Newspaper article from the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about Thomas J. Elpel and Outdoor Wilderness Living School, LLC teaching kids outdoor skills. Video of junior high kids camping in the woods
— Read on www.hollowtop.com/Articles/Outdoor_Classroom.htm
Blog
Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say…..
Worth a read! Perhaps getting back into nature and wildcrafting new hand skills is in order? 🐾
NEWS Maps
Most news today gets pretty old after a bit. It’s usually the same stuff – especially with politics – and you get to the point where you just shut it all out after a while. Or does your mind just go numb with the repetitious nature of the items being reported? It’s too bad really as the NEWS (that which informs us from the North, East, West, & South) is really what our awareness should be focused upon for it’s what comes to us from our immediate surrounding environment. And that should never be boring, or perceived as so repetitious that we stop paying attention to it! That NEWS is really what defines our sense of place – the region we tend to call HOME – and ultimately our understanding of ourselves too! The Irish call it “crack,” as good crack (“Craic”) is all the gossip…
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Elderberry Medicine – Urban Moonshine
A great bit of Wild Nature Rx to get one through the season! Check the link out! 🐾
ReWilding
I picked up a copy of Nick Baker’s book ReWild: The Art of Returning to Nature the other day. One of the first inspiring thoughts coming from reading it centered around the original concept of the term which has to do with the conservation and preservation work needed to secure greater access and availability to the wilderness for keystone species of wild mammals. Mostly by connecting already set aside and protected natural areas, creating key corridors, thus opening up essential linkages allowing these creatures to follow natural instincts relating to health, survival, and species continuity.
The picture presented was developed out of a recognition that nature and human culture has drifted apart in alarmingly diverse ways to a point where humans have created a Noah’s Ark philosophy toward species conservation and preservation; where the zoo is the sad representation of such convoluted thinking. Cages and confinement, separation, isolation, and estrangement…
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Winter Tracking II- Gait Studies- Why and How
What are Gait Studies? Gait refers to the movement pattern the animal is using and the corresponding gait pattern is left for trackers to interpret. In human terms, walk, jog, run, sprint, sit, stand, kneel, etc, etc. Think of an action an animal can take and where its feet need to go, in what order, in order to do that movement. The pattern of tracks left behind is what we read to determine what the animal was doing.
Gait studies often intimidate our students into glazed eyes and forlorn stares reminiscent of my 10th grade math classes… We start throwing out weird tracker jargon and it starts to feel very conceptual and foreign. So I want to focus on a couple things, what can you learn to interpret if you put the time in to understanding gaits and some ways of going about learning them in the first place. The winter is an obvious time for this because we get to see strings and sets of tracks all over the place we never get to witness in the summer!
Why Study Gaits…
A Winter Walk
Blue Revolutions & Wildness for the New Year!
It was a fitting way to start the New Year.
With temperatures ranging from a high of 6 degrees Fahrenheit (F) to a low of -6 F, and wind chill temperatures down to -26 F, it was certainly a wintery day in keeping with Thoreau’s wintery reflection that “the wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact”, and “that a cold and searching wind drives away all contagion.”[1] And so, with those musings in mind, I set out for a day of tracking, happy to put the contagion of 2017 behind me, while looking forward to the New Year with an eye (I) toward purification becoming more inner fact.
An intimation of suggestive possibility for the New Year’s resolve came to me as my wife and I drove up to Maine the day before to spend time with our closest…
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