has been pleasant. A seven-day water fast is a requirement for our Expedition Instructor (XI) certification.  [...]

Ross Morgan wrote a great comment on a recent post about Spiller axes, including some history of revered Maine axes and how the Gransfors Bruks American felling axe design started in the woods of New England.  I’ve heard stories about how the Gransfors was patterned after a Maine axe, and wrote as much in the [...]

There’s an attitude I’ve seen a few times that warrants mention because it will stop a person from becoming at home in the natural world. That attitude is busyness. For some a foray into the forest is a non-stop to do list without a break between projects. For some the constant stream of activity is [...]

Now that our winter programs are completed, I’m turning my attention to the spring canoe expedition semester. The course lasts 28 days. The first 2 are spent in camp planning, provisioning, packing and preparing gear. Then it’s off to run the length of our home river, the Aroostook. We’ve got an optional leg of the [...]

3 week minimum. For Immersion program students, by immersion program students. There comes a point in a person’s bushcraft education where they need to be kicked out of the nest to do things on their own and gain a level of experience that is difficult to obtain during a formal course. Once a certain level [...]

After a lot of thought and discussions with students, we’re scrapping our current Journeyman Certification Program. Instead of being based on a 4-week summer field course, the Journeyman Certification will now be based on the Wilderness Bushcraft Semester in the fall. Like the XI (Expedition Instructor Certification), it will be comprised of benchmarks, minimum competencies [...]

After three weeks sleeping in sub-zero temperatures, we’re getting a warming trend. I had plenty of insulation (2 sleeping bags), so I haven’t been cold at night. I have, however, had to deal with frost. Living and sleeping in subzero temperatures is an exercise in moisture management. The moisture expelled by your skin ends up [...]

Check out the amazing program my friend Jeff Giallombardo is running at Nokomis High School in Newport, Maine (see below). It’s exciting to see bushcraft making inroads into the classroom. “Ultimate Outdoors” is a program recently developedat Nokomis Regional High School in an effort to better serve our “at risk”young adult students and our general [...]

Video on building a semi-permanent, group-sized dome shelter in the woods of northern Maine to be used as a lodge, wet-weather instruction area, heated space during cold weather, and as a dance club in the evenings.  

We’re adding two new certification programs to our list of courses to go along with the Journeyman course: the Expedition Instructor (XI) and Expedition Instructor Trainer (XIT). They exist as add-ons to our current yearlong immersion program. There are no extra courses that need to be taken, nor is there any extra tuition involved. There [...]

Our 18th bushcraft immersion semester program is finished and I’m enjoying some down time with family.  In addition to a busy schedule of courses, we added a hand pump well to the field school this year, as well as finished the exterior of the guide shack and built a student campsite at Moose Vegas. In [...]

For the past two years I’ve been under a television contract with the Animal Planet television network. I’ve shot two pilots, and just heard that the more recent of these will not be airing. It was a fun experience and an amazing learning opportunity, but one that involved a lot of waiting and relying on [...]

It’s official; the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School has been approved by the Veterans Administration to accept GI Bill benefits for our bushcraft and guide training immersion programs.  Our approval is as a vocational school.  More details coming soon.

Today was the first day of the Journeyman Program.  It’s new this year – a four week immersion course.  We had a great day building shelters,  lighting fires, cooking over the fire, etc.  The mosquitos in the Guide Shack are fierce tonight – someone left the door open today.  They’re too numerous to spend much [...]

My posts lately have been only to Twitter and Facebook because I’ve been so busy, and the days I’m not I’ve had family duty.  This is set to change, as we start our long term programs in a week (for 13 weeks) and we’ve got a dedicated study hall period in the evening where I’ll [...]

Making crooked knives beneath the Pyramid Of Doom I’ve been at the field school for several weeks, currently in the third straight week of courses. We ran the Woodsman course, then the Bushman, and now are smack in the middle of the Riverman. It’s been busy, with days starting at around 6 and lasting until [...]

I took a bit of time away from updating the blog to get ready for my recent speaking gig in Dallas and to work on my advanced diaper changing technique, but am back again.  My diaper changing duties are about to be put on hold as I’m packing for the trip from Texas to Maine [...]

I’m a member of a hate group. Not any longer, but I was for a few hours. Someone added me to one on Facebook. I wasn’t aware that someone else could add you to a group without your consent, but one day I received 14 email updates from this group which alerted me that I [...]

The registration deadline for our summer and fall courses recently passed. We’ve done a poor job of communicating what this actually means. You can still register for all of our courses as long as the Registration Status on our calendar is Open. We started this system of registration deadlines years ago so that we knew [...]

Is the whole survival thing a sham? Steve Rinella, host of the Travel Channel’s show The Wild Within says so about the made for TV survival episodes in an article in the May/June, 2011 issue of Mother Jones. Written by Brian Kevin and titled “Savage Love: How the larger-than-life bushmen of cable TV are creating [...]

Over the past few months a bunch of unfavorable occurences have taken place amongst my circle of friends. One friend lost a child, a friend’s father lost a leg, and another friend was diagnosed with spine cancer at age 39. I’m not writing this post looking for sympathy for a few bad months. I don’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Most of the winter footwear on the market is heavy and doesn’t keep your feet warm. Pac boots, for example, seem to always leak in wet conditions and trap moisture and become cold in frigid conditions. Most of the big companies market their footwear by insisting that it is both waterproof and breathable (for some [...]

We’ve got a new Facebook page. In the past I was maintaining a personal profile as well as a Jack Mountain Bushcraft page. Our new page combines these, and as such there’s no need for the other two, so the’re gone. Visit us there at: http://www.facebook.com/timsmith.jmbushcraft

This blog is supposed to be black text on a white background.  If you’re reading this and it’s anything else, such as black text on an olive green background, would you please leave a comment or send me an email and say what you’re seeing?  Also, please include the operating system and browser you use. [...]

Throughout my life I’ve chased down old, obscure books on a variety of topics relevant to bushcraft. Often it was like detective work, finding references to something rare then tracking them down with the help of librarians and book dealers. When the internet came along it changed all that, making it easy to research and [...]

I got a call from Dave Wescott the other day. Dave is the organizer of the Rabbitstick and Wintercount primitive skills rendezvous, the author of Camping In The Old Style and the former owner of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. We spoke a year ago about his plan to put together a symposium and rendezvous [...]

We’ve got a new photo gallery on the web, and I’ve been looking through old pictures for a few days and posting them.  In a few months I plan to have all of our archived photos posted.  It’s powered by the newest version of Gallery, the same software that ran our old photo gallery, which [...]

The Teen Bushcraft And Survival Course is for young men ages 13-17 and designed as an introduction to a wide variety of bushcraft and survival skills. We spend the week camping at the field school and along the Aroostook River, practicing the skills of outdoor living until they become second nature. Syllabus: Sunday, July 3rd [...]

We’ve added a new section to our online forum specifically for questions about our programs.  If you’re searching for the gear list for a course, want to know whether there is college credit for the Journeyman program, or come up with anything else you want to know that you couldn’t find on our site, go [...]

Setting up the new BushcraftNetwork.com site and having kids down with the flu has consumed all of my free time for the past week and a half.  Now that the new site is up and running, I’ll be back to blogging soon.

We’re launching a new online social network for the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School community at: Bushcraftnetwork.com I’ve heard from a bunch of people who were part of our ning network who missed it, and personally I’ve missed the community and the forums. I didn’t want to do the same thing again, though, and I’ve got [...]

We’re planning a free bushcraft course and get together just outside of Austin, Texas, for February. When: Saturday, February 12, from 11:30-2:00 Where: Russell Park, Georgetown, TX (directions) Cost: Free We’ll do a short meet and greet, look at some basic bushcraft gear such as knives and axes, show a cheap but effective sharpening kit [...]

As the term bushcraft comes into the main stream there are many people writing and defining it, none of whose definitions I agree with.  There’s an old saying that if you don’t define yourself, others will do it for you.  Here, then, is our definition of bushcraft: Bushcraft is the active component of our interaction [...]

I often hear things referred to as fool-proof. I’ve never liked this term because I’ve seen many times, despite good intentions and careful planning, where the “fools” have been able use their skills, or lack of, to wreak havok. Instead, I like to use the term idiot-resistant. The idea is the same, but it acknowledges [...]

I’ve been slow to post our 2011 schedule because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Last summer I wrote on this blog that the 2010 fall semester course would be our last for a number of years. It was our 16th college-level, semester-length program we’ve run, and it was time for a [...]