June 7th, 2010    Learning to Survive

Our summer survival classes have begun, and this week we took some friends and family out for an afternoon of wilderness adventure.

Our group tries to come up with creative survival uses
for a variety of everyday objects.

First, we attended to one of our favorite exercises: the One Match Challenge. While almost everyone insists that they can start a fire in the wild with one match, almost nobody actually can. However, after some coaching and some trial-and-error, fires were burning everywhere. We put them all out except for one, and then learned to make fire with flint and steel as Rebecca cooked us up a meal of steamed wild nettles and milkweed.

After everyone discovered the pleasures of wild greens, we all built a debris hut -- a wonderful shelter that can keep you warm and dry. We didn't complete it (it needed quite a bit more debris stacked on it), but we had enough time to get the initial structure up.

Following the same format as our public classes, we're hoping to hold an intermediate 'Earth Living Skills' class later in the summer for the same group, and then have an overnight survival adventure in the fall.

Of course, we also saw lots of amazing wildlife, much of it found by the youngest member of our group, Sam. Rebecca and Sam captured a few of the most spectacular sights for all of us to see.