After 8 weeks living at our bush camp, I’m back for a short while enjoying creature comforts such as bug screens and electricity.  It was a great spring, and there is lots of work left to do there, but things are coming along well.  Look for more posts soon about our recent experiences.

I’ve had a lot of campfire discussions with friends, students and interns since I last had the ability to post without driving an hour.  Living outdoors for an extended period of time (in the last seven weeks I’ve spent four nights inside, on two separate trips to NH to see my family) not only hardens [...]

If you’re interested in some of our fall workshops, I’ve got our fall semester broken down into weeks and on our schedule as of today.  No, we don’t have internet in Masardis yet, but I took a trip into the Presque Isle library and have been working on it for a few hours.  The fall [...]

Last night I went through and updated each page of our website with our new address and phone number.  This morning I realized that I had written the new address on a previous blog post incorrectly.  That’s since been corrected.  Sorry for any confusion.

We wrapped up the spring Earth Skills Semester Program last week.  We finished out the course with ten days on the Allagash river, which was a great culmination to our time together.  We saw a bunch of wildlife and caught a bunch of trout on the flyrod, but nothing of significant size. Our other big [...]

I’m back for a day to pick up more gear. After a week in our new camp in Masardis, I’m completely in love with the location. We spent the week building permanent shelters, exploring the area, and exploring the river. We’ve got a new mailing address and a new phone number if you want to [...]

We’re off to our new base camp in Masardis, Maine tomorrow.  I hope to get the internet hooked up in a few weeks, but until then I won’t be posting, answering email, or doing anything else web-related.  If you need to get in touch with me, leave a message on our answering machine. Today we [...]

I saw an ad for a college today and in the photo they had as their centerpiece was a student in a lecture hall looking toward the front and acting interested. That’s a negative for me. I remember sitting through a bunch of lectures, some great, some not, but what I took away from the [...]

I’ve been diligently at work writing up my ideas and plans for the Jack Mountain Bushcraft University, and have been getting feedback from our alumni about the process. The general plan is to take the academic components we’ve developed over ten semester programs and put them online for anyone, anywhere, to use. We’re putting together [...]

It was a busy day yesterday. We baked some potatoes in the sun oven, baked some sourdough biscuits in the reflector oven, waterlined and shellaced a canoe, made fish spears, caught a bunch of fish with them, built a tripod for smoking them, filleted them and smoked them as the sun sank over the horizon. [...]

I do a lot of dutch oven cooking, but I don’t like the legs on them because I usually either hang it from a tripod or support it with fire irons. But I love the lids on the camp ovens because they have the lip that will hold coals. So I’ve been thinking about sawing [...]

I’ve taken a wide variety of wilderness medical courses around the northeast. In 2000, I took a winter medicine and rescue course at the AMC center in Pinkham Notch at the base of Mount Washington. It was a two-day course, and on many nights they have slide show presentations for the people staying there. The [...]

This morning I saw five bald eagles over Rust Pond.  They come through each year as the ice starts to go out.  It’s a big deal because for the rest of the year I never see them around here.  I think they move further north.  There is a certain way they fly that is unique, [...]

Yesterday afternoon everybody carved a bucksaw frame. It’s a great project in that it teaches safe and precise knife skills. We build them with no nails or wooden pegs, so that friction is all that holds it together. To accomplish this the carving and fitting needs to be close to exact. If someone does a [...]

Yesterday afternoon the temperature was near 60 degrees (F), a big change from a week ago. Each morning I hear more birds singing, and the trees are getting ready to bud. Spring is almost here. One aspect of our programs that we don’t talk much about is the fact that students live outdoors in shelters [...]

After pressing a specimen of Lycopodium, we spent most of yesterday morning on navigation.  We introduced the compass, then built a compass from the sun which we maintained all day.  We rounded out the morning by making hand-spun rope, then having everyone make their own rope using a rope-spinner. The afternoon began with a sharpening [...]

“Having done is worth more than having read, having watched, or knowing how.” I was thinking about experiential learning yesterday when the line above came to me. I think it will be our slogan for 2008. We live in the era where information is everywhere. But we should never confuse familiarity with understanding or experience. [...]

Today we start week 2 of our spring bushcraft semester course.  The weather is warming up nicely, but there is still a lot of snow on the ground.  We scraped a few deer hides over the weekend, and in the next day or so we’ll have all of them scraped and hung up to dry.  [...]

It’s day one of the spring Earth Skills Semester Program. Everyone’s here, and this morning we hit the ground running. There is still 36″ of snow in the bush, but since the shelters have raised beds we’re able to make it work without too much discomfort. Spring came to Wolfeboro yesterday, with warm temperatures and [...]

When I was a kid I remember being at a small airfield with my dad. As we walked past the planes, he explained to me how they were built. We stopped in front of one plane and he told me that this one didn’t come from a factory; It had been built by the owner. [...]

You’ve managed to find our home on the web, but what can you do here? Here are some ideas. 1. Get information on our programs and check our Schedule to find out when they run. 2. Read the latest news and events right here on our blog. We’ve written more than 275 posts, so you [...]

I’m back from Masardis, having done most of the legwork needed to move our programs there.  I was also able to witness how much snow they’ve got on the ground.  My guess is somewhere between three and four feet on the ground, plus another ten inches that fell while I was there.  So because of [...]

I’m heading up to Masardis today to start getting things ready for the spring semester.  I’ll be away from the blog for a while until I get internet access set up.

We had a great day working on pack baskets yesterday.  Usually I have people gather the materials with which to carve their skids from the surrounding woods.  But due to the deep snow and difficulty of getting around without snowshoes, I made these before the course started.  It saved a lot of time, and the [...]

Two more inches of snow overnight, and it’s really coming down this morning.  We’re close to breaking the snowfall record set in 1873-74, and this will get us closer. We’re running a pack basket course this weekend.  In these courses we use molds to make sure the shape of the basket is pleasing.  To ensure [...]

I recently rewrote the section of our student handbook that explains how we assess student work in our yearlong and semester programs. That rewrite is below: Assessment: Logbook and Portfolio There are no certifications in bushcraft, wilderness survival or primitive skills that are accepted universally. If any school offers a certification, it’s likely a result [...]

We filled our last general intern position for 2008 today.  Thanks to everyone who contacted us about them.  We’ll still have a few summer homesteading internships available to semester course graduates, so if you want more information on them please let us know.

We’ve got a variety of canoe trips planned for this spring.  While they will be part of our spring Earth Skills Semester Program, there will be a few open spots for each of them if you’re interested in coming along.  Trips we’ve got planned include the Aroostook River, the St. John River, a whitewater paddling [...]

I’ve got a group of scouts coming out this afternoon for a mammal tracking exercise.  With the snow conditions being what they are (two inches of ice on top of three feet of snow), there won’t be any clear prints or patterns to see.  When people are moving along on the crust of the ice, [...]

This morning we’ll be wrapping up the filming and everyone will be on their way. It’s been a great time and we’ve had a lot of fun, but it has kept me pretty busy. If you’ve called or emailed in the past week, I’ll be getting back to you tonight. The show, I’ll Try Anything [...]

A friend sent me this link to an interview with Michael Pollan titled “Don’t Eat Anything That Won’t Rot.” It’s about the present and future of food, and is an interesting read if you’re interested in where your food comes from and why there are so many fragmented foods these days. From the introduction to [...]

The weather shifted yesterday, with an inch of so of rain falling in the afternoon.  The front came through last night, and now we’ve got sun along with high winds rushing to fill in the low pressure system as it moves out over the Atlantic.  I haven’t been into the woods yet this morning, but [...]

We had another busy day filming yesterday. We started in the morning ice fishing out on the lake. It was dead for a while, then we caught a nice bass. Afterwards we were back in the woods. I went into the woods off of the trail at one point and sunk into the snow up [...]

A busy day yesterday working on the hands-on, nuts and bolts of winter survival.  It was a beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the 40’s – a welcome change from the snow and ice we’ve received lately.  Today we’ll be looking at more traditional skills and lore of the bush, identifying many of the trees [...]

I had a great day yesterday with the director of the tv show that’s here filming this week. We scouted the locations I had in mind for the shoot, then took a ride around to get some shots of the area. It’s tough walking in the woods, as there is 3.5 feet of snow with [...]

I’ve been working on several book projects this winter, and the first one is our new student handbook. I’ve put together a bunch of the student resources we’ve developed over the last ten years in our semester programs and expanded on them, resulting in a study guide for our semester programs that would also be [...]

Over the weekend I read Paddle And Portage: From Moosehead Lake To The Aroostook River, Maine by Thomas Sedgwick Steele on Google Books. It’s an 1880 account of traveling the route named in the title, which goes right by our new place in Masardis. I’ve always loved old books, especially if I’ve traveled over the [...]

Next week a tv crew will be here shooting a show called I’ll Try Anything Once. The host, a New York journalist named Touré, and I will be together in the woods for the week, along with a small camera crew. I don’t have a lot of details, but we’re sure to have a good [...]

Building on the nature study post from yesterday, I wanted to add one of my favorite links; Observations Of A Naturalist by Boyd Shaffer. It features illustrated articles (illustrated by Boyd) about nature by a man who knows it well. I studied the field botany of southcentral Alaska in Boyd’s class at Kenai Peninsula College [...]