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 Christopher and Colin and it’s an understatement to say that I’m excited to have them on the team this fall.

Each year we do a few upgrades to the field school to make the experience better for participants on our programs. This year, we added a new well and hand pump, as well as a new outhouse and some cleared land to Moose Vegas, our student village. I have my ideas where the trails will be made due to the shortest route between spots like the cooking area, well, tent trail, etc., but it’s always interesting to observe what actually takes place when people are staying there and see how accurate the early predictions were.

Our plan for Moose Vegas is to have no plan – to leave it as a primitive camp with water and add no further modern infrastructure. We do plan to build a series of different traditional shelters using forest resources over the long term, but for now we’re busy running the semester course.

Just checking in on Monday night of week 1; 8 weeks and 4 days to go.