I’ve been rereading Calvin Rutstrum’s book The Wilderness Life and am enjoying it as much as the first time.  I think his insights on wilderness living are keen, and his years of experience are evident in his writings unlike some other popular writers.  (I really dislike Nessmuk, and will write about why at some point.) [...]

It takes a long time to achieve competence approaching mastery with bushcraft and primitive living skills.  There are so many different things to learn, and real learning can’t be rushed. Consider this: Tomas Johannson, a director of the Institute for Prehistoric Technology in Sweden, has calculated that would require twelve years of schooling today to [...]

A commodity is a product that is the same no matter where you get it.  A bag of flour is a commodity, because it is the same whether you get it from your local store, through a fancy cooking store, or order it over the web.  Those who sell commodities compete on price because the [...]

During each field school program, we always take a few hours to visit the Ashland Logging Museum.  It’s a great place to learn more about the woods life lived by loggers before the chainsaw and the logging road.  There are replica cabins, a Lombard log hauler, a king’s pine, and numerous other items of interest.  [...]

Where did the widespread idea about surviving in the bush “with only a knife” come from?  I can tell you that it didn’t come from people experienced with living in forested regions.  If I could have only one tool for a trip of a 1-100 days, it would be an axe, not a knife. But [...]

This year we won’t be running a fall semester course for the first time in six years, as I decided a month ago that it was time for a sabbatical.  My apologies to all of you who applied only to have the course postponed for a year, but it was time for me to take [...]

I’m incommunicado no longer, and once again can join the conversation. Jack Mountain has a new phone number, and this one’s a keeper.  207-518-8804. We’re also changing our email to:   jmbushcraft@gmail.com The email change will be gradual, and we’ll still be using our old address for a year or two more. There’s a pile [...]

It’s been a fantastic summer and we had a lot of fun running a wide variety of programs. Yes northern Maine has had a lot of rain. But it led to people perfecting their wet-weather fire skills, and allowed me to run a bunch of whitewater that can usually only be run in early May. [...]