We’ve been busy from sun-up to sun-down with the Earth Skills Summer Program, so I haven’t been blogging or posting photos.  But since I have a minute this morning, here’s some of what we’ve been up to.  We started last week with an immersion into bushcraft starting wtih firemaking and the related skills.  We’ve identified around 100 wild plants, and pressed some of these for later identification uses.  We’ve been in the lake quite a bit because it’s been hot.  We’ve harvested a red oak and worked it into staves.  We’ve made rope with spinners and a rope machine.  We’ve built and stayed in shelters.  We’ve had snapping turtles, baby porcupines, and other critters visit our camp.  Yesterday, on top of the transformer on the telephone pole that sits near our camp we saw a funny looking bird with a long neck that looked like it didn’t belong there.  After a while it flew off – it was a duck!  A female mallard.  How it got up there I have no idea.  And yesterday we scraped deer hides.  We’ve done a whole bunch of other things as well, but those are some highlights.  Every day’s been full of hands-on, hard skills.  And today it’s going to be 95 degrees, which is very hot for this part of the world.  We’re going to brain deer hides this morning, then find a shady spot by the lake to pull them.  Neither our students or instructors are used to that kind of heat, so we’ll be moving pretty slowly today.

That’s it from this end.  I plan on putting some photos up soon.