Outdoor Living with Traditional Technology Full-Time Survival Skills Apprenticeship with Prerequisite The Full-Time Residential Semester of Outdoor Living with Traditional Technology is a Primitive Living Skills Apprenticeship with an ethic of wilderness conservation, and may be repeated for an additional semester to earn a Survival Specialist Certification. Prerequisite: Successful completion of another apprenticeship with us, with preference given to those in our Summertime Residential Environmental Education Apprenticeships. Apply Now for Fall Semester starting September 29, 2012 and running through January 31, 2013. Spring Semester of 2013 runs February 1 - June 15th. Click here for Tuition Information which includes all of the following: • Space on land on which to live traditionally; alone, in a small group, or in community with others in the program: • 5 monthly Apprenticeship Field Trips running from 9-5 on Saturdays with transportation provided from your primitive living site. • 15 on-site, one-on-one and group mentoring sessions with your instructor, Chris Chisholm, or a minimum of three times per month. • Optional complimentary attendance at our Evening Wolf Journey Classes and Weekend Workshops running throughout the academic year. • Graduation Rite of Passage Ceremony, option of moving into Traditional Living & Cultural Conservation, and choice of optional Survival Specialist Certification Evaluation which requires a $200 fee for contracted evaluators.

Outdoor Living Year One - Traditional Technologies

Scroll Down or Click for Specifics:

• Program Dates, Deadlines, Prerequisites;
• Goals;
• Skills Covered In This Program;
• Program Schedule & Tuition Breakdown;
• Program History;
• How to Apply for this Program;

The next start date is in 2013 and begins at the end of the summer upon completion of any of our Summertime Residential Teaching Apprenticeships. Capacity will range from 2-10 students. Non-Credit Tuition will be $2,000 if you apply by August 20, 2013. Chris Chisholm will be your mentor through this experience, with assistance from Kim and guidance from other Veteran Faculty members. Reserve your spot by applying right away

Credit: Most of our students do not wish to attain credit for their participation, but if you would like to apply for credit through an accreditaded college, we will facilitate that at no extra charge, although the college you choose will charge a fee per credit. We are also going through a multi-year accreditation process ourselves and hope to offer credit directly in the future.

Goals of the Program:

This is the ultimate way to learn earth skills in our opinion, and your participation will help make the new Wolf Camp a great place. In addition to learning in-depth earth skills at any of the courses we offer to adults plus attendance at any of the youth programs you want to assist, there is one main objective for this program: Remain living around primitive camp for a year.

When you are ready for this challenge, we will provide the “safe container” from which you will strive to live primitively, alone or in a small group. When you return, we’d love to have such a true survivor stay with Wolf Camp as long as your relationship with staff and students remains healthy and happy. We encourage you to caretake the land and primitive camp facilities for as many seasons as you choose to remain, in an effort to make Wolf Camp as healthy, abundant and beautiful a place as possible, and similarly, to make you as healthy, strong, and self-sufficient as possible.

Spend the first part of your program ensuring that shelters will be finished, meat smoked and dried, hides prepared for warmth, and all the other tasks completed in preparation for the coming season. This is a mild climate, however wet, and it does snow periodically at our elevation, so it's a great place to learn to thrive through a variety of conditions. We think we'll be able to succeed in creating a purely primitive, year-round camp where you can interact with any others in the program, but spend much of your time alone. Those who decide they don't want to live fully primitive will be encouraged to remain one of our other cooperative residential intensives.

Shed more and more of the store-bought gear we tend to depend on in order to live naturally in an earth lodge that you build. Learn to rarely let the fire die completely, multi-task to ensure that the next meal is constantly being prepared, and build natural tools to make life in the lodge more pleasant. Construct animal-proof storage sheds for your foods, improve your lodge so that your winter is dry and warm, continue gathering foods and medicines so that your health is better ensured, and when needed, guide novices who visit primitive camp.

There is no better way to allow the skills you learned in previous earth skills course sink into your bones, while at the same time, you will learn countless truths about shelter, fire, water, food, and primitive life in general. Most challenging is food. You may choose to have a ration of grains or other staples upon which you can add whatever you can forage.

But most critical will be developing your hunting and fishing abilities. Once you become skilled at harvesting such foods from the wild, and efficient at processing and storing them, life tends to become easy – lots of free time to do artwork, make baskets, and enjoy the central fire with others sharing the experience. But getting to that point is challenging, and we will work to make everyone who participates achieve success. Study herbal health cures to prepare for the absence of modern medical intervention, and pay attention to the medicine wheel to help maintain happiness and well being in general.

Program participants will be asked to volunteer additional time to give tours and assist students who visit primitive camp, as long as it doesn't get in the way too greatly with your daily tasks. You graduate from the program when you have completed 12 months in the program and reached the learning objectives you set at the start of your program. No matter your previous experience, you will be expected to fully participate in every possible opportunity to push your skills to a higher level of excellence, although your health, including rest and rejuvenation, will be the priority. The goal is to always develop ourselves into better and better primitive artisans.

Specialty Skills Learned
• Wildlife Tracking & Animal Surveying (identification, trailing, aging, interpretation)
• Birding & Bird Language (academic and song-to-alarm interpretations)
• Naturalist Sketching & Journaling (using sit spots, drawing instruction, quick journaling strategies)
• Skills of the Ancient Scout (sensory awareness, stealthy movement, camouflage, games)
• Wild Edible Foraging & Preparation (Herbs, Nuts, Roots, Flowers, Fruits, Insects)
• Primitive Cooking & Food Storage (pit cook, clay oven, ash cakes, smoking, jerkying, pemmican)
• Medicinal Herb Collection & Preservation (drawing from knowledge of area herbalists)
• Preventative Health & Herbal Spas (from daily health routines, to our special spa treatments)
• Emergency Shelter & Primitive Shelter (debris hut, lean-to, wickiup, thatch hut, earth lodge, split cedar cabins, including fire drafting strategies)
• Wet Fire Maintenance & Fire by Friction (bow drill, hand drill, fire plow, flint & steel)
• Flintknapping & Primitive Tool Making (from harvested stones, bones, wood)
• Bow & Arrow Making (survival bows, self bows, lumber bows, fletching, lashing, etc.)
• Primitive Fishing (wiering, netting, spearing, bow fishing, hand fishing, hook and line, gorges, bullfrogging)
• Natural Water Purification (seeps, filters, rock boiling, and locating natural springs)
• Bowls & Cordage Making (double and triple reverse wrap using nettle, fireweed, cedar, kelp seaweed)
• Primitive Hunting (bow and arrow, rabbit stick, at-latl, ethics, strategies, butchering)
• Hide Tanning (wet and dry scraping, brain and other high-tannin methods, hair on and off)

Experiential Skills Introduced
• Natural Selection Forestry (chopping and chainsawing, wood splitting and moving)
• Sustainable Building
• Organic & Biodynamic Gardening
• Farm Animal Care & Cultivation
• Human Tracking
• Backpacking & Camping
• Land Mapping & Water Navigation (orienteering with and without modern aids)
• Sailing, Kayaking, Canoeing, Raft Making
• Trapping
• Clay Harvesting, Molding & Firing
• Parfleching (carrying cases, drum making, sheaths and quivers with fur and tanned hide)
• Bioregional Ecosystems (old growth temperate rainforest, glaciated alpine meadow, intertidal and estuary, river and lake, wetland and bog, desert and sagebrush steppe, mixed pine and subalpine forest)
• Music and the Arts (flute making, drumming, songwriting, poetry, clay sculpting, natural paints, singing and pianos/guitars on hand)
• Rock Climbing & Alpine Mountaineering

Earth Skills Educational Skills
• Best skills to introduce to each age group (3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-18, 19-21, young adults, parents, elders)
• Most effective methods to use with each age group (didactic/wolf, questioning/coyote, imitation/ant)
• Delivery of age appropriate stories (personal, european, african, persian, chinese, other eastern, indigenous)
• Risk Management (assessing sites, planning activities, mitigating hazards)
• Emergency Rescue, Advanced First Aid, CPR (wilderness and water settings)
• Influences of Nature on Spirituality (buddhist, christian, hindi, indigenous, jewish, muslim) including opportunities of retreats and quests, sweat lodges and fasts
• Health & Organizational Strategies (western lineal and medicine wheel use for self, lessons, projects)
• Incorporating Earth Skills & Starting New Schools (examples of non-profits, partnerships, sole ventures, and communities)

Schedule

• Space on land on which to live traditionally; alone, in a small group, or in community with others in the program:
• 10 monthly Apprenticeship Field Trips running from 9-5 on Saturdays with transportation provided from your primitive living site.
• On-site, one-on-one and group mentoring sessions with your instructor, Chris Chisholm, three times per month.
• Optional attendance at our Evening Wolf Journey Classes and Weekend Workshops running throughout the academic year.
• Graduation Rite of Passage Ceremony, option of moving into the complimentary Outdoor Living Year Two – Stone Age, and choice of optional Traditional Technology Specialist Certification Evaluations to be scheduled in the fall.

Click Here for Information on Preparing & Applying Academic Year Apprenticeships

Click Here for Apprenticeship History and Where Graduates Are Now

And For More Depth Check Out These Links:

• Blog Summary for Typical Academic Year Ethno-Ecology Apprenticeship
• Blog Summary for Typical Summer Camp Season
• Wolf College WordPress Adventures Blog
• Wolf College Facebook Page
• Wolf College Opinion on Twitter

Employment: We only need instructors with experience running camps and teaching in the field of Earth Skills Education, including skills of the Naturalist, Tracker, Herbalist, Survival Scout, Primitive Artisan and Sustainable Pioneer. Apply to become an instructor through our Earth Skills Teaching Apprenticeship.