fulltanglifestyle

Lake Reflecting Sky

Recorded on Saturday, September 21. Oz and Rick are back from the solo expedition canoe course. We discuss how it went, what worked, what didn’t, what the plan is for next time. If you’re interested, the solo canoe expedition course is on the calendar for next summer. #FullTangLifestyle Photo: Lake reflecting the sky. Show Notes: [...]

shelters with open fires for warmth

Recorded on Saturday, September 14. Oz and Rick are in camp preparing to run the solo expedition canoe course and we decided to record our morning coffee discussion. Current events, all about the solo expedition canoe course, Rick’s survival courses in New Hampshire, Oz’s trip to Michigan’s UP, and a bit about the reworking of [...]

JMB Vlog 207 Cover

We’re making canoe poles this week to replace the old and broken ones. As it is with many projects that start with raw materials from the forest, identifying, harvesting and processing the blank is hugely important. You have to find the right species of tree (spruce) growing in the right way in order to make [...]

JMB Vlog 206 Cover

We’re into the middle of the summer 2024 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester and people are getting deep into the projects on the course. The morning we filmed this everyone was working independently, so I figured I’d walk around and document the different things that were going on. #FullTangLifestyle

small cook fire next to the rips

On episode 128 of the JMB Podcast, Jesse and Tim discuss some big-picture ideas about why you might be interested in learning bushcraft, and what you do with it when you learn it. Ultimately it’s about being resilient and connecting with the land and our ancestors. It is a lifestyle that resonates with a deep [...]

JMB Vlog 204 cover

JMB Vlog 104 is an update to JMB Vlog 201, where we were starting canoe paddles. At this point all of the students have finished their paddles, and we’re varnishing them. We do this to seal them so they don’t absorb water. Everyone did a great job on this project, and we’re excited to get [...]

solo canoeist

Episode 124 of the JMB Podcast is about training people for solo wilderness canoe expeditions. We discuss the skills needed to do it safely, and talk about a September 2024 course designed to give people the skills and confidence to pull it off. Read more about the course discussed on the Solo Expedition Canoe Course [...]

Brook trout roasting by the fire

The seventh day of May is a personal holiday for me in remembrance of an amazing day in the life of a rural kid. Some of the details are lost to the past, but let me tell you what I remember. It was 1983 in rural New Hampshire, I was in the sixth grade, and [...]

View of the distant canyon wall.

Recorded on May 5th, 2024. Opening day of 2024, the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester starts today. I’m joined by Rick Swain and Oz to discuss current events, the upcoming course, and how we spent our summer (winter) vacation. We discuss a few changes to the 2024 Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester, the idea behind the soon [...]

cover photo for JMB Vlog 178

New video series of an early May, 2024 canoe trip in Aroostook County, Maine. This was May 1st and the ice had just gone out (three days prior) on this pond. 40 miles to go. I’ll be posting this in short segments. Hope you enjoy! #FullTangLifestyle

sunrise in the canyons on the Rio Grande

I’ve been busy getting ready for our first field school program of the year. In The week and a half that I’ve been home, I went from getting vehicles stuck in the snow to bare ground. A lot of water has moved across the landscape. I only had to clear two trees from the road [...]

Camp Scene

Camp scene on the Rio Grande, Texas/Mexico border

An evening camp scene from our first night on the Rio Grande lower canyons trip. It was a big stone beach that backed up to a small field, and only a few miles from the put-in. We had great sunset light here, as well as room to spread out. Because the water contained a lot [...]

Students under the pavilion working on projects.

We’ve had a bunch of registrations recently and I wanted to let people know where we are with regard to available spots in our spring, summer and fall immersion programs for 2024. 2 Spots Remaining. Spring Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester (4-weeks) 2 Spots Remaining. Summer Wilderness Bushcraft Semester (9-weeks) 4 Spots Remaining. Fall Wilderness Bushcraft [...]

Compost Toilet Handbook

Compost Toilet Handbook

I just read The Compost Toilet Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. If you are coming to the field school you shoulld read it because this is the dry toilet system we’ve been using since 1996. I still recommend that teacher read the humanure handbook as well, but this book separates out the how-to information from the [...]

Foliage from a canoe trip this fall.

The woods are white now, covered in snow. Watching the changing moods, the changing light of the natural world has been one of my lifelong passions. I work to become a better photographer in order to share what I see, but the images my eyes see are often not well-represented with what my camera sees. [...]

hauling sleds across a frozen lake

It has snowed off and on for the last five days, and as I’m writing this it is -6 degrees F and there is 8 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Winter has definitely arrived, and I’m getting excited for winter programs in February. This photo was taken a while back, showing a line [...]

lining canoes on the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester

Recorded on November 20, 2023. We just wrapped up the field school season, and in this episode I look back and reflect on the experiments we ran during 2023. I discuss the Expedition Instructor (XI) as a continuous 6-month, residential program, moving the Wilderness Canoe Expedition Semester back to May and the high waters of [...]

Float plane and one of our red Esquif canoes on a nearby lake

From the spring. We went up to our local lake for some paddling and Maine IFW was stocking remote trout ponds by float plane. They would load the young trout from a stock truck into the floats of the plane, then it would fly off and dump them in the ponds. Since I was a [...]

Lighting a woodstove in a shelter on a snowy day

It has been cold and snowy in Aroostook County this week for the Autumn Woodsman course. We’re past the halfway mark on the course, and thus far we have covered a lot of ground, including axemanship, fire making and management, fire by friction, navigation, hot tents and stoves, woodstove lighting and management, and a bunch [...]

Ready To Carry

wood canvas canoe, ready to carry

My wood canvas canoe, rigged up and ready for the carry around Allagash Falls. Notice this canoe has a center thwart, not a carved yoke. Notice how the paddles are tied to the thwarts so that when it is carried, the weight of the boat is distributed by the paddle blades onto the shoulders as [...]

a small shelter next to a long fire, no sleeping bag

A small shelter next to a long fire, spending the night with no sleeping bag in the cold. The details all matter: The size of the fire, the quality of the fuel, the width of the bed, the distance from the edge of the fire to the back of the shelter, the overhead volume of [...]

Fire alongside a remote lake in northern Maine

It is Friday of week 8 (of 9) on the fall, 2023 Wilderness Bushcraft Semester. Everyone has been hard at work and the finish line is coming into view. What remains to finish are some practical exams, the solo, and a night spent in front of a fire with no sleeping bag or blanket. The [...]

Endless Winter

Endless Winter

This photo is 10 years old and was taken on a -20 F day with a stiff breeze while we were out on the Boreal Snowshoe Expedition. It was a great group of people and a few of the guys got it in mind to take a “tasteful nude” photo with the toboggans. So they [...]

Peak northern Maine foliage shot from the Deboullie mountain fire tower.

We’re at peak foliage in northern Maine right now. The nights are cooling off and it feels like fall. I have been seeing a lot of animals as they get ready for the cold season. Yesterday morning I jumped a deer while riding my bike, and in the evening I saw a lynx crossing the [...]

Tim in the canoe, early spring

I picked up a new piece of software called Retrobatch that batch processes photos and went through all the old hard drives full of photos to make an archive. My rough count is around 37,000 images that I’ve shot over the years. Not all of them are mine; maybe 1000 were taken by others, but [...]

Making simple mocotaugans (crooked knives) in the campfire. It doesn’t take a bunch of infrastructure to make a functional knife. I used to believe it did, but now have 20 years of making simple knives in the campfire under my belt. Vise grips and a hammer are necessary, as is a new file to cut [...]

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