Most survival advice available in the press is dubious at best, written by professional writers and not seasoned instructors with field experience.  Thankfully Outside Magazine decided to hire Tony Nester of Ancient Pathways to answer their  reader’s questions on their Survival Guru blog. Tony’s got two decades of experience teaching in the field, has written [...]

I came across this graphic on Keith Johnson’s Permaculture And Regenerative Design News blog.  Keith used it to support the idea that the production systems that sustain major urban areas lie far the urban boundary.  The term we use for this is displaced impact, and we’ve written about how it applies to minimum impact camping.  [...]

It’s looking like I’ll be trading our white, 15 passenger van, aka the white tube of misery, in for another vehicle later this month. The name was coined by Jeff Butler on our now-infamous roadtrip to Canoecopia a few years ago.  We were driving through Chicago on our way back from Madison, Wisconsin and were [...]

The cord I’ve been using for a decade is finally available online. I got tired of paying the high prices for paracord in the 1990’s and switched to using commercial fishing twine. It’s tough and much cheaper than paracord. The place where I get it recently added an online store. To check out the cord, [...]

The book of poetry titled Pine Tree Ballads was published in 1902 and has some great pieces about the north woods of Maine.  The Knight Of The Spike-Sole Boots by Holman Day tells the story of a sport who tried to run the Hulling Machine on the East Branch of the Penobscot River.  I’ve run [...]

Our new podcast is coming together, and the first episode is live on the web.  There is a bit of work left to do getting everything set up and integrated. Note: In December, 2013 we moved our podcast to it’s current place on our own site.

This morning after dropping my son off at preschool I was walking down the stairs to the house and I heard a bunch of crows making a ruckus.  After looking towards the lake for a few moments, I spotted a shape in one of the white pines, about 20 feet from our deck.  It was [...]

I wrote up a document on helping people prepare for their field school course recently, and put it online with a link from our Registration page.  You can read it at: http://www.jackmtn.com/PDF/JMB_field_school_preparation.pdf The text is below. ———————————————————- ———————————————————- 1.    Food, meals and cooking 2.    Drinking Water 3.    Electricity 4.    Gear And Gear Lists 5.    Sleeping [...]

I’m back from the field school after a great spring semester.  The weather is perfect, the perennial edibles are coming up in force, and we’ve got an edible plants of early summer workshop tomorrow.  More to come, including thoughts about the spring semester, are coming soon.