Our upcoming winter programs, The Winter Woodsman Course, The Boreal Snowshoe Expedition and our trip to northern Quebec for the Winter Living With Cree Hunters trip are all currently full. We’re no longer accepting registrations, but if you’re interested contact us to be placed on a waiting list.

Gina Beach is a former teacher, current world traveler (by bicycle) and all-around impressive and accomplished young woman. I had the good fortune of having her in the fall, 2018 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester course. She publishes a great blog and the Saturn Returns podcast, and she’s been posting podcast interviews she conducted with other people [...]

I’ve written before about the bushcraft and wilderness living skills we teach not existing in a vacuum. During a semester or other long-term course, these are practiced every day out of necessity and that helps students and instructors alike to really “own” them. What I see happening is that a lot of the time is when students [...]

Big crafting projects are important on our courses at Jack Mountain and School Of The Forest. Not only do students get to make a completely functional piece of kit that they’ll actively use during the course, but they start to understand something about what it means to live an outdoor life.  On a recent semester, [...]

Rules can be a drag. Oftentimes they make people feel policed. If the rules are handled poorly or ill defined, it can cause people to walk on egg shells and worry more about getting “caught” breaking them than actually following them for the reasons they were established in the first place.  Over the last few [...]

Paracord was and continues to be the go-to cord in bushcraft and survival circles, but I never use it on our courses or expeditions. Instead I use string from the commercial fishing industry; a braided nylon. You can’t take it apart and use the small, inside strings for different things, but it holds up better [...]

Hanging a pot over an open fire is a great way to cook outdoors. Over the years we’ve experimented with a wide variety of pot suspension systems and have arrived at four criteria by which to judge them. As we’re often cooking for and with groups of ten or more people, it’s important to note [...]

We’ve got 3 new courses running at the JMBS Folk School in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire in January: The JMBS Axemanship Course, Winter Survival in the North Woods, and The Art & Science of Fire. Each of them is a single day. They run on Saturdays in January (see the Master Calendar). I’ll be posting more [...]

I’ve been rereading some of Bill Riviere’s books lately and am reminded of why I hold his work in such high esteem. A registered Maine guide who worked on the Maine border patrol during World War 2, he was also a prolific writer. Here’s his take on throwing knives from Backcountry Camping: On TV and [...]

I took my daughter to a homeschool workshop at the Remick Museum in Tamworth, NH last Monday. The theme of the class was cooking on the hearth, or cooking on an open fire inside like they would have done in New Hampshire in the mid-1800s. It was a good experience with lots of dutch ovens [...]

I recently had dinner with a few friends, one of whom is an accomplished touring cyclist, and builds his own bikes. As the conversation turned to this particular passion of his, he mentioned that even with all his experience and working knowledge of the sport, he struggles to explain or teach it to others. This [...]

The Brushfire Rendezvous is on the calendar for Friday, October 11 to Sunday, October 13. I don’t have any details yet, but will be working them out. After talking to a few friends, we figured that 100,000 people was too many, so we’ll probably limit it to 40 or so. We’ll be running an introduction [...]

We’ve been discussing the possibility of having a small 3-day rendezvous based around bushcraft and traditional wilderness skills at the field school since 2010. But despite a lot of talk, we’ve never hosted the event. A few weeks ago I was talking with some friends about it again, and after an hour discussing the possibilities, [...]

I’m renewing my Maine Guide license this fall, and the rules have changed. Included in the process now is a digital fingerprinting and background check. I heard a rumor from a game warden that the process is a response to people with criminal sex-offender backgrounds taking young people in the woods. While I don’t like [...]

If you enjoy first person narratives of life on the trail, you might be interested in a book that I just put on the Kindle store on Amazon. It’s a selection of my canoe and snowshoe trip journals from Maine, Alaska and the Florida Everglades. Most of the essays are from the early days of [...]

A simple toolkit should be easy to maintain once you know a few basic pieces of information about the components of the kit. Habits that protect the edges of your tools, how to put a good edge on the tool when it starts to dull etc. Sometimes though a piece of gear fails, and needs [...]

We had several storms over the past few days at the field school, resulting in the loss of one of our canoes. With temperatures below freezing and winds gusting to 50 miles per hour, several canoes were blown off of the racks, and one hull was broken. In the photo above, you can see the [...]

We just wrapped-up the Autumn Woodsman course after a great week of bushcraft and camaraderie. The Autumn Woodsman was new this year as a cold-weather, no-snow weeklong course. We had a great group, achieved all of our intended learning outcomes and also had a bunch of laughs doing it. Participants spent the night in individual [...]

There’s a certain image that’s been created of the “bushcrafter” or “outdoor expert”. It usually involves a perception of this way of life as something difficult or nearly impossible to obtain for most people. It’s been cultivated by years of “survival” television and “man against nature” films, books and other media. Some of my favorite authors [...]

There are two new alumni sections on the Jack Mountain website: alumni programs and alumni appreciation. In the alumni programs section (under the Courses tab) is information on the Year 2 Program for alumni. It’s on the schedule for 2019 and consists of a 2-week canoe trip on the Allagash and the 2-week Primitive Wilderness [...]

In 2019 we’re changing the dates for the Wilderness Bushcraft Semester courses that have been on the web for a few months. After lots of discussions in the guide shack about how to provide the best courses with the fewest drawbacks, we’re shifting a few things around. The spring semester will run from April 28 [...]

There were hugs, handshakes and promises to keep in touch, but now the parking lot is empty and a group of people that came together nine weeks ago has gone their separate ways. They’re headed back to Alaska, to cycle across southern Europe, to explore West Virginia, to a winter job at a ski area [...]

We’re leaving on our final trip this morning, headed to a large, remote lake about an hour away. While there we’ll do our canoe-skills testing and people will head out on solos for several days. We’ve had some cold nights, so I’ll be brining a canvas tent and wood stove in case someone goes for [...]

The Autumn Woodsman is a new field school course this year, designed to provide people with skills for cold weather without deep snow. There’s a heavy emphasis on axe, saw and knife use, appropriate fire skills, shelter construction, using tents and stoves to create warm, comfortable spaces, as well as seasonally-appropriate crafts such as making [...]

Human physiology doesn’t change in order to make a story better. But sensationalized stories of survival will always draw eyeballs, with the result being foolish and untrue beliefs being formed. I’m not a fan of how the media portrays survival episodes. They are looking for sensational stories, not to tell the truth. The result is [...]

We had an amazing week on the water last week, as the Wilderness Bushcraft Semester students used the paddles they recently carved to cross a remote lake and camp for the week. They learned a bunch of named paddle strokes, where hand and body position at the beginning and end of the stroke, as well [...]

After a long, hot summer (the warmest on record in the Caribou, Maine area), we’ve now had two mornings in a row with temperatures in the high 20’s. It will warm up again and we’ll be swimming comfortably for a few more weeks, but the colder weather is coming. A few years ago in the [...]

An old video of our received a comment that stated there was no such thing as bushcraft in North America because we didn’t have any bush, only woods, and as such it had to be woodcraft. Let me take this moment to say I don’t care what anyone thinks about the appropriate name for bushcraft, [...]

There are two components of incorporating wild plants into your life. First is making a positive identification in the field. Second is harvesting and processing the plant and knowing what to use it for. There are a lot of great books on using wild plants for food and medicine once you make that positive field [...]

Mors Kochanski is a man who needs no introduction to people in the bushcraft community. My friend Dragan Uzelac from Niko Wilderness Education and The More You Know Podcast recently posted a 2 hour, 7 minute podcast interview where Mors discusses many things that will be of interest to the student of survival training and [...]

Yesterday we began the fall, 2018 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester, our 45th long term program over the past 20 years. Our team for the course consist of myself and Christopher Russell as instructors and Colin Clifford as the teaching assistant. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years on the trail with both [...]

From time to time I mention our amazing alumni. Tonight I want to say congratulations to Sam Larson for winning Alone, season 5 in Mongolia! You’re an inspiration for the young and young at heart everywhere! If you don’t know Sam, he runs Woodsong Wilderness Outfitters, has a great sense of humor, and is now [...]

Our alumni do awesome things, so it’s a pleasure for me to keep in touch with many of them. This past spring I got an email from a guy named Ezra, who participated in a summer program a while back. He has since received a bachelor’s degree, worked as a teacher, and had many other [...]

It’s been a long, hot, low-water summer full of challenges, and we’re finally back from the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester (WCES). Since mid-June we’ve spent seven weeks on the rivers of Maine and Quebec guiding. That’s a lot of rapids, carries, and meals cooked over the fire. Today we said farewell to our WCES crew, [...]

In a few hours people arrive and we’ll begin the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester. The plan is to spend the first few days in camp planning and packing meals and covering a variety of expedition skills from efficient paddling to whitewater rescue, then head out on the river. We’re having an exceptionally dry summer in [...]

We’ve had a great week on the Summer Woodsman course, starting with a heat wave but settling into cooler temperatures late in the week. We’ve spent a significant amount of energy working on axemanship, fire, campfire cooking, navigation, shelter, crafting, tracking and edible wild plants. Today is the last day of the course, and we’re [...]

I talk to a lot of people who are interested in running their own outdoor business, but haven’t pulled the trigger. I also talk with a lot of people who have pulled the trigger, but haven’t had the level of success they need in order to make it their full-time job. Due to requests from [...]

As we roll into July, School Of The Forest programs are off to a great start.  Yesterday was the first day of our program at The Libby Museum in the lakes region of New Hampshire. This program is run in partnership with GALA, a local non-profit that focuses on building more self-reliant local communities. This [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to hear the unsolicited opinions of participants on our Boreal Snowshoe Expedition, listen to this episode of The More You Know podcast by Dragan Uzelac (Instagram @ nikowilderness) of Nico Wilderness Education from Alberta, Canada. Dragan spoke with Blake Towsley (Instagram @ leclubderaquettedesrf), owner of Le Club De Raquette De SRV, [...]