Find your way and gain confidence. Learn basic woodsman skills, trip planning essentials, and equipment use. Follow our guided hike to a primitive wilderness camp.
Students will be instructed on wilderness skills and navIgation, how to gather what gear you’ll need, and how to assemble your bushcraft pack. Hands-on participation in shelter building, fire making, water purification, campfire cooking and hand-tool use is required. In addition, each student will be supplied the materials to create their own unique bushcraft tool kit to take home. Leave – No – Trace principles are stressed.
2025 Class Dates:
June 1 – 8
October 6 – 13
Formerly offered as a basic 3 day and an advanced 5 course – Now offered as a combined 8 day comprehensive course.
8 days / 7 nights – $2200
We provide guided instruction along with a basic pack, wool blanket, hand tools, fire materials, meals, small sleeping tents and gear, and a shared lodge tent with woodstove.
You will need to bring weather-appropriate clothing and comfortable footwear. Hats and gloves are required. A suggested gear list will be provided.
This is primarily a packhorse assisted wilderness hike, with horse riding option for daily activities.
Build bush craft skills and advance to the next level by learning to how to provide food, water, and shelter in a challenging survival situation. Make primitive hunting and fishing tools. Identify and forage edible wild plants. Understand the wilderness environment and gain the confidence to thrive. Prerequisite MTFWP licenses are needed to harvest fish or game animals. Learn the essentials of big game hunting with bow and rifle with a emphasis on safety. Hunter and Bow Hunter certification available separately.
“This instinct for a free life in the open is as natural and wholesome as the gratification of hunger and thirst and love.”
Horace Kephart
“It is Nature’s recall to the simple mode of existence that she intended us for. Our modern life in the cities is an abrupt and violent change from what the race has been bred to these many thousands of years. We come from a line of forebears who, back to a far distant past, were hunters in the forest, herdsmen on the plains, shepherds in the hills, tillers of the soil, or fishermen or sailors at sea; and however adaptive the human mind may be, these human bodies of ours still stubbornly insist on obeying the same laws that Father Adam’s did.”
Excerpt from the book Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for the Travelers in the Wilderness
Written by Horace Kephart, the father of the Bushcraft movement, published in 1917.
Learn to cook wilderness style.
Make a fire from found materials
Create a safe haven for overnight.
Find your way from mountain to meadow.