They’re trickling in from far and wide. England arrived yesterday. Texas and Chicago tomorrow. Ohio, Connecticut and California on Thursday. New Hampshire is ready to go. Alberta and Montreal are meeting us on the road. In two days our small group (on the Jack Mountain calendar as the Subarctic Snowshoe Expedition With The Cree) is [...]

Cold wind whipping across frozen lake Winnepesaukee.  

Monday morning inventory: Dog getting quilled by porcupine? Check Kid throwing up all night? Check Overnight rain making road glare ice that is unsafe to walk on? Check But, we did have a great weekend in the woods with the Winter Survival Weekend Course. Met some great people, got them on snowshoes with traditional bindings [...]

Dog with porcupine quill beard. Not going to be a fun afternoon.  

Derek checking a pot of hemlock tea. Winter survival weekend course, January 2015.  

This weekend we’re running our Winter Survival Weekend Course at the folk school in New Hampshire. It’s a short course designed to teach the fundamentals of living in the winter woods. We’ve been running it for more than a decade, and I think that it has provided a basic skill set to a lot of [...]

Last night Discovery again aired the Norway episode of Dude, You’re Screwed featuring yours truly. It was a great experience from start to finish; great people, beautiful place and a little boat that grew on me over time. Being on the show has given me a lot of great memories, as well as my first [...]

It’s easy to make something that looks like a bucksaw frame, but it’s much more difficult to make one that will cut a lot of wood without coming apart. It’s easy to make something that looks like a snowshoe, but much more difficult to make one that will allow you to walk on it all [...]

Lucky dog pouncing during a twilight walk on the pond. Looks like a chupacabra.  

Last week we ran our first program of 2015; the Winter Woodsman course. In summing up the experience, it was cold. Really cold. -50F (with wind chill, -25 in still air at night) cold. While those temperatures aren’t unheard of on winter expeditions, the Winter Woodsman is an introductory course in living out in the [...]

Trip planning, even for day trips, should start with reading Paul Petzoldt on expedition behavior (ch. 10).  

The Guppy, Tim Cole's paddle, on display at Freem's bar in Ashland, Maine. End of a long, cold week.  

Fishing and ice safety on the lake during the winter woodsman course. Skunked! No fish, but we'll be back.  

Checking out the vent hole on an active beaver lodge during the winter woodsman course.  

Axe class, winter woodsman. -20 tonight, -50 with the wind chill. BRRRR! Having fun despite the cold.  

Weaving a pair of snowshoes in the guide shack. Cozy inside, -10 outside.  

Enjoying an evening in the guide shack before the Winter Woodsman course. New wood stove.  

I started blogging in 2004, but that first blog was hacked in 2006 and all the posts deleted. I don’t know how many posts I had, but somebody thought it would be fun to delete them all, and they did. I started this blog in 2006, and this is post 1001. I had no idea [...]

2015 marks my 20th year composting humanure, also known as human poop. In that time I’ve managed numerous compost piles, scrubbed countless buckets, read The Humanure Handbook about five times, built a variety of structures to serve as outhouses, had numerous outhouses built by others, and created a lot of soil. What started me down [...]

A variation of the promontory peg that hails from Siberia and was made famous by the documentary Happy People, the Koolyomka is an interesting deadfall and a fun one to carve in camp. This was carved during downtime on the 2014 Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester.

Video 9 in the 2014 WCES (Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester) series. Join us as we run the Telos Cut. Running Telos Cut We finished our trip down the Allagash in the last video. After taking out in Allagash Village, we had a big lunch at Rock’s Diner in Fort Kent, then went back to the [...]