At the beginning of this semester course I picked up a sun oven. They’re simple to operate, use no fuel or electricity, and can be used all day whenever the sun is shining. I figured I’d try out a commercial model before building a bigger one. It’s been a great acquisition and I won’t run another long-term course without one.

It couldn’t be simpler to operate. You just put in what you want to cook, close the oven door, and point it at the sun. You can also lead the sun with the oven for a longer cooking time. By this I mean point the oven west of where the sun is shining so that as the sun moves across the southern sky it will eventually shine directly into the oven. We’ve gotten ours up to 350 degrees F twice, but have gotten it up to 300 degrees F numerous times on clear days. If you check out the product literature they’ll tell you that the air temperature doesn’t matter as long as there is abundant sunshine, and our experience backs that up.

Unlike some pieces of kit, these are useful both at home and in the bush. I highly recommend getting one and experimenting with it in the back yard. They’re not cheap (you can get them for about $280, shipping included, off of ebay), but they have no moving parts and nothing to wear out, so it will remain functional indefinitely.

If you visit us in Masardis you can see ours in action.

I’m back for a day to pick up more gear. After a week in our new camp in Masardis, I’m completely in love with the location. We spent the week building permanent shelters, exploring the area, and exploring the river.

We’ve got a new mailing address and a new phone number if you want to get in contact with us. They are:

P.O. Box 61
Ashland, Maine 04732

Phone: (207) 540-7632

I’ll be changing the contact information on all of our web pages as I get time to do so.  Phone is still the best way to contact us and will continue to be until we get a permanent structure built and an internet connection.

We’re off to our new base camp in Masardis, Maine tomorrow.  I hope to get the internet hooked up in a few weeks, but until then I won’t be posting, answering email, or doing anything else web-related.  If you need to get in touch with me, leave a message on our answering machine.

Today we pressed a bunch of plants, including water hemlock, yarrow, and Japanese knotweed.  We gathered a bunch of the knotweed shoots, peeled them, and made a great pie  with them.  We cooked it in our sun oven.  It’s a great tool for cooking outdoors and I’ll be writing about it in the future.

I’m featured along with Survivorman Les Stroud in an article titled “Getting Out Alive; Survival experts show pilots what to do when the propeller stops spinning” by Marc C. Lee. Although written for pilots who find themselves alone after ditching their airplane, it’s a good primer for most survival situations.

You can read the article here.

I saw an ad for a college today and in the photo they had as their centerpiece was a student in a lecture hall looking toward the front and acting interested. That’s a negative for me. I remember sitting through a bunch of lectures, some great, some not, but what I took away from the experience was that I wasn’t involved. I was a passive observer, reading about the work and research of others. Were I to be applying to school again, I’d want to see an ad featuring people doing things, not just listening to people talk about things or reading things, to be impressed. Our bodies are built for action. To simply sit and take in information isn’t learning. This is why I’ve spent the last ten years developing and running our hands-on semester programs and am currently expanding them into a yearlong program. But there is another part to the learning experience.

My most positive academic experiences were in graduate school. Gone was the lecture format, and in it’s place were a bunch of motivated learners. We would read a lot, write a lot, and engage in meaningful discussions about the topics we were covering. We would share our writings with one another via email, and comment on each other’s work. Such is my goal; adding an academic component to a practical endeavor.

For much of the knowledge of bush lore, background study is required for mastery of the practical skill. It’s not necessary to successfully accomplish the skill. However, it adds a great depth of knowledge which enriches the experience, and is a prerequisite to being a competent instructor.

I think we’ve reached a turning point in education. Modern universities charge a lot of money for a piece of paper saying that you did the work and met the lowest common denominator of their program. But the cost has grown so much that many are looking for an alternative. Our approach will be different. It will be open to everyone and the work will speak for itself through a peer and facilitator-reviewed portfolio and logbook assessment system.

This program will not replace our hands-on, residential programs, but it will complement them, and allow us to serve many people who are unable to come to us for a course. There is no way to replace direct, hands-on instruction. But if that instruction is complemented with a rigorous course of academic study, the result is greater than the sum of the components. It results in a depth of practical and theoretical knowledge unattainable by other means.

The difference between this and simply studying alone is in actually doing the work, documenting it, and having it peer-reviewed. Putting in your time with field guides. Spending time on focused study. In a world inundated with information, the temptation is to approach information like many people watch television - flipping through the channels with the remote control. But flipping through things like this isn’t learning. It isn’t even studying. How much have you learned from the magazines in your bathroom?

Our goal is to create a community of lifelong learners who understand that focused study is the route to knowledge and comprehension, and ultimately mastery. The tools and the technology are all available for free or at a very low cost. What’s left is to actually do the work.

Tuition Cost: The tuition cost for JMBU is twofold. First, you have to do the work. Second, you have to review the work of your peers.

Requirements: Participants are required to actually do the work and document it. In order to avoid having it turn into something that people just blow off, if the work isn’t done people are dropped from a course.

Facilitators: We’d encourage anyone who had successfully completed a course to stay on as a facilitator. We’d try to get as many people involved as possible, so as to spread the workload.

Assessment: Keeping Track Of What You Do. If you don’t document your work, it didn’t happen. Your documentation of your work is part of your portfolio, as explained in the student handbook, and is reviewed by peers and the course facilitator. But it’s not like school. You don’t get grades. Your work speaks for itself. The purpose of the review process is to make sure you’re on the right track, and to ensure you’re not making outlandish, untrue claims (ie. “I made five full-sized birch bark canoes today before lunch.”) Documentation is public and kept on the web so everyone can read it. This way it can also serve as a peer-reviewed resume if someone wanted to use their logbook as proof of what they’ve done in applying for a job, etc.

Goals:
Academic complement to a hands-on training course
Create an open-source, peer-reviewed model of education
Develop critical thinking skills
Create a community of lifelong learners who value traditional knowledge for it’s own sake

How We Do It:
Each student starts a blog on a free service such as blogger to host their logbook and work. On their bio page on the Jack Mountain Network, they add the blog feed. This allows their posts to be commented on by others without having to spend hours navigating the web. We’ll provide links and a short how-to explaining how to set this up. They can set up the blog and their account with us under a pseudonym as long as the other people on their course know what their real name is (because it sucks trying to have a rational discussion with “bushmaster007″).

The lesson is posted on the web with start and finish dates, along with an abstract of what the course will entail. People sign up, get set up, and start working. Each course becomes a separate group on the network to facilitate communication.

Weekly expectations are set by the facilitator. People can comment on either the blog or the Ning network page saying they’ve read it, and ask any questions that are necessary.

Upon the completion of the course, the logbook (in this case, the blog) is printed out and mailed to the facilitator, who signs off on it in ink. It’s then mailed back to the student, and is a record of the completed course. Student pays for postage. If this turns into a huge pain (ie. shipping overseas), we’ll look into other ways of doing it.

If you’ve got comments about this, let me know by posting them in our online network at:

http://jackmtn.ning.com

I’ve been diligently at work writing up my ideas and plans for the Jack Mountain Bushcraft University, and have been getting feedback from our alumni about the process. The general plan is to take the academic components we’ve developed over ten semester programs and put them online for anyone, anywhere, to use. We’re putting together a system of peer and facilitator review so as to verify the completion of work, and we’re hoping to have the whole thing available for free, or for a very low cost. As I’m headed to Masardis with the Earth Skills Semester Program folks in a week, the pressure is on to have the first course online before then since we have no internet (or water, or buildings, or anything) in the woods of Masardis.

The plan is to have the whole thing be open source, or free and 100% transparent. We plan to use our online network to facilitate the process, so if you haven’t joined the network yet, please do so here.

More details to come soon.

It was a busy day yesterday. We baked some potatoes in the sun oven, baked some sourdough biscuits in the reflector oven, waterlined and shellaced a canoe, made fish spears, caught a bunch of fish with them, built a tripod for smoking them, filleted them and smoked them as the sun sank over the horizon.

While building the fish spears I was using my knife with a baton and the blade broke in half. I’ve never had this happen with one of these knives, even after using them exclusively for fourteen years. With the one-inch blade that was left, I was able to easily finish carving my fish spear, so it wasn’t a big deal. I’d much rather use a knife hard and break a few every decade than have a showpiece-knife that I was afraid to beat-up on.

Fish spears are like shelters. If you don’t use it, every one that you make is great. It’s in the actual use where you learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ve seen pictures of fish spears people have carved that must have taken 20 hours to make, but that would be ruined with the first fish they tried to catch. There’s only one way to see if a fish spear is any good - try to spear a fish with it.

I do a lot of dutch oven cooking, but I don’t like the legs on them because I usually either hang it from a tripod or support it with fire irons. But I love the lids on the camp ovens because they have the lip that will hold coals. So I’ve been thinking about sawing the legs off of a cast iron dutch oven to make it fit my needs, and to make it more portable. Before I resorted to the saw, I looked around and found one that was exactly what I was looking for made by a company called Bayou Classic. Amazon.com carries them, and they’re reasonably priced. I just got the 12 quart model. Check it out here.

I’ve taken a wide variety of wilderness medical courses around the northeast. In 2000, I took a winter medicine and rescue course at the AMC center in Pinkham Notch at the base of Mount Washington. It was a two-day course, and on many nights they have slide show presentations for the people staying there. The night I was there, a woman named Michelle put on a presentation about her quest to become a climbing guide. She told the story about how she was drawn to the mountains, and that after she went climbing once she knew she wanted to become a climbing guide. But she struggled with her weight, which made the path to becoming a guide difficult. Eventually, she made up her mind to get in shape and become a guide. People doubted her resolve, but she never did. A year later, with a much fitter body, she continued to pursue her dream and eventually realized it. It was an amazingly inspiring talk, one that has stayed with me for eight years. Near the end of the talk, she read a short note from one of her climbing instructors;

“Michelle’s demonstration of dedication and achievement reminds us all, as individuals, of our great capacity for accomplishment. Her success is a caution to us, as teachers, to be wary of extinguishing the dreams of our students by taking too seriously our imagination of their limitations.”

I don’t know what this man’s name was, but he really got it. He understood the role of the teacher. It should never, ever be limiting. And it’s good to keep in mind that if a teacher has ideas about the limitations of students, he or she should keep them to him or herself, because they’re just that; ideas.

Last summer I guided a trip to northern Quebec where we spent a week with Cree guides David Bosum and Lawrence Capissit. They were born in the bush and have spent their lives living off of the country there. One day one of guys on the trip was asking David some questions about winter trips. David answered a few questions, but as they started to get more involved he said;

“The action will answer your questions.”

People are hungry for knowledge. Our culture has taught us to ask questions until we get verbal answers. But it might not be the best way to learn something. Through the act of doing it and having the experience, many more questions will be answered than could be by a verbal explanation. The hard part, for most modern Americans, is that this way is foreign to them. It’s not how they learned to acquire knowledge in school.

I get a lot of questions about our programs, and about bushcraft and survival and guide training. I often feel like I have a foot in each of two different worlds. I try to answer as many questions as I can, but I know that David was right. If you do it, you’ll know. You’ll know better than anyone could ever tell you. And you’ll know even better if you do it several times.

We’re heading back up to northern Quebec for a canoe and bushcraft trip running August 10-16. If you’re interested, more information is at:

http://www.jackmtn.com/quebec.html

You can also check out the video and photo gallery from the 2007 trip.

This morning I saw five bald eagles over Rust Pond.  They come through each year as the ice starts to go out.  It’s a big deal because for the rest of the year I never see them around here.  I think they move further north.  There is a certain way they fly that is unique, allowing me to identify them from a great distance.  Then as they get closer, I can see their white heads.  It was just beautiful.

Yesterday afternoon everybody carved a bucksaw frame. It’s a great project in that it teaches safe and precise knife skills. We build them with no nails or wooden pegs, so that friction is all that holds it together. To accomplish this the carving and fitting needs to be close to exact. If someone does a poor job, it simply won’t hold together. Today we’ll use them and see how they turned out. If some need refitting, it will be done over the weekend.

Yesterday we also learned several new knots, pressed several more plants, and explored the lagoon at the end of the lake. There are a lot of fresh beaver chews, and we found what might be a bank lodge. The snow was still nearly crotch-deep, which made getting around slow. We’re supposed to get a big rain tonight, which should knock it down a bit. It could be a tough weekend for those people who live along nearby rivers, though, as they’re predicting flooding.

One of the rewarding aspects of running our semester programs is watching the shift that takes place in people while they’re here. When people arrive, they think of a piece of gear and, as they’ve been trained to do by our culture, wonder where they can buy it. By the end of the course, their thinking has shifted to where they wonder what they’ll need to get (raw materials) and do to make it. I can already see this group starting to shift.

Yesterday afternoon the temperature was near 60 degrees (F), a big change from a week ago. Each morning I hear more birds singing, and the trees are getting ready to bud. Spring is almost here. One aspect of our programs that we don’t talk much about is the fact that students live outdoors in shelters they build themselves. With such an experience comes a knowledge and understanding of how changes in the weather affect us on a day to day basis, which is a reality that’s no longer part of modern life. Because most people live, work, and travel in climate-controlled buildings and vehicles, the whims of the weather no longer impact their daily lives except for storms that make driving difficult or knock out the electricity. Even though this aspect of our program is often overlooked by people focusing on the skills we teach, it results in a visceral learning experience for those who come here. It strips away another layer of artificiality of our modern world and gets people back to reality.

After pressing a specimen of Lycopodium, we spent most of yesterday morning on navigation.  We introduced the compass, then built a compass from the sun which we maintained all day.  We rounded out the morning by making hand-spun rope, then having everyone make their own rope using a rope-spinner.

The afternoon began with a sharpening lesson, followed by some friction fire practice.  Then we scraped hides for two hours before breaking for the day.  There were some flies around the deer hides, a sure sign of spring.  Many people around here have been wondering if it would come at all this year, so it’s nice to see it finally arriving.

At sunset we walked down to the end of the lake to fish for smelt.  We say a few of them in the stream, but not enough to make catching them easy.  The way they’re caught is with a dip net, and when there are just one or two of them it is difficult to get them in the net.  While we were there we spent an hour or so identifying stars and constellations, and discussing their use as navigational aids.

It was another good, full day in the Earth Skills Semester Program.

“Having done is worth more than having read, having watched, or knowing how.”

I was thinking about experiential learning yesterday when the line above came to me. I think it will be our slogan for 2008.

We live in the era where information is everywhere. But we should never confuse familiarity with understanding or experience. Just about everyone who’s attended our programs in the last few years has seen some of the television shows on bushcraft and survival, as well as videos on youtube and other web sites. But reading books and watching videos isn’t doing it yourself. The goal of our courses is to get you to do it yourself, because that’s where the real learning takes place.

Today we start week 2 of our spring bushcraft semester course.  The weather is warming up nicely, but there is still a lot of snow on the ground.  We scraped a few deer hides over the weekend, and in the next day or so we’ll have all of them scraped and hung up to dry.  When we get a bunch of hides I like to flesh and scrape them all right away, because then they’ll keep indefinitely as rawhide.

This week we’ll be fishing for smelt and getting our fish spears ready for the annual run of suckers.  We’ll also continue with our bushcraft immersion and nature studies, and build shelter #2.

In the current (April, 2008) issue of AMC Outdoors magazine, there’s a great little article by Christopher Collier about canoe poling titled Pole Position where I’m quoted several times. There’s also mention of Don Merchant and Pole And Paddle Canoe.

Read the article here.

Yesterday we rebuilt the sauna, and today we’ll start scraping deer hides so as to make buckskin.  Below is one of my favorite quotes from Sigurd Olson.

The bush is a complex of many joys — companionship on the trail, the thrills of exploration, the impact of silence, vastness, and infinity, the good feeling of doing something for its own sake without the spur of reward, the physical satisfaction of using bodies as they were meant to be used, and moving under one’s own power, the complete naturalness of living out of doors.

-  Sigurd Olson, Songs Of The North

Our first day of the spring bushcraft semester course was marked by a wide range of weather. We went from still air, to snowy whiteout, to sleet, to rain, as the temperature warmed through the day. In the afternoon we went into the bush to familiarize everyone with the area. On our way out, we walked on top of the snow on the crust. But as the temperatures warmed, the crust began melting and we began sinking in. This slowed our progress, as there is still 36″ (and more in the drifts) of snow in the woods.

I came across a great quotation about learning and remembering the other day.

“I have found that it is hard to remember what you try to learn. But it is difficult to forget what you have fun playing with.”
- Truoc Duong, The Zen Of Self Publishing

It’s day one of the spring Earth Skills Semester Program. Everyone’s here, and this morning we hit the ground running. There is still 36″ of snow in the bush, but since the shelters have raised beds we’re able to make it work without too much discomfort. Spring came to Wolfeboro yesterday, with warm temperatures and abundant sunshine. This week the days will be much warmer than last week, with temperatures ranging from the 40’s to the 60’s during the heat of the day, so the snow won’t last too long. We’re going to have a tough mud season, but soon the lakes and rivers will be open and the leaves will be coming out on the trees.

So this morning I’m dusting off our video camera and getting ready for season 3 of Jack Mountain Bushcraft Journal. Stay tuned for updates.

When I was a kid I remember being at a small airfield with my dad. As we walked past the planes, he explained to me how they were built. We stopped in front of one plane and he told me that this one didn’t come from a factory; It had been built by the owner. I remember being amazed that someone would build, and then fly, their own plane. He asked me if I ever wanted to build one, and I told him that I might not trust that I had done a good enough job, and I would be afraid of it coming apart on me (I was a kid with no idea what it would take to actually build one). I asked him if he wouldn’t feel nervous in a plane he built as opposed to one built at a factory, and without hesitation he told me that he’d trust one he built himself much more than one built at a factory.

The memory has stuck with me for 30 years. He had spent a lifetime surrounded by and flying aircraft of all shapes and sizes, and was amazingly skilled with his hands. He didn’t think he could trust himself, he knew it.

As we start our 11th semester program this weekend, I’ve been reflecting on what I want our graduates to walk away with. Obviously I want them to have the tangible skills and knowledge that come with being fully immersed in the bushcraft lifestyle for 10 weeks. But from a more philosophical perspective, what do I see as the lasting benefits of our programs, independent of the content knowledge?

The answer is a self-reliant attitude. The way of living your life where you don’t think you can accomplish something, you know you can. Hesitation-free. This self reliance isn’t taught in our courses. Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could teach it. I don’t think it can be taught. Instead it’s a gift that comes with learning the hard skills and the background knowledge. It comes as a result of the learning, but ultimately, it is the learning and the goal of our programs. When you have it, the world is a different place.

Ten years after someone takes our semester course they might not remember how to tie a lining bridle on their canoe. They might not remember how many front toes a fisher has. They might not remember all of the techniques and skills they’ll have polished for ten weeks. But that attitude of self reliance, the confidence that comes with knowing you can take care of yourself, will never leave them. And that, I think, is the lasting lesson we aim for people to have when they leave here.

Summed up in a single word, our educational philosophy is this: Can.

Our new sourdough cookbook is finished and back from the publisher. It has all the sourdough recipes we use on our trips, as well as recipes for simple baking powder breads, easy pie crusts, bannock, and more. Unlike other sourdough cookbooks, our recipes have no perishable ingredients that you probably won’t have with you on a long trip. We do have two cake recipes that call for eggs, but other than those you could keep yourself in fresh-baked sourdough goods in a remote cabin until you ran out of flour.

A print copy is $8.  There’s more information on the book in our online store, where you’ll also find our famous sourdough starter.

I had a professor in graduate school who said that we decide how the world works by the time we’re two and a half years old, and we spend the rest of our lives justifying and defending that idea. It’s a concept that keeps coming up and makes me think about what I believe and why I believe it. While the author below uses the term “programming”, I’ve also seen the terms domestication and enculturation used to describe the process.

I don’t think we have recognized the degree to which programming in our youth can affect our thinking in later years. This programming affects our scientific attitudes most pervasively. We surely did not recognize when we were being programmed – it proceeded in the most innocent circumstances, in the early years when we were beginning to learn a new discipline and were overwhelmed most of the time.

Remember the lessons that you were taught in a foreign language, chemistry, or geometry? The first terms were filled with memorizing a welter of disconnected, new information. The details floated in a kind of limbo, so you had to create jingles to remember them. Then, after several terms, the learning became much easier. I think that the change occurred because you had created a new scaffolding in your mind, a system into which you could fit the new things that you were called on to learn. I call that scaffolding a deep program. While you were creating the program, you entered ancillary material inherent in the scaffolding, and you were not conscious of it. You were vulnerable to what, if it occurred in other circumstances, might be called brainwashing.

You were not aware that while you were being taught chemistry, you were also being taught deterministic Newtonian reasoning, the assumption that atoms and molecules exist in stereotyped forms and will behave in exactly the same way regardless of sample; the changes that occur as concentrations increase will be exactly reversed as concentrations decrease. Later on it is difficult to know when you are thinking in ways that were programmed into you, and when you are thinking for yourself. The programs were put in places so deep in your mind that you cannot bring them up and consider whether you really want to think that way. I’m convinced that such programs seriously limit the way we think about nature and ourselves. The immediate and long-standing acceptance of the closed system models of W.M. Davis, Braun, and Clements are examples of this phenomenon. Thousands of naturalists and ecologists have become convinced of the validity of these ideas because they were not introduced to the alternatives and did not have a chance to formulate their own theories during a childhood outdoors.

- William Holland Drury, Jr. Chance and Change; Ecology for Conservationists, p. 5-6.

You’ve managed to find our home on the web, but what can you do here? Here are some ideas.

1. Get information on our programs and check our Schedule to find out when they run.

2. Read the latest news and events right here on our blog. We’ve written more than 275 posts, so you can also check out the blog archives.

3. Join the conversation, post photos, post videos and meet new friends on our online network.

4. Watch our videos on our video page and discuss them in our online network.

5. Explore our photo gallery with more than 400 bushcraft and wilderness travel photos, and discuss them in our online network.

6. Read our articles and trip journals on the Online Articles page.

7. Check out our books in the online store.

8. Take an online course for free at Jack Mountian Bushcraft University (coming soon).

9. Sign up to receive our blog posts as email, or subscribe to one of our rss feeds on our Subscription Information page.

10. Check out the gear we recommend on our traditional outdoor gear page.

11. Read what past students have said about us on the Testimonials page.

12. Read about our appearances in the media in our Media Room.

13. Find out about jobs and internships we’re offering.

14. Get information on receiving college credit for our semester and yearlong programs.

15. Enroll in one of our programs.

16. Join the Jack Mountain fan page on Facebook.

For updates to this list, see our new welcome page. Thanks to Mungo for the idea for this post.

I’m back from Masardis, having done most of the legwork needed to move our programs there.  I was also able to witness how much snow they’ve got on the ground.  My guess is somewhere between three and four feet on the ground, plus another ten inches that fell while I was there.  So because of the snow depth, we’re going to start the spring semester here in Wolfeboro and move it up there when the snow melts to a more reasonable depth.  My guess on this happening is between two and four weeks, but then again mother nature hasn’t been overly interested in fulfilling my prognostications for the last few months.

We’re still covered in snow as well, but the temperatures are supposed to warm up this week.    We still have several feet of snow on the ground, but hopefully after a week we’ll be down to 1-2 feet so we won’t need snowshoes to get around.  Staying here for the first few weeks will also give us the opportunity to fish for smelt, carve fish spears and use them on the April sucker run, and work on a bunch of other things that being on Rust Pond facilitates.  So I’m excited about the opportunities afforded by starting the course here and finishing in Masardis.