Vital Outdoor Skills

Planning your spring outdoor adventure?

Try these skills and projects, even if it’s in your backyard. In fact, your backyard may be the best place to start your journey to outdoor self-reliance.

Burn Stuff (Combustion)

• Flint and Steel
• Fire from One Stick
• Bow Drill Friction Fire
• Practice Making Feather Sticks (short video)

Practice in wet conditions. If it ain’t raining, you ain’t training…

Cut Stuff (Cutting Tool)

•  Ax Safety and Firewood Processing
• 4 Basic Ax Skills
• Splitting Long Logs with an Ax
• Axes and Kids

Shelter Stuff (Cover)

• Four W’s – what to look for when selecting a campsite
• Make Your Own Oilskin Tarp (waterproof and fireproof)
• Outside the Tent
• More Tarp Setups
• Emergency Shelter in Under 5 Minutes

Avoid Stuff

• Poisonous Plants
• Ticks
• Stings

Forage/Harvest Stuff

• Mullein
• Pine Resin
• Wild Edibles: Trout Lily, Ostrich Fern shoots, Milkweed pods, Wood Sorrel,Purslane

Tie Knots and Stuff

• Square Lashing
• Tripod Lashing

Eat Stuff

• Mountain Man MRE’s – pemmican, jerky, parched corn, and dried fruit
• Smalls – crayfish, minnows, snakes and reptiles
• Cocoa
• Coconut Oil – 100’s of uses

Make Outdoor Stuff

• Frog Gig
• Wooden Spoons
• Natural Cordage
• Waterproof Fire Tinder
• Take-down Bow Saw
• Pine Pitch Sticks
• Fixin’ Wax – good for tools and safe for skin
• Char Cloth and More Char Cloth
• Duct Tape Arrow Fletching
• Oil Lamp – quick and easy diy candling device
• Wool Hunting Shirt
• Pace Beads – navigation

Wilderness Self-Reliance Stuff

• Stay Found
• 5 Lessons from Pathfinder School
• Creative Self-Aid Skills

Let the fun begin! Get out and stay outdoors.

Keep Doing the Stuff of Self-Reliance,

Todd