Primitive and modern outdoor skills

status update

2013-09-23

What's up with us.

Jess is out of the woods and is more than just alive, she's quite healthy. It turns out she ate exceedingly well, though was pretty cold on her project. I'll let her fill in the details.

I went to Rabbitstick and long-story short ended up in Washington with Jess instead (oh DARN! :P). Sorry to anyone who expected to see me at Rabbitstick, it was pretty last minute (As in negative 12 hours). I stayed with Jess in Washington for 5 days mostly processing wild foods that are surprisingly abundant this time of year and helping out at a nearby seed farm. It was pretty awesome. We had a meal that was (excepting salt and pepper) entirely from the local area, and where Jess at minimum saw each thing as it was processed. Most of it she picked or gathered. Such good food!

I'm currently in the Tahoe area in Truckee for a second swiftwater course (SRT-A). The temperatures are dropping below freezing sometimes in Truckee, but closer to 65-70's daytime. This class is going to be interesting. It's basically "now you know some ropes and swiftwater lets do crazy stuff". I'm excited. The first day is tomorrow. I've got a (I really hope) good drysuit, and since I'm getting all this training I got myself a rescue lifejacket 'cause it seemed silly not to have one. After the swiftwater training I'll be heading up to meet up with Jess for real this time at Saskatoon Circle (the primitive skills gathering). That's a week long, then we'll probably stay a few more days to get organized and then get down to the bay area to swap things around in the storage unit (maybe move it to another place) visit folks and then go to a couple of weddings.

Jess and I are currently researching wall-tents. I just spent all evening on that. Google wins it turns out on this front. I looked at 12 different companies or so and they were basically descending in awesomeness as I went down the links pages. If anyone is curious, the winner so far seems to be Davis, who makes some sweet wall-tents. We'll see how it all pans out though, we may go used. No doubt there will be some wall-tent posts in this blogs future.

I still need to research portable (but not backpacking) wood stoves. 3 dog is on the list already. There's another someone suggested as well but I forget the name.

Jess and I are toying with the idea of holing up for the winter somewhere and doing a bit more of a homesteading'ish thing in terms of being in one place. That will make things like processing animals and putting up food a lot simpler than I've been dealing with and we expect it to be cheaper as well. Jess has a lot to teach me and it'd be interesting to test out a slightly different lifestyle. I've finally got hunter's ed and just got some broadheads, so we could make a go of seeing how much we could get off the land. It's a bit late in the season to start really trying to put up food but oh well. We're thinking somewhere not super cold since we haven't been preparing all summer. If anyone has places that might work and not cost much let me know. We have one possibility so far, we'll see.

Just hanging out with everyone up in Washington I got a much better idea of how one would actually live off the land. Combined with what I've been doing the whole thing is making more and more sense. The picture doesn't look quite like I imagined, but I will have to think more before I can describe how.