The Value Of Using Wilderness Skills Closer To Home | Bushcraft Show 2016

Description

This is a video of my Bushcraft Show 2016 main stage presentation entitled "The Value Of Using Wilderness Skills Closer To Home", including the slides I showed during the talk.

This is the third time in the past few years I have been among the expert speakers at the Bushcraft Show. which takes place every year in Derbyshire, England. Other speakers included Ray Mears, John "Lofty" Wiseman, Tristan Gooley and Dr Sarita Robinson.

The full 45 minute presentation, along with all slides is in the above video. There is also a short Q&A session at the end where I answer specific wilderness bushcraft questions.

Below is a short description of the topic of my talk...

We live in an age where all of our needs, indoors or outdoors, can be met by gadgets and technology. Despite this – and maybe, partly as a result of this technological backdrop – bushcraft has become part of many people’s outdoor lives in recent years. There is a wealth of wilderness bushcraft skills and traditional knowledge, all of which is valuable while travelling the wild places of our planet. Even closer to home, however, where we are not far from phones, roads, re-supply or rescue, the skills and knowledge of wilderness bushcraft are valuable, both on a practical level as well as psychological one.

This presentation given on the main stage at the Bushcraft Show discusses the value of learning and using bushcraft skills which have proven their worth on wilderness expeditions but also much closer to home, highlighting the key areas of knowledge and how they can be integrated into your day-to-day outdoor life.

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Tags: Bushcraft Show,presentation,speaker,keynote,bushcraft,wilderness,Bushcraft Show 2016 Main Stage Presentation,Paul Kirtley,paulkirtley,The Value Of Using Wilderness Skills Closer To Home,Derbyshire,Beehive Farm,May,Ray Mears,Lofty Wiseman,Tristan Gooley,Sarita Robinson,survival,wilderness skills,outdoor skills,outdoors,fire,shelter,water,food,foraging,wild foods,fungi,navigation,natural navigation,first aid,cooking,campfire

Video Transcription

I'm Paul and Paul currently i'm doing this talk so if you think you should be listening to somebody else you're in the one place I'll tell you who I am in a second if you don't know who i am but show of hands who has no idea who I am be honest good tough audience excellent love it love it good so my name is Paul curtly and I'm going to talk about the value of practicing wilderness skills closer to home we talk about wilderness skills a lot but we're not in the wilderness today but there's lots of great skills going on here and a lot of the UK is at really wilderness and yet we can get a lot of value from practicing some of the skills that we're going to we're going to talk about but just to give you a little bit of background about me some of you may know me from my blog from Paul curtly coat UK some of you may know be four my youtube channel please don't hold that against me I'm not just a youtuber I do actually go outside and do some things that's no disrespect to youtubers but there are a few people on YouTube like that on youtube like that what's going to stay behind the speaker's there I'm a UK mountain leader i'm also a canoe leader full-stack new leader working towards five star so I do have some proper outdoor qualifications but my main focus is teaching bushcraft and I do that through my company frontier bushcraft which I established back in 2010 where I came from yes that is really me a long time ago 23 years ago I was a bit of a racing snake then I used to do a lot of mountain biking all my muscle was in my legs back then but that was me walking the west highland way back in nineteen ninety-three and I did have a green rucksack even back then that and worked with Ray Mears for quite a number of years worked with in full time for five years as course director before moving on to do frontier bushcraft worked with last fault up in the Arctic worked with Gordon Hillman worked with David Scott Donnellan still do with work with David Scott donlon who was here with me a couple of years ago and ray Goodwin as well who many of you will know or know of and ray and I still work together we take people we do stuff in the UK but we also take small groups on wilderness trips far into the wilderness in Canada and that's one of our groups and float plane in on some of the trips which is fantastic so real real wilderness right out there when that float plane goes you're on your own probably an hour's flight from the nearest road head which is still in and of itself a long way away from anywhere really in terms of civilization we've also learned a lot on my travels both from indigenous peoples as well as people that I've worked with always people know things that you don't you can always learn something from somebody else and also experience that this is the UK this is up in Scotland's river crossing on the trip we did a couple of years ago this is the sort of thing I do on my holidays okay this this is Scotland this is Canada and embarrass Amanda who SAT there she's in the bow on that photograph hiking in the autumn in Sweden just as it's turning to winter out in all the seasons ski touring in Norway this is a sort of thing I like to do often in very wild places winter camping up in the far north of Sweden so that's where I'm coming from in terms of my my background in terms of outdoor skills outdoor education it's what I do full-time and what I want to talk about today as I say is this is in the lake district but applying a lot of those skills so what value can we get from applying a lot of wilderness skills that have proven themselves in the wilderness what value can we get from using them here and also what are some of those skills what do I suggest that you should be focusing on working on so the value I had a bit of a brainstorm and I came up with a little list and I don't know if you can see that but basically sense of achievement appreciation flexibility discipline realism becoming a maker field-tested skill set confidence internal development environmental connection freedom self-reliance well-being and of course fun that we should be having fun if we can okay so some of those will not make sense some of them will well being just being in green spaces is good for you yeah don't have to do anything when you get there just looking at pictures of green spaces has shown to make people feel less stressed more comfortable less aggressive and here's a quote from a report and if you can't see that the balance of evidence indicates conclusively that knowing and experiencing nature makes us generally happier healthier people and I think we all know that many of us know that in our in our heart but there's an increasing amount of research going into the benefits and Syreeta also talked about some of the mental health benefits of practicing bushcraft before okay once you start actually applying some of the skills you start getting an environmental connection and I think that's something that a lot of people that are drawn to bushcraft crave they they sit in a cubicle all week maybe they're in the scouts when they were younger and then they want to university they've got job they've got kids and then once they've got their kids they think we should be doing things outside I used to do things outside when I was a kid and I've lost touch with that side of my personality and so people want a reconnection with nature and you do get that through practicing bushcraft and i'll use the humble birch trees as an example here a lot of people consider birch as a weed certainly one of the first things if you've got an an old railway siding on an old car park or something that's overgrown you get things like buddleia and birch and these pioneer species going in and taking over and a lot of forestry workers and forestry managers it up until relatively recently considered birch Silver Birch a bit of a weed but it is common it is widespread but it's also extremely useful we all know probably that birch bark is a fantastic natural fire lighter and probably one of the best the twigs the dead twigs very very good kindling full of oils as well in the bark but also just really fine matchstick thing twits really really good the leaves have got natural soap in them they've got saponins in them which can be used for hygiene out in the bush the better quality bark can be used for craft work whether you're just making a candle holder through to weaving baskets and people have even made shoes and boots from birch bark carving as well it's not necessarily the best carving wood in the world but it's relatively easy and there's also a real tradition of carving implements out of birch in the north of Scandinavia in particular where it's one of the few broadleaf trees available tapping the birch for SAP in the spring or a bit past the stage for doing that this year but that's something that a lot of people look forward to and then there's also a relationship between lots of trees and particular fungi but in the case of in the case of birch we've got the orange birch bolete birch polypore which often referred to as a razor strop fungus so it's traditionally used surface dropping cutthroat razors and of course horse's hoof formost voluntarios one of the classic tinder fungi and it's that trauma layer that orange chamois leather like layer in the middle which is the really good bit for for making amadou and once that's lit it burns very very well so there's a lot of useful elements relating to just one tree species and so the next time you look at a green space and enjoy being in that green space but you see some birch then perhaps you see that differently and certainly as you become more familiar with the bushcraft skills related to particular species you do start seeing resources you start seeing friends out there in what would otherwise be just a bunch of sense of achievement okay this is a bit of a cliche of bushcraft now pretty much any bushcraft school worth its salt as a photograph like this on it somewhere on the homepage and it is a great sense of achievement every time you you get a member you get fire by friction you do have a really good sense of achievement not just the first time as in the case of the student here every time I achieve it it's a good feeling you have a sense of achievement and it's not just the guys it's not just a guy thing the girls really enjoy getting that ember as well and groups it's a great group activity getting people working together and lots of smiles when they achieve that flame realism I'll use bow drill as an example again there's a big difference between down bow drill on a nice warm a bank holiday weekend like today and doing on a cold wet windy damp April day and like here and particularly when you're demonstrating it in front of students but the point is the more you practice this you practice this technique with different materials different natural materials will you go to the woods collect the materials that you need there and then and make a set make fire and the more conditions you do it in the more realistic your abilities become and the better sense of realism that you have about the skill set so by practicing these wilderness skills actually if you look closely at that photograph was actually a cottage not far behind so we're not in the middle of the wilderness we are in the woods we're on the edge of a of a bigger state but there's a cottage there we're not million miles away from anywhere but still practicing these skills in a realistic way where you go to the forest and make the set gives you a sense of realism about the skills also flip side if you're practicing skills that you know have proven over the Tesla there stood the test of time they've proven themselves in wilderness so this is a photo quite a wide angle shots a bit of an odd shot but of a little promontory where we had our camp on one of our wilderness trips in Canada and it's a nice day it's a beautiful evening still water there but we're traveling all day we're paddling all day we get to camp we have to unload the boats we have to set up camp we have to set up our personal areas mutual group area fire we have to get firewood we have to process it and we have to cook and we need to do that in a reasonable time get to bed and have a rest because we need to paddle again the next day is a two-week paddling trip so we need to be efficient with our skills and we need to efficiently get those things to work our top knots our water purification are cooking our fire lighting we need to do all of those things efficiently even if it's pouring with rain we can't just have a night off because the weather's bad so the skills that prove themselves in the wilderness and in terms of the way that you actually do them in terms of realistic timings you can bring back to the UK so if you're even if you're never going to a wilderness if you're watching people who do and you're learning from people who do who've been there as many of us who teach have then you know that you practicing the right skills in the right way because they work under the circumstances of duress or pressure or efficiency so whenever I post the photograph like this on Facebook I get people saying that's irresponsible that flames too big you don't need that much kindling etc etc etc the problem is the guys are all wearing t-shirts it's a nice warm dry day I don't know where any of those students are going Henry one of my assistants they're doing the demonstration I don't know where any of those students are going next okay there might be on a one day course with us or a two day course with us but I regularly get emails from people telling me where they've applied the skills that they've learned from us so for example somebody wrote to me or what little while ago and said oh I've just in a canoe trip in a wilderness area in New York State up near Main and it was wet it was cold and I was the only one in the group who could consistently light a fire and that's having done a one day course where we've shown them how to do this similarly a guy who did a hiking trip in Sweden group were pretty bad at lighting fires

he could light the fires and taught everybody else how to do it during the trip so these things work if you practice for just fine weather if you practice for conditions that not particularly difficult when you actually get to somewhere where you really need to rely on them they don't work so well so we always teach people on the basis that even though we're maybe teaching them in a bluebell wood in Sussex they might be in a wilderness area the next week or in six months time or a year's time you don't know so you have to teach them properly and then when we do have a really wet day the students don't necessarily like it watching a demonstration bedraggled in the rain but the same techniques even though you don't get the high flames gets the fire going even in the pouring rain and that's what we're aiming to teach people internal development well this is me ten years ago almost to the day this is july two thousand six when i got my black belt in particular style of jiu-jitsu and those are some of my training buddies who also got their black belts at the same time and for me having studied martial arts for a long time but also studied bushcraft for a long time I can see there's a similarity in terms of what it does to you inside in terms of your approach your mentality your acceptance of things the way that they are you don't get upset and angry and throw your toys out the pram when they aren't the way you want them to be you go with the flow and you use your skill to work to your advantage and so I'll use bow drill is another example the ability to go to the woods select some material that's at the right type find it however long that takes make a bow drill set get it to work make an ember make sure that ember survives and blow it into flame to me it epitomizes bushcraft in a lot of ways or it's certainly iconic a bushcraft but it also develops these internal things patients attention to detail working with what you've got rather than wishing they were the way that they are and that brings a certain discipline and we don't need to be a million miles away either for this we can be doing this in our back garden in our local woods we can also overlay some extra discipline by for example here always burning your bow drill set if

you're practicing rather than saying oh this is a really good set i'll keep it i'll put it in the garage yet and dry out because it will work better next time but that's making you not so good at bow drill as you would be if you went out and made another set each time if you're really trying to get better at these skills develop these skills put some impose positive constraints on it burn your set make another one try different material next time becoming a maker lots of people these days in the day to day lives never make anything their jobs involve computers and I'm not saying is nothing wrong with computers we're using one now for giving this presentation yeah but people use computers they're working in offices their job really involves passing information on to other people moving information around and selling customer service all of these things don't involve doing things physically with your hands but as soon as you get involved in bushcraft you can select some nice material some nice cherry here for example few tools and you can make some really really nice things and that's very satisfying in itself but you're also practicing hand-eye coordination you're making things which is not so common these days and this is a set I made for frost River canvas roll so that we then have a nice set of utensils for one of our canoe trips for example also this is a nice thing about going into the woods and making something almost from nothing so here's a bark container about basket if you like made from sweet chestnut bar lash together with some roots made on one of our intermediate courses and it's nice be able to go into the woods find the materials and make something which is aesthetically pleasing but also the process of making is nice to do that it's it's involves you and your senses in your hands and your eyes in a way that we often don't do in other parts of our lives these days and the ultimate extension of those sorts of skills are things like birchbark canoes going into the woods finding all the materials that you need whether it be pine tar whether it be spruce roots whether it be cedar whether it be birch bark it's all found in the forest and there's a quote that I really like from this master birch bark boat builder and for those of you that can't quite see that so this is Marcel LaBelle and he says people asked me where did you get this canoe and I say well I found it in the bush some assembly required and that to me in a lot of ways epitomizes this real sense of connection with the bush with nature that you get from understanding how to use a materials and you don't have to build a birchbark canoe okay even just understanding how to source and find and process and prepare a spruce root and this is a situation where we were on one of our Canadian canoe trips as some of you might have read this story on my blog but basically and there were six of us and these days on a single prop beaver plane you can only take one tandem canoe on the outside so there was six of us three tandem boats on the river that meant three plane trips to get us into where we needed to it's about 45 minute flight in but the morning that we were flying in was supposed to be flying in at eight-thirty one of the planes have developed a fault so there are only two planes available and so that meant one of them had to go back and get the remaining people or remaining kiss or whatever it was so what we normally do is we do two people in each boat with their kit and some group kit two people inc playing sorry with a boat on the outside with a kit and then we'd all get there and three flights but what we did here was I went with one of the clients the other three clients went in the second plane and then ray Goodwin was going to come up in the last plane with the rest of the grip kit what happened there was the weather deteriorated so we ended up five of us in the woods 45 minute float plane flight from the road head which was also quite remote and Ray couldn't get in now ray had the dry food and he had the cooking equipment we had the fresh food and not a lot else other than our personal kit and we had some brew kit but that was about it ought most of the dried food was Ray the cooking equipment was a gray and so we just made the things that we needed it wasn't a hassle we needed to cook bacon so we made a griddle we didn't have a frying pan it was fine that's the sort of attitude it doesn't have to be a survival situation it's just we don't have what we need will just make it and that's what we did one of the guys didn't have all of his personal kit with him some of it was with the grip kit we just may do and we lent him things and that that spirit of just ok what do we need to do what can we make and it was comments find the weather was bad as I say that's why the plane didn't come in but it wasn't a big deal ray came in the next day and we carried on the trip so you don't have to be building birchbark canoes for these things to be useful it builds confidence that sort of experience where you're not flustered by things you just make what you need you you adapt you improvise it builds confidence and the ability to go into the woods even here in this example this is the northern Sweden where you can build a shelter you can light a fire make a long log fire and survive a night at minus 30 it in comfort and is a real confidence builder and that's the sort of confidence that these skills give you freedom I think we probably all understand this going to the woods with a basic kit setting a tarp up lighting a fire spending the night even local woods gives us a sense of freedom that maybe we don't have otherwise and its really really important appreciation and by that I mean when I've had clients of students in the woods for a week they say I'm looking forward to a shower I'm looking forward to the fact that I don't have to use a head torch I can turn the lights on at home that there's going to be running water so I don't need to filter it i'll put it through a milbank bag and boil it yeah we appreciate the smaller things it doesn't mean to say that we disown the things in the woods that we like doing we just appreciate the the the luxuries of home maybe a little bit more than that many people do self-reliance of course if a zombie apocalypse arrives we're probably going to be all right so for me bushcraft really is at the core it's about a study of nature yet we've talked a lot about using natural materials and there's a knowledge required there there's also some skills required there and as a whole I would refer to all of that as knowledge and skills or skills because they're really intertwined and also experience yet the more experienced you are

off with using these things and applying them in different situations the better you will be so what skills well I kind of did a bit of a brainstorm with a mind map and just the basic skills and I came up with this and you can't see that I appreciate that but if you go to my blog and it's not up yet it'll be up tomorrow night once the show's finished and type in that web address skills hyphen list you will get a list of what I listed there is what i think are a good broad range of basic skills for a bushcraft person to have fire is clearly going to be close to the top of that and you'll notice here that I've been on a bit of a quest to try and photograph fires at night looking something like an old dutch master oil painting it's just a little bit of a hobby of mine yet but whether it was in Sussex of the previous photograph windermere in the Lake District here out in the middle of nowhere in the boreal forest of Manitoba is in this situation here or in the high North High Arctic forest in northern Sweden with a long log fire there's a commonality there the power and the value of fire and particularly at night it turns a warmth in terms of all the other things that we need to do in terms of camaraderie in terms of morale and when you're looking at your fire skills don't be complacent go right back just as in martial arts it's the motifs the basics which are the most important the same of your fire lighting go back and make sure that you're practicing things in the right way that you're in grading good habits are you always striking a match match in the optimal way that's going to minimize the chance of you breaking the the matchstick are you getting the biggest most concentrated sparks from your fire steel there are two for me two main ways of taking a flame to an established fire one is small sticks this classic small stick fire birch twigs we already talked about spruce twigs pine those small sticks that burn very well we can put in bundles like witches broom broom sticks that's a key way and it works in a lot of places the other one is feather sticks if you can't get the fine kindling because it's too wet or it's just not available you can split down wood and you can shave it with your knife and you can light it with a match you can produce all the different kindling and small fuel that you need from a round of dead standing would as long as you've got a knife and as long as you've got the skill and by a good feather stick we're talking about that sort of thing not the rubbishy fuss sticks that you see in a lot of older survival books a good feather stick should have long curls it should have a thin neck that will light from the curls so that you've got your second layer of fuel there already and that should be connected to the stem not all disparate on the floor so that you can manipulate that and get your fire going with ease that requires some skill with your knife but given were all bushcraft people most people like knives so it's a good excuse to be using your knife a lot and it's also a good excuse for you to have it nice and sharp which again push truck people like doing they're like spending time sharpening their knives so feather sticks is the perfect thing to be practicing even in the back garden whether it's for lighting your barbecue lighting your wood-burning stove whatever the opportunity you have practice feather sticks and get good at making nice long curls you can start experimenting with fibrous plant materials as well this is honey something on its way to being buffed up to blow an ember into flame it's not quite there yet but you can experiment with fibrous plant materials you can experiment with downy seed heads really instrumental in catching sparks and then you can play around with combinations so here's one I only had a tiny little bit of a survival experiment I was doing on my own and I only had one of those little old-fashioned military spark is not a modern Ferro rod not on modern fire steel just the old hacksaw blade and a little sparker and Bracken as it is doesn't tend to take sparks very well anyway but what I put the bottom there is a bit of cattail greater read mace tifa latifolia bit of seed head which will catch the spark very well but will go up very quickly then I've got some Bracken laid up in a nice little V file a and then I've got my birch twigs on top so it's that combination catching the spark catching the flame into a bigger flame and then getting the king lingo and that then with one spark gets the fire goes it's that knowledge of natural materials again and lots of people who will argue well I always carry a Ferro rod I always carry a lighter always carry matches I don't need to practice all of these things you do if you want to be good at them that's this depends whether you want to be good at the mo not at the end of the day nobody's saying you have to be the end of the day we don't need to be any good at any of these skills most of the time in our daily lives we choose to practice it with them so if you take away anything from this today is all i'm saying is choose to be good at them if you're going to choose to do them at all and of course make sure you know how to clear up a fire afterwards and leave it with as little trace as possible you a lot of people ask me about shelters some of you know that i do a Q&A show on youtube some of you and ask me questions on Twitter and just generally ask me questions and a lot of people ask me about shelters and go to town with shelters if you want to but a lot of the time certainly on wilderness trips you're not gonna be building shelters and if you're in a survival situation I I can't think of many survival situations in the UK where you're going to have to build a leaf shelter because if you've got the energy and the physical capacity to build something like that you can probably walk to the nearest road frankly and but it's a great thing to do it's a lot of fun to do and in more extreme environments it could be a very useful skill but if you're going to do it do it well when I was a kid we used to build dens yeah I think it's almost an innate thing that we can all do yeah we can go to the woods as kids and we can make a den we can put some branches up against a tree trunk forest schools do it a lot with kids and kids just know how to do it they can kind of make a little thing to crawl into and as adults we should be aiming to be a little bit better than that so make a well fat shelter that's going to keep the rain out it's going to keep the wind out make your beds that you can actually sleep on don't make a hovel that will be unpleasant to spend a couple of hours in make a shelter that we were pleasant to spend a few days in but also I would encourage you to get good at your knots all of your tarp knots because frankly that's what you're going to be using a lot of the time whether you get sleeping on the ground whether you like hanging from a tree in a hammer

you're going to need to be good at you're not so practice them practice them so that you can do them in a dark when you arrive at a campsite and it's late and it's windy and rainy you can get set up quickly and get them to cover so practice all of these knots for big tarps and for small tarps so that you can do that without thinking about it also make sure that you understand how to get the most out of your sleeping equipment again I get lots of questions about condensation buildup in Billy bags sleeping bags not working properly understand how to use the baffles understand how to air things out understand how to make the most of all you're sleeping kit and understand about the dangers are being out if you're going to be camping out year-round understand about hypothermia understand about how heat loss and can go into the environment and different ways that you can lose heat to the environment and make sure that you've got things in place to minimize that water and heat and hydration so you need to understand hyperthermia you need to understand dehydration I'm sure some of you some of you've been at the beer tent already and some of you have been out in the Sun some of you will be dehydrated already and here it doesn't really matter but soon as you start working harder it matters more so you were building a natural shelter to understand about water understand what the problems are with water what can make you ill understand how to deal with it and that could simply just be boiling or it could be one of the many really good filtration systems which are available in the market these days and also if you're camping with other people spoons if you're camping with other people then make sure you put a system in place so that everybody knows where the clean water is it really knows where the dirty water is and as a system and in place I was speaking to somebody recently who and got very ill due to getting a waterborne disease and it transpired they've been treating their water very well they've been using the Milbank bag have been boiling or they've been doing other things with it to treat it but then they've been washing up in dirty water and so they're cut and their mug so their mug and their plate was contaminated and that's how probably how they got ill so think about what you're doing understand pathogenic organisms understand how you can get ill when you and make sure that doesn't have to be a million miles away you then come on to some of your basic camp craft how do we efficiently boil water over a fire two more elaborate setups so again it comes back to your knife use your craft work making things it all starts to tie together and there are lots of different ways of hanging a pot over a fire and that's fun to play with and again you can be almost in your back garden to do that and again it develops knife skills and it's a nice thing to do cooking yet we all need to eat and probably several times a day and cooking is a great thing to do outdoors it's very satisfying if you can cook some good meals you'll really impress your friends as well yeah it's a really good weight way to get free beers if you can cook a good stew I'll cook a good Bannock or cook good pancakes that's a that's a skill worth having probably it's up there it should have been just below fire reckon ok cooking is really really important and you can become more elaborate if you want to / NASA fish you don't have to be fly fishing in Alaska you don't have to be out in the middle of nowhere you can go to your local fishmonger buy a whole salmon and practice the technique how to fill it the fish and cook it over the fire you can do that do the barbecue if you know a friendly game keeper you might be even able to get hold of something a bit bigger and practice and larger game butcher in there was a good demonstration going on out there really wrong cooking over the fire in simple ways can be very very nice again these can all be practiced you can practice these things with families you can do it on camp sites that allow fires you can do it almost over a barbecue if you want and learn how these this this looks simple but the number of people I've seen try and rush this style of cooking of a fish over a fire on the stick and end up with a fish in the fire or burning through the stick or whatever it is and takes a little bit of subtle tea it's worth practicing of course there's lots of other methods of cooking when we come on to finding food people ask about trapping now most trapping these days is not legal there's very few methods of trapping in the UK which are legal and often they're for specific purposes and when it comes to making traps on natural materials that pretty much all illegal and that's certainly not just the case in the UK in relatively wild places you'll also find that's the case you need is quite closely even in places like Canada where third people still trapped for furs the way that that's done is quite closely regulated you can't just go and shop whatever you want in the woods but there's a there's an interest here is it I I used to like taking my bike apart when I was kids i took my star wars at-at to bits when I was young and I never put it back together again I like knowing how things work and it's the same with trapped an understanding of the trigger mechanisms and the mechanics it's an interesting and stimulating thing to learn how to do even if you never employ it in practice and of course tracking this is really really interesting to me I'm really passionate about tracking because to me it's a way of seeing the world for what it really is and there are a few key elements of bushcraft in terms of understanding the natural world and for me tracking is one it's like learning to read and until you can learn to track and tell you can learn to identify and locate and follow sign or spa however you want to call it you can't really read what's been going on it's really like learning to read so understanding what you're seeing and that comes with time it's not something that's going to come overnight so you can chip away at it bit by bit by bit go out regularly in your local area and see what you can see through the year what tracks can you see if the snow on the ground when it's been raining what's fresh what's got raindrops in it so that was older what's fresh that's on the fresh mud in the puddles you can really start it will be it'll infuriate your partners if you've got a partner a wife or a girlfriend or a husband or a boyfriend who isn't interested in bushcraft this will infuriate the hell out of them you're getting interested in tracks and sign because your warps will become very very slow yeah we've got some droppings there with beetles and fur and things in there some fox droppings it's interesting to see what you can see also foraging tree and plant identification for me if you can't walk into the woods in the in your local area and tell me what every single tree and plant is in that local area you've got work to do as far as I'm concerned and that's that that's the internal talk that I have with myself yeah I get I get irritated not irritated in the right word but I I get motivated probably better word to find out what something is if I don't know what it is yeah and you should be the same you should have that inquisitiveness about nature and in terms of foraging for food roots leaves there's flowers there's berries there's roots there's rhizomes pollen a lot of people don't even think about pollen as being a food source medicinal herbs yarrow here for example is a classic one as bit and that's before we get on to edible fungi which a lot of people think it's not worth bothering with and maybe from a survival perspective for short-term survival it isn't in terms of flavor and unless you dislike mushrooms at all then it's worth learning some basic fungi such as some of the boletus of birch bolete there and there's chanterelles that as well there is some that are easy to recognize that add a lot of flavor and they're worth learning also so I talked about looking at nature's signs really looking in detail foraging learning all the trees and plants or just learning to identify them even if you're not interested in wild foods just learn to identify them because until you learn the resources how to identify them you can't really get beyond that until you can tell the difference between a birch in a willow and a beach and an oak and a spruce and all these other trees which are all out there and you can't use them to their maximum capacity in terms of using the spruce roots using the birch twigs using the willow ones using the Bark's of different trees you can't do that until you can identify them and then when you become more granular and looking at some of the plants it's exactly the same the other element the third element really is looking at what the environments telling you about direction yeah there's been two unfortunate cases just in the news in the past couple of days where people have been found dead in the wilderness after quite a long time and one of them is almost certainly down to the

fact that somebody got completely disoriented and couldn't find their way out of a relatively straightforward situation the more you can glean from your environment about the direction that you're facing and the direction you need to go the better and every single day the Sun passes once through the sky as we rotate once every single day you've got a data point for looking at where does the sunrise where does it set when is it at its highest point what time is local noon where I am what angle is it at and through the seasons how do those things change you can observe that every single day wherever you are you don't need to be out in the wilderness and it's one of the most regular ways of learning natural navigation and the same with the moon yet the moon can tell you a lot about direction and it was a long time before mathematicians worked out equations for the motion of the Moon and Newton had a lot to do with that with his laws of motion and it's quite complicated but if you remember the fact the moon is illuminated by the Sun and you understand the movement of the Sun that's very very helpful and again you've got data points every single day you don't need to be out in the wilds even in town this photograph is taken in London yet even in town when there's a lot of light pollution you will still see the moon if it's up and a new crescent moon can tell you a lot about the direction of the Sun it can tell you where south is there's lots of things that you can glean just from looking at the moon and the Sun before you even start looking at the stars and other factors so learn these things you've got an opportunity every day to to learn about these things and also learn how to use a map and compass yeah let's not be romantic they're really really good tools and also learning about reading a map will also tell you more about reading a landscape understanding where water sources are understanding where different resources are you can glean a lot from a map you're going to need some tools I haven't really talked about sharp shiny things yet but you will need some tools for doing some of the skills we talked about but I would caution against going over the top that's pretty much all I think you need as a beginner or even an intermediate in terms of really you know if we're honest in terms of practicing bushcraft skills you need a knife a saw and the firesteel is going to get you a long way with your with your fire lighting skills in terms of practicing different techniques and different materials you may well need a sharpening stone as well at some point across and learn how to sharpen your knife and turn it learn how to look after it and learn how to do that with a cheap one before you buy an expensive one oh they practice with a cheap on even if you've already got an expensive and also learn the limitations yeah and the more you use things and more you will learn limitations and I have regular arguments about whether Mora's break morris do break sometimes but it's normally when they're being battled and if we're not very far away from home we can take a spare or we can just go to the shop and get a new one when we're in a wilderness maybe we need to take something more robust because I do see a few percent or maybe one percent of these break when battling every year that's just the fact of the matter so then choose something that's more robust as appropriate yeah well that comes with experience and then when you do find something that suits you really well use it lots and lots and lots you can see how well used and well-traveled that stuff is that's my personal knife and saw and fire steel when I took that photograph for an article yet you can see from the sheet they have not been in a draw they have not just come out of the shock they have traveled they've been to Canada they've been to Sweden have been to Africa they've been to lots of places and they're being used and you will learn to use lots of different tools over time and that's great going back to being a maker and being an ofay with her and you can do a lot with a few tools we've got a folding box or there we've got an ax small forest acts they're ubiquitous a really good portable ax we've got an adze there which some of you will be familiar with maybe some people aren't but that's good for me hollowing out larger things you've got your bushcraft knife you've got a carving knife and then maybe a backup folder for your pocket and learn how to use these things really really well that's again at the core of the craft side of bushcraft and you should look at something like this and just see a bunch of resources there yeah and the willow wands the Barkers birch in the back grounders Bracken was all sorts in this photograph once you start looking there's a world of resources out there and you will recognize them as such the more experience you have and the more skill that you have you can turn things into cordage what they start to process bark for cordage and turn out nice useful cordage which surprises a lot of people are so many useful things out there I know a lot of you are familiar with these sorts of things but you'll be surprised everybody's at different levels with their learning some people some people have got no idea that this event is going on this weekend and yet they might be interested in in seeing these things so again spread the word if you can about how you can do these things now I think this is too small for the screen okay but I'm really cautioning you to keep things simple both of your kit and with the way that you apply the bush craft skills there's lots of people who are always I think it's I think it's a tendency of our of our age that we're always trying to find a better way version 2.0 of doing something yeah but this is from a long time ago this is a quote from Thomas Aquinas and if you don't know who he is or was and you can google him but he said some quite sensible things even though it's a long time ago and what he says here is if a thing can be done adequately by means of one it is superfluous to do it by means of several for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffice is and I like that because the core of that is keep things simple that keep things straight forward there's a beauty and anesthetic to keep things simple and I think if you apply bushcraft properly and in a way that's in tune with nature as Thomas Aquinas suggests here it's he came to this conclusion from observing nature then we can do the same we can keep things simple now I'm not going to be romantic either be sensible with your skill set learn the basic skills you need to look at if you're going out into the outdoors and again I don't need to be patronizing here but we see cases in the news and the Son and the day daily mirror and the Guardian and The Telegraph and all the other newspapers love stories of people getting lost and discovery channel of maida made a fortune out of people in adversity whether it's contrived whether it's real we like these stories and the paper's like these stories but I don't want any students of mine or anybody I ever speak to to be in difficult situations learn how to look after yourself learn em stop and plan learn how to protect yourself on the environment learn how to signal learn how to find water make shelter all of those things because otherwise you don't want to be recipients of one of these carry a survival bag if you're in the Hills that's much more important to carry in the hills in the bushcraft knife in the UK and make be sensible about where you're going don't be romantic about the skills yeah survival fishing kit is not very much used to you on scarf el pais yeah a blizzard bag is much more useful to you so I would just to reemphasize in terms of skills we talked I remember I i was quite careful in how i titled this I didn't say bushcraft skills at beginning I said wilderness skills and and a lot of for me a lot of wilderness skills a lot of what's in there is bushcraft but as a baseline I also think you should learn to navigate well and there's a pleasure in a lot of people get stressed about navigation a lot of people get stressed about angles and numbers because they had bad maths teachers at school I think that's a lot of it so we can blame them but get over that and if you're not very good at navigating if you don't understand how to use a map and a compass together learn how to do that find somebody who knows how to do that we can show you to do that because that's going to open up a lot of semi wild places in the UK to you that maybe would otherwise not be available to you so it allows you to get into places that you can't otherwise get into and it also helps keep you out of trouble it means that maybe you don't have to spend the night in the Hills maybe you can find your way back to the car or the pub or ever it is it's an important thing and also get some good first aid training yeah I see a lot of people get very excited about fires and axes knives and many fewer people do good first day training get some realistic training where somebody's providing good scenarios with lots of blood and gore and it looked real because then when you do have to have a real situation whether it's something to do with what you're doing outdoors or if you're just traveling home after a weekend meeting your bushcraft mates in the woods and that you come across a crash on the road you're going to be a better human being in terms of being able to deal with that and help somebody else that needs it so please do get some I think that's a basic wilderness skill as well and as I say that skills list will be up tomorrow night make a note of that poor coco at UK forward slash skills list and a lot of what I talked about there plus all the others that I didn't quite touch on or in that sort of spiders web diagram will be on that list if you want to find me online there's lots of free information at Paul curtly co uk that will help you with a lot of the skills that I've talked about tonight this afternoon and if you want to come and learn from me personally you can do that through my company frontier bushcraft com okay and that's me at half past can we have a couple minutes for questions cool does anybody got any questions yes what's my favorite country to travel to and at the moment it's Canada it really is because for me I grew up in the UK and as my horizons have got bigger the landscapes that I wanted to go to have got got bigger and so I explored the UK a lot I've explored Europe and Scandinavia a lot and there's some fantastic places there but once you get into Canada remember that photo I showed at the beginning we're sort of flying over the forest and you Flight your take off a lake and you fly over the forest and you just look down and it's just mile after mile after mile after mile of trees it just blows your mind and to land in the middle of that wilderness and in to explore that willna see even though people have been there before but to explore it for yourself that for me is a real it's a real pleasure at the moment so for me at the moment it's Canada yeah lots of cool wildlife in Canada and smart more question is so that going sorry what inspired me to do bushcraft Lee well when I was how old are you 11 okay so when I was about your age and I live in a small village I'd lift in Wales for a bit when I was younger and we used to go in the forest but then I lived in a small village in and the north of England and they were there only a couple of other lads who were the same age as me and we used to go out into the woods as you know we used to go out we had we're in to be MX's and catapults and going to the woods that's kind of what we did and we just got interested in lighting fires and building shelters and these sorts of things and and when I was 13 my dad bought me lofty Wiseman's survival handbook and we started trying to do some things out of that book and I just started to get interested in survival skills and then later on I got more into hiking and backpacking and travelling by footing Wilder places and then I came back to the survival skills thinking I really should know some of those things I played around with when I was when I was younger I really should know how to do those things properly because I'm going to wild places and I have to rely on my stove and my 10 tonight I'd like to learn a little bit more about how to rely without those on myself without those things if I need to so then I started looking into learning survival skills formally and then to cut a long story short I ended up finding Ray Mears and studied from him and then ended up working with him and it just went from there so it was a really an extension of an interest that always had but it came full circle back to it being my job in the end so that's that's where it came from any other questions you might have to shout quite loud yeah so the question was and when you're in the wilderness and it's often advised to check streams before you drink from them in case there's a dead animal in it so how far should you check and I i I'm almost going to change the question in the sense that unless you can be sure that there isn't something there you should assume there is that that's but that will be the starting point and it depends on how fast it's flowing it depends on how big it is so for example my personal experience if I'm in Scotland and I'm above any livestock and then I will drink the water straight from the streams because it's coming out of a peat bog it's snow melt it's what it's rained that's filtering through and yes check immediately above that there isn't a dead animal and but you know if it's if you if it's nearby you're going to smell it generally unless the winds blown in the opposite direction so check a little way maybe 20 30 meters but I don't worry too much about it and now for example look at the look at the landscape as well you know if it's just a stream coming through some moss you know for quite distance and you can look up a hillside and not see much that you know why would an animal have died there is what I'm coming to whereas if it's like a load of craig's and and it's coming down through some rocks there's more likely to be something that's in there so maybe pay it more attention so look at the circumstances but generally and that's in the UK if I'm in the Lake District there's lots of people as lots of sheep I are just assume it's dirty frankly although I know some of it probably isn't and so really the only exceptions for me would be in in Scotland up in the high up in the high ground and once we move over to Scandinavia you know for a long way away from habitation in Sweden for example the waters pretty pure there you don't have problems with things like Giardia whereas when you go into Canada even in a similar sort of environment in terms of spruce and pine and swag no moss and bog Myrtle and all those sorts of things which should be familiar from Scandinavia you've got a beaver population which has got Giardia and which is hosting Giardia putting Giada into the water you just have to assume that the waters not safe to drink and so my primary focus when I'm in that environment is is really just filtering out the cysts and once you've done that I don't tend to bother putting chemical treatment in for bacteria and other things because the waters generally quite clean other than the fact that you've got this Giardia population there in the fall in the in the beavers so I think it depends where you are and Frank does that answer the question because yeah cool cool AB yeah one more question what's my favorite season to be out well I like I like this is I like all seasons but and if we're talking about some of the wilder places so you use the word bush so some of the wilder places in the northern hemisphere I like being out in the early spring and I like being out in the late summer early autumn because the insects aren't is bad yeah so you know whether we're talking about North America or whether we're talking about Scotland or whether we're talking about Scandinavia you've got problems with mosquitoes black fly you know midges mosquitoes and so yeah those are some of the most pleasant times but you've still got relatively long days compared to the depths of the winter but you don't have all those biting insects so you can sit around the campfire and enjoy a bit more so for me that's that's the favorite time for getting out there into really wild places in the northern hemisphere yes cool right well thank you very very much thank you for your attention and I guess I might see some of you in the beer tent a bit later on cheers thank you