Bushcraft Show 2018 Main Stage Presentation

Description

This is a video of my Bushcraft Show 2018 main stage presentation entitled "The Value Of Using Wilderness Skills Closer To Home", including the slides I showed during the talk edited into the video. [More info below...]

This was the fifth time I have been invited to be among the expert speakers at the Bushcraft Show. which takes place every year in Derbyshire, England.

Other speakers this year included John "Lofty" Wiseman, Dr Sarita Robinson, Ed Stafford, Dave Canterbury, Luke Soderling, Barn the Spoon, Will Lord, Fraser Christian and Dan Hume.

My full 55-minute presentation, along with all slides is in the above video.

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

REAL WORLD EXPEDITIONING WITH BUSHCRAFT SKILLS

Much of what we consider bushcraft today was tied to journeying in the past, whether it was seasonal migrations of native peoples, frontiersmen pushing into new territories or colonial powers employing expeditionary forces. Despite all the technology and materials available today, bushcraft still has a solid place in modern expeditioning in wild places. From lightweight backpacking to canoe tripping to winter camping by snowshoe and toboggan, bushcraft forms a solid backbone of practical skills for pretty much any environment you can think of. Further, there are psychological benefits of entering wild places with a strong base of bushcraft skills honed close to home. In this presentation I explore and expand upon these concepts, highlighting the bushcraft skills which I have found valuable in a career of wilderness expeditions and which you can benefit from learning then applying wherever you choose to have your adventures.

**GET ADDITIONAL RESOURCES**

Throughout the above presentation I refer to various podcasts, articles and other presentations. To get links for all of these plus additional resources pertinent to the presentation, including trip reports, video blogs and kit lists, then please follow the link below and request the free pack of resources which I will send you for free...

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/bushcraftshow2018

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Tags: bushcraft,bushcraft show,bushcraft show 2018,main stage presentation,paul kirtley,expeditioning,expeditions,adventure,adventure travel,wilderness,wilderness journeys,wilderness trips,wild camping,campcraft,journeying

Video Transcription

[Applause]

all right welcome welcome thank you for coming to my talk and taking time out of your day I appreciate that I'll try and stand out the way of get that out of the way over there good can you all hear me okay

brilliant good thank you and welcome so I'm going to be talking about real world expedition with bushcraft skills so how I use bushcraft skills how I work on bushcraft skills and how I use them for trips and some lessons I've learned from trips about what's useful and I've done some talks which overlap with this in previous bushcraft shows I kind of almost think of these bushcraft shows as a series of talks now I've been here for about five years in a row and and I will refer back to some previous ones and they're all on my website so you can you can see those there if you've not seen them already and so I have a company called frontier bushcraft and that's my training company I do all my training and the overseas expeditions that we do with clients through that company I also have a blog at Paul Kelly code at UK and as of tomorrow evening after the show finishes any of the resources that I refer to or articles or things if you're interested in getting the links rather than we give them all to you now just go to paul kelly dr. code at UK bushcraft show 2018 that live that link will be live as of tomorrow evening after the show finishes and you can get all the resources that I might refer to in this show so you can now just focus on what I'm talking about good so I'm Paul currently and believe it or not that's me bit skinnier back then that was on the west highland way back in the early 1990s and I was heavily into backpacking then I did a lot of backpacking on my own and with friends and I've always liked the journey and for me that's in a way how I see my bushcraft skills in the context of making journeys and but of course over the years I've looked at many different ways of journeying canoeing is something that has become a passion certainly in the last decade and some of the contexts that I'll give you this evening is about canoeing also winter trips and canoe trips as I say some of them easier than others winter trips ski tours and snowshoeing toboggan type tours and all of them I have found bushcraft to be really really really useful in different ways and ok I think it's worth pointing out a couple of different contexts expeditions where your main aim is to go and train in skills to find out about how to operate in particular environments and expeditions where you're really aiming to travel so for a lot of people it might be an adventure just to go out for an overnight in their own country you know I remember when I first went out and encamped when I was a young lad it was a real adventure it was a real expedition in that sense and one person's expedition is another person's ordeal it's easy for some people that have got a lot of experience for other people it's something to aspire to we're all on a journey in that sense and I think it's important to remember that don't pooh-pooh what somebody else thinks is a real aspirational challenge we're all learning and getting experience as we go so there if you've never been out and spent time out then going and spending some nights out in your local environment is a good way to start building up skills and for going on to bigger journeys and then you can go and do plenty of great trips in this country so this is a photograph from the space some of you here of done tricks with me and ray Goodwin on the Spay and that is a an expedition in itself there are people in this room and I won't even look at them in name names who found those journeys quite difficult or challenging or they learnt a lot from them and that's one of the things with going on trips you learn a lot about your admin you learn a lot about your skillset you learn a lot about doing things efficiently if you're just sat in camp all day you've got all the time in the world and that's great it's a good way of developing skills previous presentation about the benefit of practicing bushcraft skills close to home and you can find that on my on my website previous bushcraft show presentation when you start going on journeys you can then put those skills into practice and you learn about how to apply those in reality and then you can start going on journeys too while the places more remote places more unfamiliar places and I would say generally it's a good idea to not bite off more than you can chew we all get ambitious but I think it's good to go to places and say okay let's stay within the bounds of sensibility and then learn what we can about operating in this environment so a good example would be northern Sweden in the winter it's pretty harsh there it can be very cold it can easily be down in the minus 20 Celsius easily down overnight into the minus 30s in the in the depth of the winter so if you're going to go and camp there and journey probably the best thing to do first is to learn how to camp there because you've got the time to work on the camping skills you've got the time to work on how to operate how to get in a firewood you've got very short days etc etc rather than trying to do tens and tens of kilometers as well as learn all those other skills because in that environment if you make mistakes you start getting frostbite you start getting cold injuries you start having serious consequences whereas if you don't put your type quite right Yara if you don't put your tarp quite right here you're gonna get a bit wet maybe yeah well if you don't do things quite right there you're going to lose fingers

so think about consequence consequence build up the basic skills so that's what I'm talking about annex bed where you're really just going to gain an understanding of how to operate in the environment before you ever really trying to cover any great distance and this is what we did initially I had worked

with last fault and I myself and some friends wanted to go and do more journeys where we really went out took all of our kit took all of you know toboggans heated tents etc etc and went through you know a number of weeks and what we did initially was took baby steps okay how do we pack the toboggans how do we get all of this sorted how do we how much time do we need to set up camp how much time do we need to source firewood but we didn't really do much traveling we did a little bit week and then we also went out and back to see how far we could go in a day under different and the different conditions different snow conditions etc when we built up the database of half of how much we could manage in a day how how efficient we could be etc etc we also looked at some of the classic bushcraft skills that are available in that environment long log fires snow generators like water generator bags and lots and lots of things that we we've done before but but you know put ourselves in the position where we're camped out in the middle of nowhere going out and doing those things and using that tent as a base and then we progressed on to doing journeys where so another emergency snow shelter during journeys where we're traveling compare that to for example something like this blood vein journey blood vein rivering in Ontario Manitoba Manitoba so it's on the border between Ontario Manitoba and starts off in woodland caribou flows out towards Lake Winnipeg and you've got to you know you've got to start at a you're dropped off by float plane and then you've got to get to B and we'll come back to this in a little while but every day you're traveling you're applying your canoe skills that's not the place you want to be learning some of these skills you want to have develop them in a more structured way closer to home on smaller trips and then apply them because every day you're stopping on a new campsite you have to be efficient with your fire lighting your shelter construction or your tarp setups etcetera etc because the next day if I can get in the next slide the next day you're onto a new part the river and you're traveling and all of it beautiful but all of it varied some days quite calm but always on to a new campsite wonderful camping spots you don't have a lot of time to be developing new skills when you have to get down the trail you have to get down you're developing experience but each day you're applying the skills that you've got already you're applying you're journeying skills there's not a lot of opportunity to be developing new bushcraft skills and when you have to be spending most of the day going from A to B so that's what I mean by the difference between X beds to learn the skill set and X beds to actually just cover the ground and once you do start traveling from A to B and make having to cover the ground you have to rely on your skills the skills have to work if you get to the end of the day and you're cold and wet and tired you and you're relying on a fire for cooking or for getting people warm your fire lighting has to work yet your fire lighting skills have to work and you have to rely on your skills if you're traveling by toboggan and you get to where you're going to camp it's caught you just in a cold lake crossing you come up onto a swamp you go across the swamp into the tree line you have to get that platform flattened get your heater tent set up go and get firewood saw it split it get the stove going it cetera et cetera all while managing your clothing managing yourself managing to avoid cold injuries and so when you're in that environment when you're moving through the environment you're journeying skills need to be good and your camp skills need to be efficient yeah but if you prevent the time practicing things close to home you spent time in those environments honing the skills in that environment then it all works quite nicely ok and this takes us back to some of the history of bushcraft and anybody you know who this gentleman is that's Frederick Russell Burnham and if you've not read scouting on two continents I'd recommend it as a as a very good read he was a scout in North America and he was a scout in Africa and these guys relied on their bushcraft yep and he he was a mentor in some ways to this gentleman who many more of you might recognize baden-powell father of the scouting movement certainly here in the UK again a lot of what he brought in was down to his experience in the bow war and also Russell Burnham had an influence on that okay those guys were relying on those skills and bushcraft has a history both in terms of indigenous skills as well as expeditionary efforts expeditionary warfare colonialism and interesting podcasts that I recorded with Lisa Fenton anybody here heard that no got lots to listen to yeah so I did a podcast with Lisa Fenton who spent a lot of time she basically did a doctoral thesis on some of the relationships between bushcraft and indigenous skills and indigenous knowledge acquisition but a big part of that was also the relationship with the cultural relationship with colonialism and people like Russell Burnham and people like baden-powell and it's very interesting where bushcraft comes from it comes from people having to rely on these skills for their day-to-day life and one of the most important skills is your fire craft yeah if you're at the end of the day don't if you can see it there's lots of rain hitting that water there for the end of the day and you've got cold wet side hungry people you need your fire craft to work okay you can practice these things at home or close to home and then you can make them work out in the field and even in places like this you might think well how is my wood craft and my fire lighting skills going to be any use on the Hardanger wind video in winter well you might be staying in a hut hopefully you are staying in a hut you're staying in a tent in the mountains of Norway in winter is quite a miserable experience after a while they're cold tens you can't take the hot tent because it's too heavy

if your ski touring so if he's stealing from Hut to Hut once you've dug yourself in and you need to get the the fire going and feather sticks are very useful in that environment as well there will be a log store there and you can leave this for other people as well even if you don't find the hut like that that might be very useful to some to someone one of the last times I did a Skeeter in Norway a few years ago we were already in a hut and the weather was horrible so we decided to stay put for the day and a couple of guys came in from the opposite direction

to where we were going to the opposite direction to the one that we were going so they'd had the wind behind them we would have had the wind in our face which is one of the reasons why we decided to stay put and they came in and the first guy who came in he started speaking to us in Norwegian and we said actually we only understand a few words of Norwegian were English and he was like oh ok and then decided to start speaking English but then just went back into Norwegian he couldn't speak English because he was so cold and he was like he was really struggling and he literally then spent the last that the next three to four hours sat almost on top of the stove which of course we had going and so people will go into huts very cold and if you can leave them in good condition that's really good etiquette if you can leave them with your really nice feather sticks as well as it being useful to you when you get there if you can leave it like that it's fantastic and it's something you can practice at home you can practice your knife sharpening you can practice your feather sticks and then you can apply them on journeys yeah it's a great skill set we don't use it a lot at the time maybe 10 percent of the time when we're lighting fires often we're going to be using small stick fires but when you do need it it's super super useful yeah so practice your fire craft make sure it's really efficient but journeying makes it more and more efficient do I ever really use bow drill on a journey sometimes but it's more for specific purposes which I'll come onto water a lot of people get confused about water purification it also actually I know because people ask me a lot of questions about it it stopped people going out they worried about water they worried about the cleanliness of water they worried about what they have to do to make it safe to drink and boiling kills all pathogenic organisms yeah

rolling boil below 2,000 meters 6000 feet is enough to kill all pathogenic organism no it won't deal with chemical pollutants but if you're out in the wilds that probably aren't chemical pollutants apart from a few few places where it's probably well documented and documented so boiling is really really good but again that goes back to your fire craft a lot of the time yeah above 6000 feet or 2,000 meters rolling boil for 3 to 4 minutes also understand the technologies that are available to you filter bags dromedaries know when it's safe to drink water in places and know when it's not safe I'll happily drink water in the mountains in Scotland I won't happily drink water out of rivers in Canada where there's beaver where there might be Giardia for example so get used to and understand how filter systems work what they filter out micro filters filter out large pathogenic organisms like Giardia Cryptosporidium and other protozoa understand this this is all stuff you can learn and then you've got the skillset for traveling yeah and this is on one of our Canadian trips guys using the same sort of katadyn filter system great for during the day you can't be bothered to have a fire you don't have the time to have a fire stopping at lunch fill up the water bottles hot day you want the water and then in the evenings you can have a campfire so these things are not mutually exclusive either a lot of people think I'm doing a canoe journey what should i do should I have a fire and a boil water or should I use a filter system or should I use chemicals there's nothing to stop you using them all at different points of that journey depending on what's pragmatic at the time you also may be presented with things that you haven't used before so understand the principles rather than just be wedded to particular bits of kit that's one of the things you find as you travel more widely you don't always have all of your own personal perfect kit with you

foraging for food now here's a romantic notion yet we're going to travel through this environment really hard and we're going to live off the land as we go yeah if you're thinking about having some mint tea or nettle tea that's probably realistic yeah and you can find these things in a lot of places yeah and then you can also experiment with things that you're not used to like Labrador tea yep it's in the rhododendron family Layden and I wrote a tendrán Greenlandic ohm this one that's the one you want to use the other ones and a bit toxic well even this one's a bit toxic but you don't want to boil and boil and boil and boil it you can experiment with new foraged foods as you go but bit do be careful of course yeah and on courses here we might be foraging for cattails anybody on my plant walk this morning yet so we talked about getting cattails out of the pond there's some people doing it yeah yeah and there's some being roasted on the embers some of the rhizomes been roasted on the embers really good good source of carbohydrates we also might dig for burdock roots here some guys using digging sticks thinking for burdock roots they've already chopped the leaves off cuz they're going to use them for wrapping food to cook under the fire that's all great to do but trying to do that while you're covering distance in an environment is very very difficult and so here's a scene from Canada rife with cattail and other usable foods but we don't really have the time to forage for them if you're actually covering lots of ground wild rice something you find alongside rivers this is on the blood vein again and that's all wild rice at the side of the river and this was collected by native people but it never all is ripe for collecting at the same time so you have to go through with the canoe and bash it into your canoe collect it in the bottom of the canoe and you'd have to do that over time in a particular area to collect enough food you'd simply don't have the time to do that on a journey to collect enough to collect enough food it's a nice thing to show to people if you were camping in that area for some time yes you could start using that as a food so but if you're traveling through you don't have the time yeah that's not a very good picture it's very pixelated it's the best one I could find at that particular scene I was thinking of back in the day the voyagers yeah again they didn't live from the land when they traveled they had a job to do they had to get out from Quebec or from Hudson's Bay and they had to get out into the country and take the trade goods in the spring and come back with the furs before the freeze and the autumn they didn't have time to mess around picking roots and berries and things they may have collected some stuff just as an aside but they had prepared food that they took with them yeah they had pemmican and other supplies that they took with them nothing has changed yet in terms of that you if your priorities to cover ground you don't really have the time to live off the land at the same time you certainly don't have the time to live off the land and get the calories that you need to hump the loads that you you're humping on trips portage packs canoes covering scores of kilometres every day but what you might be able to do is get handfuls of berries at certain times of the year very easy to collect blueberries or blade berries or or whatever is available and that the things that you're familiar with even in unfamiliar parts of the world rotates that's out in the wild in Canada somewhere and a very similar mountain ash to what we get in the UK fungi as well if you're good with your fungi and you're traveling at certain times of the year it's a tasty addition to meals yeah you can get things that are easy to identify I've certainly collected Lexx items and boletus and cantarella and stuff on trips but it's not what I'm planning to rely on it's just an extra bonus the same as the berries yeah and you can also learn about local wild edibles as well and we were talking about and dog woods and cornice this morning on my tree and plant walk that's bunchberry

one of the north american forest floor plants which has an edible berry fishing is a good Expedition skill particularly if you're traveling by canoe now this is something that is reliable it's something that isn't romantic if you finished at the end of the day really good time of day to be to be to be fishing that's on the blood vein River in Canada and that is a very happy client who's just caught the fish very easily they're not used to being fished the fish there and northern pike and that can be an extra extra little bit extra addition for your dinner and you might think about okay we're going to take our core starch staples calorie foods with us and we'll fish along the way on a canoe journey and if you're half-decent at fishing then you might stand a good chance of catching brook trout walleye pike etc etc that is not over-romanticized

but getting all of your calorific needs from the environment while you're traveling hard through it it's not going to happen even if you take a rifle anybody who's ever done any stalking and for larger game knows that that can be very hit and miss cap craft yep simple stuff works on trips we can do lots of nice elaborate cooking cranes and things and they can be useful particularly when we've got fixed camps with lots of people but when you're on a journey keep it as simple as possible Occam's razor the simple solutions are normally the right solutions simple answers are normally the right answers yeah but be prepared to be prepared to apply your Basics in improvised and pragmatic and flexible way so here we are and the main river this is in Scotland the main body of the river is over that bank on the right hand side there's a dried-up side channel here we were camped up in the woods up up there but we didn't want to make a fire scar up in the woods it was a really nice Bluebell wood and it was a little bit earlier than this time of year last year and so we took our fire and had it down on this dried-up riverbed and there was no danger of flash floods at that time of year but it was it was simple it was quick and he was easy to tidy up the next morning when we're leaving so be pragmatic yeah

fire sights on some even remote places in Canada when you're doing trips they're easy to use and they're quick but you have to be and maybe a little bit pragmatic compared to what you normally do yeah this sort of thing is great and sometimes we do use it on trips if we're doing a little bit more elaborate cooking but sometimes you're just using very very simple setups this is on the shore of Lockett a trip that I did with their spoons last year and we struggled to find a half-decent campsite along this stretch of the lot and we ended up camping in amongst all these rocks and finding a couple of spots where we could Bibby and drag our canoes in and the place where we could have a fire but we had a comfy time and the view was absolutely fantastic but had we been a bit rigid about oh well we don't normally camp in a spot like that we wouldn't have picked it so be pragmatic that's another thing that I've learned of doing lots of trips is just be pragmatic about applying the basics okay have a good repertoire of food yeah if you can cook well in camp you'll be the favorite person in camp trust me yeah particularly on trips when flavors are important so be good with your fire management be good with your cooking practice recipes at home practice them in the house practice them in the back garden practicing on camp with your mates and then when you do journeys you'll be yet okay I don't even need to look at the recipe and this was a situation where we had a bunch of ingredients left over and we were improvising based on what we knew and then we came up with a really nice garlic pan bread recipe which again some of you will have seen on one on my blog this is on a course where we're cooking with five dutch ovens all of which weigh about 14 kilograms you're never going to have that on a trip yeah not unless you're an absolute masochist yeah but the skills that you're developing be able to cook complicated meals like that when you're on a trip and you've got limited things so you know your Outfitters giving you one aluminium Dutch oven and a few stainless steel cooking pots you can still cook good

because you've got the core skill set and you can improvise so that's on a Miss and I be trippin Canada yeah so what yes we're using the aluminium Dutch oven with some coals on the top but we're using a stainless pot there with a lid turned upside down and some coals on top of that as well french toast made with leftover bread yeah and again cooking some good meals but again good good skills with the fire and being pragmatic knots and bind craft are really really useful they're part of your camp craft but being good with knots and being efficient with knots to set things up quickly I remember when you guys came on the space rack with us you were surprised at how quickly we set camp up because all of this stuff we've honed with quick wood quickly quick with this stuff and if you can be quick with tying guylines on and doing and hitches and getting stuff set up and setting things up in a way that's easy to take down as well yeah Mike he's gone now but otherwise I'd be taking the the pisser the the mickey out of him and he took three and a half hours to pack up from a course that he did with us last week and he's quite proud of that he's meticulous but you can't do that on trips you can't spend three-and-a-half hours every morning packing your stuff you have to be quick part of it is setting things up in a way that you can take down quickly don't forget your bushcraft oh yeah paracord and everything is great and we all use it and various other things but this kind of skill set can be useful even on expeditions as well and I'll come back to that navigation and wayfinding you can't go anywhere unless you can find your way yeah personally I do think this sits within your bush skills your bushcraft skills the ability to find your way your ability to look at foreign Maps and understand what they're telling you how are they the same as British maps how are they different from British maps how did the grid systems work how do I make my GPS work with this system etc etc etc that's all part of your skill set yeah being able to find roots while you're on the ground sometimes there's a nice low or port ours trail sign at the beginning of the portage but you're still going to find that that's only about that big on a tree and when you're going down the river trying to find that sometimes can be quite difficult but your wave your map reading skills are important your ability to find roots through in environments is important as well hiking trip in Scotland small River crossing you can develop these skills over time so that you've got the ability to cover the route that you want to you've got different options we might have got to that and it might have been too full to cross we may have then had to go a different way so you need the navigational skills to have the flexibility to change your plan on there on the ground as well also knowing when you're at the limits of your navigational skills as well as a couple of mates of mine on a on a Skeeter in Norway and preparing to leave the hut and we're going out into pretty horrible weather but because were competent with our navigation not overconfident but we were happy that we could navigate in those conditions we were happy that we had the wind behind us so it'll blow us along a bit we didn't have the wind in our face and we got to the next hut and without too much difficulty but it's time as it did feel like navigating inside a white paper bag using the natural signs as well very very useful build your natural navigation skills it's a really nice way of connecting with the environment Tristan Ghoulies works been fantastic in highlighting lots of different navitor navigation techniques but in terms of making journeys don't again basics are basics how does the Sun move every day where is it going to be in the sky at different times what does local noon mean and what does the Sun beam over my meridian mean when a shadow is going to be shortest how much does the Sun move in terms of degrees in an hour all of those sorts of things are things that you can work out at home you can work out where the sun's going to set the sun's going to rise how much daylight have you got where you're going at the latitude that you're going on your trip at the time of year you're going on your trip how much daylight have you got all of those things can be looked up before you go so you don't mess up on your trip and again how much moonlight you're going to have on your trip what does a moon tell us about direction not that we're really going to ever be navigating at night most of the time on a planned trip but again it can be good to know how much moonlight you've got and so that you can operate maybe within the hours of darkness medicinal plants this is something I have found useful from time to time on trips there are common ones that we might know from home like self heal prunella vulgaris that you'll find around the world we looked at this one on my walk this morning meadowsweet for the Penn Jillette and Maria useful source of an actual source of aspirin and then some other not so common ones that are useful medicinal eastern white cedar so if you're traveling in environments maybe have a look into what some of the most common and easily used medicinal plants are and what they're used for yeah this is an example from a trip that I did I am capsized out of the canoe there's only a small capsize it wasn't a major thing it's just one of those daft pratfalls little rockledge didn't hit a right-angle canoe went over I tried to keep hold of them my paddle which I did but in going out I scraped my thumb on either the canoe on one of the screws on the canoe or on a rock underneath in the canoe I don't know I came out the river with a lump out on my thumb it's only a bit of skin missing normally wouldn't matter but after a number of days of it being a bit wet because I'm canoeing sometimes it got wet it didn't fly out all the time a bit cracking so it was if I put a dressing on it it got a bit damp if I let it dry out it then cracked it starts to feel like it was getting a bit infected and it was certainly very sore so what I did was I sourced this which is some balsam fir and these have little blisters which if you burst them it runs clear it's medicinal in the sense that it it does have vitamin C in it but more importantly it's anti-inflammatory and it's antiseptic and I put that on my wound which did two things one is it stopped it cracking up because it gave it some

flexibility and also it helps the healing process and unfortunately you can have a look at my thumb it is still there but unfortunately I don't have a photo of a sort of day by day of it getting better but it then went from getting worse day by day to getting better I just rub some of this on morning and evening in camp and that helped very nicely so these things can be useful I wouldn't have known that if I just being a canoe er with a first-aid kit that didn't have the right things in it so knowledge of trees and plants I think is key we can all identify birch trees if we know silver birch here we can probably identify a paper birch elsewhere has very very similar properties we can light fires with it etc it's great but learning to identify a balsam fir which that is might take a little bit more practice but if you take the effort you get the rewards and balsam firs have little little suckers like attachments to this to the twig they've got very white stomata bands underneath they've got a little notch at the top and you can learn to recognize and then they have those blisters this is a plankton find in Scotland but you also find it right around the northern hemisphere is it bog Myrtle let me know what bog myrtles good for insect repellent yeah it is you rub it on your skin and it works okay yeah it's got these very noticeable buds and that's what the leaf looks like that's what the flower looks like there at the end that's a good one to recognize you see it far and wide this is a good one to know if you go into North America anybody know what that is can't see at the back I know it's difficult

that's the leaf poison ivy toxicodendron radicans that causes a nasty contact reaction if you come into contact with it that is on a portage trail that log is across the portage trail you wouldn't want to be touching that and it has leaves in threes and it looks a bit almost waxy around the edges and if you see that in or near camp you need to be careful because you don't to be coming to contact with it you certainly don't want to be going to the toilet anywhere near it squatting down on that would be a bad day out cutting tools of course goes without saying that one of the things that sets bushcraft apart from maybe other outdoor activities or aspects of the outdoors are I use of cutting tools and this is a range of cutting tools of one of the guys who works with me yet all of his favorite cutting tools if you like his bushcraft knife was the buck saw he made himself his axe his adds pocket knife carving knife we're not necessarily going to have all of those things on a trip

we just can't carry everything just in case now we can't take the kitchen sink mentality two to two trips and I saw a funny cartoon the other day where somebody said oh yeah I've got my bug-out back bag ready and it's this guy under this massive pack yeah and we can't take everything we might ever need under every circumstances we have to look at the type of trip we're going to do and take things that are widely applicable they're going to be useful under lots of circumstances that are going to be realistic you know so if we're going to the tropics we might take a machete or a piranha we're going to the northern forest we might take a sizable axe and we might take a a saw with us as well if we're going on a summer trip in the boreal we might take one axe between a few of us if we're going on a winter trip in the boreal we might take several axes and depends on how much work we're going to do how much fuel we need and how many days of hours of daylight we've got and we also need to learn how to use our tools safely we can do that at home yeah people ask me and which is my favorite tool to use now it's a it's the axe but I still use it as little as possible on trips because then I minimize the chances of me ever injuring myself with it I don't use it for the sake of it but learn to use your tools closer to home this is in the Lake District and and then you can start applying those skills you can you can learn them and learn to apply them precisely and then you can apply them further afield so this is a winter trip in northern Sweden or a canoe trip in Canada skills that develop closer to home and then applied efficiently overseas again winter trip in the boreal forest tree felling sectioning we need all of that for the stuff that we're doing it becomes a necessity of the trip it's something we might practice out of enjoyment as a hobby at home but when we start making trips with our skills really count and you need to rely on them they've become a necessity but it also is a necessity that you don't injure yourself while applying them you might also end up using tools that are not yours so being able to pick tools up and check whether they're safe to use and you probably can't see but the axe at the back has got horrible overstrike damage on it that half the handles gone it was the head was loose the wedge wasn't in it properly I wouldn't want to be swinging that axe around it's not safe and but you will find things like that in sheds in huts around the world so understanding the limitations of tools as well as important you shouldn't baton with amaura so I keep being told that's why I didn't break that once a student broke that one that's a standard Mora clipper they do break occasionally when your baton with them which is fine if you're in the woods close to home you know they're kind of almost disposable I don't like thinking of things as disposable we like to keep things and but they do you know if knives are not strong enough they will break and and it happens a few percentage of them maybe break when you're doing things with them they're not really designed to do so if you're going to do those things or there's a chance you're going to do those things on trips when you can't replace your tools if you break them choose something that's stronger yeah make an informed choice about what is the most appropriate tool to take is it the biggest thickest strongest indestructible one at the top or is it something a bit further down which is still stronger than the basic knife but is light enough that it is justified in your kit because weight is always a consideration as well get trusted tools that you know that are going to work I can see how well use they are yet they're beyond lots and lots and lots of trips

you come to trust certain tools in certain environments well just be realistic don't be romantic preventing degradation so tools again you ain't you're not going to have your two hundred eight hundred twelve hundred six thousand eight thousand nagura stone water stones everything with you when you go your different grades of stropping paste different stops grinding wheel polishing set you're not going to have all of that on the trip so learn how to sharpen stuff so it's fine doing that at home it's fine having a shed tricked out with all the different water stones polishing paste Smurf poo all that stuff yeah got nothing against that stuff but on a trip it doesn't make sense you've got to carry as little as possible and do the most with it as possible so learn how to do that learn how to sharpen all of your tools with a pocket stone learn how to sharpen your knife on an axe stone learn how to sharpen your axe with a dc4 or whatever or a double or a Spyderco double stuff and and be good at it make sure you look after your kids on trips get into good routines yeah this is another thing get this sections called preventing degradation what happens on trips over time is you degrade and your kit degrades unless you get into good admin routine so airing kit off hanging it up even if it's under your tarp while you're having your breakfast yeah hygiene yeah it's important looking after yourself after a week you need to cut your nails maybe you want to have a shave you certainly want to wash your hair all of those sorts of things you need to do otherwise you start to degrade you get sores you get chafing you get itchy scalps and infestations and infected toenails and all sorts of things which is not good basic hygiene is important organizing your kit before you go knowing where everything is making sure it's all in good order before you leave it is part of your skill set I don't focus a lot on kit but particularly if you're doing a winter ski tour in Norway in the winter I said winter twice they're winter winter winter and

you need to be organized you need to make sure everything works yeah and then one of the things for me that I think is really valuable about doing trips particularly trips with clients is developing techniques and knowledge in context and what I mean by that I give you some examples so on amis and IB canoe trip where you're canoeing through a beautiful environment like this of course you're working on the journeying skills you're working on you're paddling you're getting better at your paddling your your fire lighting is becoming more efficient because you're having to do it in a short space of time in the morning and the evenings you're polarizing skills are getting better you're packing and unpacking skills are getting better your routine gets better and but we can also learn other things while we're there we can if we're interested in bushcraft which everyone here seems to be here at the bushcraft show then we can also work on other things it's a little bit lowdown it's a little bit cropped there but she's very happy because she's just got her first boat remember yeah under a tarp on a rainy day in camp where we decided to stay put for that day I went into the woods and I got some boss dead standing balsam fir and made a bow drill set and then under that tarp which I don't account from of what what topic was that we got from the outfitter we made embers and these people are very happy they're learning skills in the context you can see how bedraggled Steve's looking there and but he's just got an ember too and it's just something quite special about going into the environment getting the things that you need and making the fire there and then and learning the skills in context the same as learning more about the wild foods and this is something we discussed this morning on there on the walk Gayle DeRose it's in Flour around the lake at the moment it's the one that has the slightly pungent center flower and it has the sterile big pretty white flowers around the outside and this is what the berries look like this is in Canada they have the same species there are very similar subspecies and the interesting thing is here in Europe you read a foraging book and it says that this plant is slightly toxic and you shouldn't eat it and taste disgusting and in Canada you read accounts of native use of this plant and they used to use the berries as food so it's interesting to me okay do they taste different to here do they is there something different about the plants and I've tasted that the berries here and they do taste quite unpleasant but most of the unpleasant taste is in the skin and then you read an account of First Nations using this basically by putting the berry in the mouth chewing it up a bit sucking out the the nice juicy scent a bit spitting out the skin and spitting out the PIP yeah this is what the leaf looks like it's viburnum Occulus it's a native plant here many of you might know it but if not there's plenty of it around the lake here that's what the berries look like and that's what the flat tip in the middle looks like so you don't want to be eating that it's kind of like the consistency of the seeds you're getting red peppers or green peppers capsicum and but it's bigger you can see my finger there for scale so basically I had I tried this eating the berries chewing them sucking the juice spitting out the the skins and and the seeds and it was quite tasty you don't get the bitter aftertaste that you get if you chew the skins up too much and I didn't have an upset stomach so that was quite an interesting little experiment that I did in context in that environment so you can expand your own knowledge also you get exposure to other cultures and environments when you travel and again within the context of bushcraft if you look for these things you'll find them so here we are on a trip in Canada and up on artery lake before we're heading down the blood vein River and it's a really nationally significant rock art site there where there is all this red ochre rock art that's been painted and a lot of it done with sturgeon oil and ochre mixed together and there are Buffalo on there there are ashaming there's this water serpent that flicks their canoe over and it's really quite fantastic to go and look at and particularly when you realize that there were no Buffalo within a hundred kilometers of that lake even when they were Buffalo roaming on the plains in Manitoba and you can also see similar to how some of the rock art is in Africa where they've drawn the feet and almost like this is the print looks like so it's interesting to get exposure to different cultures via your journeying you get to camp in some wonderful places that was a view across the islands on Brunswick Lake on our miss an IB trip last year and Brunswick Lake was one of the most significant there was the site of one of the most significant Hudson's Bay trading posts in that area that was down the other end of the lake but just an absolute wonderful place visually aesthetically wonderful sunsets but also a real sense of history there in terms of what went on with the fur trade wonderful spots that you can get to when you're journeying this is double rapids on the French River not a particularly remote place but a beautiful place nonetheless that you have to you have to canoe to get there Africa again some real opportunities for learning indigenous skills there from people still just about hand rail with the Hadza

cooking skills that I'd never seen before with Masai guys there and very interesting and things that you can bring back and bring into your own bushcraft practice when you travel and see these things and there's a something really special about putting your head down in the camp when you know that it was a thoroughfare for voyagers and explorers and expeditions and people proselytizing and religious missionaries and just the sense of a history on some of these routes is quite fantastic and to be sort of part of that culture on a canoe trip for some for example as the Sun Goes Down you think well people camped here hundreds of years ago when this was the main means of transport it's quite special also of course nature one of the reasons a lot of us are interested in bushcraft is to get closer to nature to have a better relationship with nature a closer relationship to nature that was certainly one of the things that attracted me to bushcraft I was already making journeys I was backpacking but I had a stove and everything I needed and I was almost in a little bubble where I wasn't interacting with the environment at all I certainly wasn't collecting wild foods I certainly wasn't and using medicinal plants I wasn't even particularly good at fire lighting I didn't know that the properties of lots of different woods for feather sticks offer and for roasting or what-have-you and I didn't pay as much attention to what the wildlife was doing but once you start getting into the different avenues of bushcraft you start noticing a lot more and you have a lot more of an intimate relationship with the environment you're traveling through so here you can't really see the scale but it's an area of flattened grass and vegetation where a moose has been sitting down again just by the side of the river on a canoe trip near where where you were camped on one of our trips in Canada you see amazing wildlife and this large owl on the on the miss and I bee that actually followed us for quite a while and kept perching up and watching us and then flying down the river a bit more just special special experiences that you get by being in that environments where there aren't many other people and then you also see tracks even if you don't see the animal and here some not particularly big bear tracks just down the edge of the river on that same miss an IV trip so a couple of case studies to finish off with very very quickly and I will rush through these yeah so hiking trip in northern Sweden so not a winter trip late summer trip and there isn't always a lot of autumn there so this is the forest kind of forest area were hiking this is within the Arctic Circle and set early September beginning of the moose hunting season which is why you'll see that we've got some orange on it lots of stalk as they might call it on their map a lot of boogie a lot of boggy ground in between the forest lakes rivers quite wet but really interesting to explore no real trails around a couple of snow machine trails that get used in the winter but no real summer hiking trails really good place to just you can just rock up you can set up your camp and we found some really nice camping spots we were camping we were going quite simply tarps we had a group top with a small group top of the fire there were three of us but we were finding right you know it's just it was like being a kid again this trip it was fantastic and we were doing a circular route and we didn't have a huge amount of time pressure and we were just explore in the woods great foraging at that time of year so we were collecting a lot of blueberries tons of those as well as Ling on and what we would call cow berries and if you don't know have a look on the underside of the leaves little pause there can help you positively identify them horse's hoof fungus so we made we made tinder and we just had a great time and then we camped up on this this area and it was getting cold a day by day we camped up by this lake it was quite cold one of the ways you can see it's quite cold as the smoke isn't really going up that's going up and then going sideways that's often a sign that the weather's getting colder and then next morning I woke up was that why is that on my face it was snow drifting just flutter flurrying underneath the side of my top but again it didn't faze us yeah our tart skills are good our fire skills are good we've got the right clothes our admin is good we didn't like it degrade in the wet rain and bog that we've been traversing for previous days and we were happy and we had fun and we finished by clambering taking a shortcut back over the top of a mountain and that's the top of the hill it's only was only about 800 meters but we've all done plenty stuff in Scotland in the winter as well and all of their skills come together to make something that would be an ordeal for some people be a fun adventure for us and I think that's what it's about all of those skills coming together not necessarily hardcore you know I'm not living out there in my underpants using bow drill but we're using the skills as we need them as we travel through that environment second case study and this is the last one three minutes left and into Canada into the beginning of the blood vein on one of the blood vein trips that we did things didn't quite go to plan these are the stories that people always like when things don't go to plan so it's about a 40-minute float plane in float plane fly and then you land on a lake and you take your canoe off and you take your gear off and there were six of us and rules are in Canada now that you can only put one boat on the outside of one of these planes and you just put two so basically we need there was six of us three boats we needed three flights in and the company that we were using has three planes but it had been raining a lot in previous days and there and the day before we flew out the floatplane company had been playing catch-up getting people out two fishing lodges getting gold prospectors out to where they needed to be etcetera etc and the night before we were due to fly one of the planes had broken down so they only had two planes good to go the next morning so one of the planes have to fly twice so we had to flight where two planes go in and then one had to go back and get the rest of the people the rest of the gear now some of these pilots can be quite stropping particularly the older ones and the plan as far as we were concerned was two guys in each plane with one boat and their own personal gear and some of the group kit well what ended up happening was the first two planes that went out five hours went out and some of the gear and one guy which is ray Goodwin got left back on the dock for the final flight then what happened was this yep it just the weather closed in it was murky those planes don't have sophisticated navigation systems they wouldn't fly in that low cloud and rain so we were out there and without a lot of the group kits one of the guys didn't have his personal kit apart from his day pack and we had no way of getting out and Ray had no way of getting in so we just had to sit tight and most of the kitchen equipment was with ray we had the fresh meat some of the other fresh food was with ray and so it messed all of our menu plans up right from day one as well one of the guys didn't have a tent or a sleeping bag this is this could be a scenario on a course couldn't it a test so one of the guys had a little personal tab oh yeah because the group tarp was with the kitchen kit and so we made this like windbreak with the canoes we put the little personal tarp up we made a fire because the fire skills are there and and we got comfy and plenty of birchbark easy to light the fires and we had a great old time what we also needed to do was we had to cook our dinner we had steaks but we had no frying pans or cooking pots or anything so we made just just apply your bushcraft okay so make a little griddle going back to the cordage point I said we'd come back to it yep roots spruce roots strip them off split them down

great bindings so usually not again clove hitches etcetera etcetera it's not difficult to make these things if you know how ya make a really good one roast the bait roast the steaks cook the steaks one one evening next morning bacon leave and made a little stool for himself to sit on we had that much time we were comfortable we all chipped in with with clothing so the guys stayed warm overnight they didn't have a sleeping bag and he stayed in a small two-man tent with one of the other guys and they were nice and cozy so we improvised yet we had to improvise a little bit with the water purification we had to improvise with the cooking and then we did a two-week trip because ray managed to come in the next morning there he is looking very dapper with his trousers rolled up taking his boat off we've got the rest of the gear and then we did a two-week trip and you know what the guy said the best part of the trip was that first day when we had to improvise yeah so it's it's one of those things that it sticks in people's memories and it's nice be able to apply your skills in a positive way even when you are in a slightly difficult situation so I would I put this on my talk last year make journeys make voyages attempt them there's nothing else well I think there are other things but I think they are a great thing to do and they're a great way for you to apply your bushcraft skills and be pragmatic learn as much as you can close to home step up what you want to do you don't how all have to do journeys but if you get the opportunity to you really will learn a lot and it's a fantastic way of making your bushcraft skills make sense and putting them into context and then you can bring what you learned back and share them with other people because at the end of the day what a lot of all of this is about and why we're all here is sharing the knowledge showing the skills I've tried to share some of what I've learned with plenty of trips over the years there hopefully some of that made sense to you and thank you very much for listening I appreciate it I've gone over time I have a few minutes for questions apparently no we what we did was we just got some spare layers and made like a sleeping mat for him and then we got a couple of fleeces and things that he kept most of his plays on put a couple of things over the top of him and he was quite comfy but he went in one of the guys had a small two-man tent as his personal tent and that was big enough for the extra guy to get in but it was a small enough space of it was quite cozy yeah thank you very much Cheers

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