Tim Smith has launched a video series focusing on key aspects of best practices for not only survival, but what I call “thrival” in the northern winter forests. This video lays out your two choices: cold/dry, and cold/wet scenarios. It is a good review for me.
I am planning a few days of camping in Acadia this coming week, and the forecast three days out looks like I will be living in the cold/wet setup.
Last weekend, I attended the Snow Walker’s Rendezvous in Vermont .
I experienced the weekend through a new lens-through the eye of a newly Registered Maine Guide. Other Maine Guides were in attendance, including Master Maine Guide Tim Smith, and another new friend I made at the weekend, Portland-based Lou Falank.
I really enjoyed hanging out with Tim on Saturday night.
Tim Smith has been finding his way into the conter of the bushcraft/backwoods survival skills spotlight for some time now. He developed and continues to run his Jack Mountain Bushcraft School, the highly respected Maine-based ” University of Outdoor Skills” . Tim’s long-term immersion programs are the longest and most comprehensive bushcraft, survival and guide training courses in North America.
What’s bushcraft? The JMB website explains: ‘Bushcraft is the active component of our interaction with the natural world. Both art and science, bushcraft is doing, making, crafting, traveling, building and living in the natural world. It is an inclusive term for doing things outdoors and is composed of activities such as, but not limited to, primitive skills, modern survival, classic camping, expeditionary skills, prepping, hiking, paddling, crafting and outdoor living, as well as more specialized disciplines such as hunting, fishing and trapping. Bushcraft has no political agenda or worldview, isn’t about preparing for the end of the world, and isn’t an “ism”. It is made up of people of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds who share a love for being active outdoors.’
Now Tim’s going to be on our living-room or palm-based screens in upcoming episodes of Dude, You’re Screwed on the Discovery Channel. Tim’s episode should be entertaining us before 2015 rolls around, sometime in early December. Stay tuned for more details.
The normally bushcraft-distant New York Times gave considerable column length to the show in their Dec. 20, 2013 review : “Dude, You’re Screwed” centers on five men, most with advanced military training, who take turns running gauntlets designed for them by the others. Episodes open with essentially a staged rendition — the mark is kidnapped, hooded and bound at the wrists, then spirited off to who knows where. Unhooded, he’s left to fend for himself with just a handful of tools provided by the team. (As for suspension of disbelief, wouldn’t the participants know their destination when they’ve presumably gone through passport control?)
While the contestant in the game — all the men refer to it as “the game,” though there’s no prize — makes his way through various struggles, the other four men observe him remotely, and sometimes say grim things like “Moisture kills out here.”
But more often, their mood is light. Its like the home run contest before the All-Star Game, an essentially meaningless display of skills where titans watch one another show off. But the casual mood also serves to take the edge off the very real struggle of the man in the wild.
I want to see this show, but I don’t subscribe to the Discovery Channel. If tell you when it’s on, can someone help me see it?
I also had a great time talking with Lou Falnak.
Lou runs his Mountain Bear Programs and Guide Service.
Lou has provided programs as a director, instructor, and co-facilitator at camps & schools across Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania. He’s a Registered Maine Guide. His L.O.S.T.(Learning Outdoor Survival Techniques) Program specializes in bringing youth from a wide variety of backgrounds into the outdoors to learn skills and experience community. He’s making a difference in the lives of children in the Portland area, bringing after-school bush-crafting skills to the next generation.
Lou and I hit it off. We’ll get together in the near future, after Thanksgiving, to do something together in the outdoors.
I was recruited to kick off the weekend at Friday night’s whole group meeting ( the event cuts off at 100 registrants) with a half hour reading from my blog. This was old school, no iPhoto or Powerpoint, just one guy trying to entertain the faithful by reading a half-hour story of an actual deep winter adventure in the Maine woods.
I read about my one-week walk across the frozen Moosehead and Seboomook Lakes. Here’s the link to the talk- this time there are photos and three video clips –The Great Slush Walk of 2009.
I plan to include at least one more entry about the weekend.
There was so much to be excited about !
Big doings at the winter outdoor skills corral today.
There were some impressive whole group presentations today.
In the morning, Ed Belchner shared slides and stories from the early 1970’s in his program “40 Years into Nahmakanta by Snowshoe, Ski, and Dogsled”. Ed attempted a southbound AT hike in winter and struggled through the snow and ice until he decided to get off the trail at Nahmakanta Lake, where he straggled into an ancient camp and initiated a lifelong relationship with the camp and its owner. Very cool to see what the in and outside of the now extinct Nahmakanta Lake Camps and to view Antler’s Camps as well. Both are now just legends of the AT.
We also heard from Maddy McNair, who is recognized as the top woman polar guide in the world.
Maddy McNair is the real deal. From her website: “Matty has journeyed to both Poles setting several very impressive world records. She led the first women’s expedition to the North Pole in 1997. She also guided the Ultimate North Expedition; a dog sledding journey from Cape Columbia to the North Pole, arriving at the North Pole in just under Robert Peary’s 1909 record time of 37 days, thus proving that his disputed dash was in fact possible. Maddy has the distinction of being the first American to ski to both the North and South Poles. In 2004/2005 she completed an unsupported ski expedition to the South Pole, accompanied by her children Sarah and Eric, who became the youngest persons to ski to the South Pole. Adventure appears to run in the family. She presented photographs and tales from some of her expeditions.
In the afternoon I attended two small group workshops.
You can never be too careful with an axe and one person who knows about axes and their use is Maine’s Tim Smith. Tim runs Jack Mountain Bushcraft. In addition to more than a decade of 1-7 day bushcraft, survival, guide training and outdoor living courses, Tim has now taught 21 semester-length, college level, field-based bushcraft courses. Tim walked us into the woods, where he demonstrated proper felling, limbing, and sectioning techniques.
I learned a lot from Tim, and hope to take a course from him someday.
The second skills session that I attended was by Kevin Slater and Keiran Moore, entitled “Tips and Tricks of Winter Travel”.
Kevin runs Mahoosuc Guide Services. An active guide for 25 years, Kevin has traveled extensively in the north by canoe and dog team. He has done expeditions in Maine, Quebec, Labrador as well as a pioneer descent of the Grand Canyon.
Kieran Moore lived with the Dogrib Cree in the Northwest Territories between Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes from the early 1970’s until 2002 . Moore experienced communal subsistence hunts into the barren lands both by canoe and dog team, observing a vanishing way of life of a people at the farthest reaches of the tree-line and beyond. Moore is a fabled storyteller, and we have been held spellbound by some of his recollections of life with the Cree when he presented at a previous Snow Walkers Rendezvous.
Both men traded skills demonstrations:
Slater reasoned out out the contents of his day pack for an instructional session, as well throwing together a scaled model of a winter survival shelter, and a talk about how to build an emergency snow pit.
Moore demonstrated two Cree subsistence techniques: how to use three crafted sticks to set up a ice fishing gill net, and the use of cordage and an appropriately sized piece of fabric to pack up and transport a sectioned caribou.
The highlight of the large group session Saturday night was Ed Webster, an expert on the history of Mt. Everest. 
From www.climbing.about.com
“Ed wrote one of the best books ever written about Everest, Snow in the Kingdom , an account of the first ascent of Mount Everest’s Kangshung Face.
In 1988, American alpinist Ed Webster teamed up with Robert Anderson, Paul Teare, and Stephen Venables to climb a new route up Mount Everest’s massive 12,000-foot-high Kangshung or East Face. The four, in contrast to most expeditions, attempted it in the best possible style—on a new route; without supplemental bottled oxygen; without radios and satellite telephones; and without Sherpa assistance.
Below the South Summit, Ed saw prayer flags strung between rocks and purple-robed Buddhist monks chanting a blessing ceremony. Not thinking he was hallucinating, he simply watched them before passing out. When he awoke he realized the perilous place he was in and that if he continued on to the summit of Mount Everest that he would never return alive. “From out of my mental haze came the inescapable conviction that if I continued I would probably be killed.” At 28,700 feet and 3:30 in the afternoon, Webster turned around and started down. Life was more important than summit. Stephen Venables continued solo to the summit, becoming the sole expedition member to reach the top and the first British climber to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen.”
We only were treated to 10 minutes of slides and a phenomenal demonstration of what it was actually like to actually walk and breathe in the Death Zone. It’s one thing to experience, another to read about it, and to hear and watch Ed gulp air for 10 loud breaths and then walk two steps and do it again I’ll never forget.
Ed presented a gripping 30 minute history of North and South Pole discovery, using original photographs from the Nansen, Peary, and Cook expeditions, and he made sure we knew that Matthew Henson belonged in that pantheon as well.
I agreed with several of other people who attended that the quality of the presentations at this year’s Snow Walker’s Rendezvous was the best yet.
So it sold out again at 100 people and will be held next year in Vermont the weekend of November 8,9, and 10. For more information, past program lists, or to be included on the mailing list, please check out the website http://www.alohafoundation.org/hulbert-outdoor-center/community-programs/outdoor-conferences/snow-walker-s-rendezvous/. Sign up early if you are fortunate enough to get the chance. I’ll be there!
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