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Wolf Camp and the Wolf College

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Sulstainable Living & Self-Sufficiency

Full-Time Semester Apprenticeship with the Wolf College

The Full-Time Semester of Sustainable Living & Self-Sufficiency is a Permaculture Apprenticeship with an ethic of plant conservation, and may be repeated for an additional semester to earn an Ethnobotanist Certification. No prerequisite. Special Offering: This full-time apprenticeship is offered at a part-time price due to the significant amount of on-site work at Blue Skye Farm. Apply Now for Fall Semester starting September 15, 2012 and running through January 31, 2013. Spring Semester of 2013 runs February 1 - June 15th.

• 5 monthly Apprenticeship Field Trips per semester running from 9-5 on Saturdays;
• 2 monthly Wolf Journey Classes per semester running on weekdays evenings in the location nearest your home, plus optional complimentary attendance/assistance at 30 additional Wolf Journey classes running earlier in the day and at locations further away from your location if space is available;
• Feedback from your instructors Kim & Chris Chisholm after every field exercise you complete as you procede through Book II of the Wolf Journey Earth Conservation Course - Trail of the Traditional Herbalist; expected progress is one field exercise per week, or a minimum of 20 chapter lessons per semester, although you may do as many as one per day if desired;
• 1 Mentoring Visit from Chris & Kim to your personal Study Site;
• 4 Study Days normally taking place on Sundays at the Wolf Campus in Puyallup;
• 2 Sunday Afternoon Sustainable Homes & Gardens Workshops with Permaculture Potluck taking place at the Wolf Campus in Puyallup and other areas of the state;
• 2 Saturday Workshops taking place in the mid-south Puget Sound area, with additional optional Saturday Workshops charged at just $25 each;
• $600 off any 1 of our scheduled Training Camps per semester. Travel to-from the course site and nights requiring indoor lodging also extra. Additional training camps charged at a discount from the listed price. If you cannot attend one of the 2 scheduled training camps taking place during your semester of study (or if one is canceled due to weather, etc.) then you may substitute another during the semester or summer immediately following your semester.
• Optional Ethnobotanist Certification evaluation upon graduation which requires a $200 fee for contracted evaluators.

 



Artwork by Wolf Journey alumna Joanna Colbert, depicting mutual friends working with herbs in her kitchen on Lummi Island.

Program Mission & Participants

The mission of this Ethno-Botany Apprenticeship is that you become an herbalist versed in plant craft. Ethnobotany means that 1) we understand the relationships between plants and humans, including how plants are incorporated into our lives, as well as how humans are dependent on plant ecosytems; 2) when we harvest a plant, we honor all of its gifts by preserving herbs to retain the most medicinal and nutritional value, for example through artisanry skills; and 3) we caretake land, whether it be potted plants on our balcony, or a large farming enterprise, to the benefit of all creatures.

This Part-Time Apprenticeship Semester is designed for aspiring naturalists, zoologists, artisans and trackers learn to further their understanding of the animal world, especially with 1) working adults who only have evenings and weekends available to study, and 2) full-time high-school and college students. No matter your previous experience, you will be expected to fully participate in every possible training opportunity to push your skills to a higher level of excellence, although your own health will be the priority, and we hope that each participant becomes a person to whom anyone could turn for learning about tracking and wildlife in general.

No prerequisite, but see our application page for suggested preparation. To further your herbal skills even further, we recommend that you also check out our Summer Ethnobotany & Herbalist Instructor Apprenticeship for a follow-up program.



Instructor Chris Chisholm gathering cattails at the workshop last winter.

Thomas Elpel's Botany in a Day is the best national overview of ethnobotany, and it is one of the required texts for this Ethno-Botany Apprenticeship. Books and travel are the only expenses associated with this program not covered by your tuition.

 

Program Instructors, Benefits & Certification Options

Program Instructors: Kim & Chris Chisholm will be your mentors through this experience, with assistance from Seasonal Faculty.

Benefits of the Program: Your transformation into an excellent tracking instructor is the greatest of benefits, but for every semester you complete, you will receive $250 off additional apprenticeship semesters, and $500 off your choice of Summer Teaching Apprenticeships. Training in each Ethno-Botany semester includes:

• 5 monthly Apprenticeship Field Trips per semester running from 9-5 on Saturdays;
• 2 monthly Wolf Journey Classes per semester running on weekdays evenings in the location nearest your home, plus optional complimentary attendance/assistance at 30 additional Wolf Journey classes running earlier in the day and at locations further away from your location if space is available;
• Feedback from your instructors Kim & Chris Chisholm after every field exercise you complete as you procede through Book II of the Wolf Journey Earth Conservation Course - Trail of the Traditional Herbalist; expected progress is one field exercise per week, or a minimum of 20 chapter lessons per semester, although you may do as many as one per day if desired;
• 1 Mentoring Visit from Chris & Kim to your personal Study Site;
• 4 Study Days normally taking place on Sundays at the Wolf Campus in Puyallup;
• 2 Sunday Afternoon Sustainable Homes & Gardens Workshops with Permaculture Potluck taking place at the Wolf Campus in Puyallup and other areas of the state;
• 2 Saturday Workshops taking place in the mid-south Puget Sound area, with additional optional Saturday Workshops charged at just $25 each;
• $600 off any 1 of our scheduled Training Camps per semester. Travel to-from the course site and nights requiring indoor lodging also extra. Additional training camps charged at a discount from the listed price. If you cannot attend one of the 2 scheduled training camps taking place during your semester of study (or if one is canceled due to weather, etc.) then you may substitute another during the semester or summer immediately following your semester.
• Optional Ethnobotanist Certification evaluation upon graduation which requires a $200 fee for contracted evaluators.

In addition, those students who begin to take responsibility for assisting Wolf Journey classes and workshops may be hired to lead those courses in the future. By the end of two semesters, we hope you will fully embody your title of Certified Ethnobotanist.

Click here for a complete description of all our Botany & Herbology Certification options.



Artwork by Wolf Journey alumna Joanna Colbert.


2010 Apprentice Rachel Edwards with Yarrow.

Nikki sporting the cedar bark skirt and had, plus tanned dear and bear hide shirts she made during her 2 year survival trek in the Pacific Coast wilderness.

This completed thatched hut we made in 2005 is a good example of ethnoecological use of grasses.

This willow-frame wigwam in process of being constructed is another good example of how ethnoecologists utilize the natural resources around them to meet their basic needs.

Program Goals & Skills

Specialty Skills Learned
• Naturalist Sketching & Journaling (using sit spots, drawing instruction, quick journaling strategies)
• Backpacking & Camping
• Artisanry Craftwork
• Writing & Journaling; Photography & Recording; Sketching & Drawing

Knowledge Acquired
• Wildlife Study (in-the-field biology classes, sit-spot sensory awareness exercises, etc)
• 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)
• Time Outdoors (especially growing up playing in the woods, deserts, or beaches around your home; harvesting fruits and vegetables, fish and animals both domestic and wild, as a youth; plus taking adventures on the mountains, prairies, and waterways of this beautiful earth as a young adult)
• Political Environmentalism (left and right wing strategies, legislative and artistic strategies)

• Health & Organizational Strategies (western lineal and medicine wheel use for self, lessons, projects)
• Medicinal Herb Collection & Preservation (drawing from knowledge of area herbalists)
• Preventative Health & Herbal Spas (from daily health routines, to our special spa treatments)
• Organic & Biodynamic Gardening
• Farm Animal Care & Cultivation
• Wild Edible Foraging & Preparation (Herbs, Nuts, Roots, Flowers, Fruits, Insects)
• Natural Cooking & Food Storage (pit cook, clay oven, ash cakes, smoking, jerkying, pemmican)
• Various Basketry Projects (one of our specialties), woodwork, and other pioneer crafts.
Natural Selection Forestry (chopping and chainsawing, wood splitting and moving)
• Land Mapping & Water Navigation (orienteering with and without modern aids)
• Pioneer Style Shelters, plus Emergency Shelter & Primitive Shelter.
• Clay Harvesting, Molding & Firing.
• Canoeing, Sailing and Kayaking.
• Parfleching (carrying cases, drum making).
• Bent cedar boxes and other important bioregional crafts.

Additional Earth Skills Learned:
• Wet Fire Maintenance & Fire by Friction
• Natural Water Purification (seeps, filters, rock boiling, and locating natural springs)
• 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)

The mission of this semester apprenticeship is for you to develop a self-sufficient lifestyle within modern society. For example, you will find that the plant world may become your conduit for health and healing. Whether you simply process herbs for personal and family use, or if you someday open an herbal dispensary or healing practice, we hope that caretaking wild herbs and cultivating garden plants will become a lifestyle for all graduates.

At its core, this program offers you space to become self-sufficient through experience. Self-directed cultivation of gardens and hands-on caretaking of wild-land flora will be supplemented by class lectures and our library resources. And in the end, we hope that your development of a personal medicine wheel of health, guided by permaculture principles, the values of earth skills, and your own spiritual study, we hope that each participant becomes a person to whom anyone could turn for advice in the healing arts.

Herbal Aspect:

To us, being an herbalist means being the person in a community to whom everyone can come for guidance as well as healing. To heal means preventing ailments, so an herbalist must know what tonics should be included in community meals. And to treat ailments, an herbalist must know how to deal with crises, build fire to heat water and lift spirits, then apply herbs and other remedies to cure a situation. The herbalist also makes sure that the community is caretaking its land in the most sustainable way possible, and s/he maintains a vision of peace for community action.

To realize these ideals, you will need to begin to practice an herbalist's lifestyle, based on the rhythms of your micro-climate and bio-region, as well as on the rhythms of the individuals around you. You will help develop a wall-size community calendar to document the best times to cultivate and harvest, while also developing your own personal medicine wheel of health. You will also help us expand our farm and forest gardens as we walk this land with attitude of caretakers.

The core elements of your program include Wolf Journey field exercises which guide you to become an herbalist in a broad sense of the word, while the classes with Linda Quintana (tentative depending on dates) and other herbalists show you a vision for where your skills could bring you. Plus, the week-long camps with Chris, Carol and Nikki (see staff page) are designed to push your skills to the next level. Most everyone agrees in retrospect that these camp experiences become the richest in every participant's memory, and the most difficult to convey in words, so we won't try to explain it now. They simply have to be experienced to understand.

We will also use resources by Susun Weed, Tom Elpel, Pojar & McKinnon, Paul S. Auerbach, Hillary Stewart, Michael Moore, various Permaculture authors and the Peterson's Field Guide series among many other sources as our references. You will graduate from the program once you have completed a minimum required amount of coursework which is part of the above activities.

No matter your previous experience, you will be expected to fully participate in every possible training opportunity to push your skills to a higher level of excellence, although your own health will be the priority. The goal is to always develop ourselves into better and healthier herbalists.

2007 was the pilot year for the this program, and we ran the program from March 1st - July 1st, with one full-time and two part-time students, plus two staff members who participated in Linda Quintana's every-other-week classes on her herb farm near Bellingham. The classes were wonderful beyond description, as anyone who has experienced Linda will tell you. For us, it is her expertise, kind hospitality, and authentic background which most astounds us. From being raised on an original homestead hours from Fairbanks, Alaska, to sensitively co-creating her family, home and herb farm carved from scratch out of the northwest rainforest, to opening an herbal dispensary in downtown Bellingham where everyone runs as soon as we get sick, Linda's experience cannot be topped in our view.

It is an honor to help Linda in her gardens. Linda wildcrafts with the wisdom of a caretaker, brings her herbs directly to her store named Wonderland Teas & Herbs, 1305 Railroad Ave. in Bellingham, WA, phone 360-733-0517, dispenses them at incredibly fair prices, and counsels all who enter with decades of experience. Mostly, it is an absolute joy being around Linda, and every moment is a lovely learning experience, now matter if we are helping her clean her storage room, picking weeds, or processing herbs for the store.

We also enjoyed every-other-week classes with seaweed-god Ryan Drum on the beautiful shores of Puget Sound. With the foundation Ryan laid for us, we'll will be taking over the seashore classes with support from Nikki, who spent two years subsisting off the shores of the northwest coast as part of her primitive living experience. Nikki's book on the experience is currently being reviewed by a publisher, but you can read this Written Message from Nikki to get a sense of the unprecedented work she did in the field, for which additional words just can't do her justice. Suffice it to say that the backcountry healing she did without hope of getting to a doctor (just like back in the day), basketry, and other crafts which you will learn from her, are of museum quality. Perhaps we'll get some photos to add to the site here which can demonstrate what we're talking about.




Artwork by Wolf Journey alumna Joanna Colbert, depicting Forest Flor Recovery Plant Nursery proprietor Wanda Cuccinatta.

 

 



Artwork copyrighted and used with permission from Wolf Journey alumna Joanna Colbert.


Workshop participants gathering cattail down last winter.

Fall Semester 2012 Schedule

(bold indicates all expenses included in tuition)

September 8, 2012: Apprenticeship Open House
September 15, 2012: Field Trip to Glaciated Alpine Meadows
September 16: Wolf Journey Study Day 9:00-4:00
Sept 26 - Oct 24 Wolf Journey Class Topic: Natural Navigation, Lostproofing & Orienteering
• Oct 5-7 at Fort Flagler in Nordland WA: Northwest Permaculture Convergence,
Oct 13 Saturday Workshop Series in Puyallup: Weaving Willow, Cattail & Nettles from 10-4
• Oct 14 Sunday: Barter Fair at SongCroft in Snohomish
October 20, 2012: Field Trip to Central Washington Canyonlands
16
October 21: Wolf Journey Study Day 9:00-4:00
October 28: Sustainable Homes & Gardens Workshop plus Permaculture Potluck from 1-4 p.m.
November 10, 2012: Field Trip to Coastal Sand Dunes
• November 20-25, 2012 Training Camp: Mississippi Delta & Gulf Coast Ecology in and around New Orleans, Louisiana.
Decemnber 8, 2012 Saturday Workshop at Wolf Haven, Int'l near Olympia: Mima Mound Prairie Crafts & Food from Oak, Pine & Hazel from 10-4
December 15, 2012: Field Trip to UW Burke Museum & Horticultural Center
December 16, 2012: Wolf Journey Study Day 9:00-4:00
• December 26-31, 2012 Training Camp: Winter with the Wolves in Clam Lake, Wisconsin.
Wolf Journey January 9 - February 12 Class Topic: Wilderness Survival including the Top 10 Wild Edible Foods
January 13: Wolf Journey Study Day 9:00-4:00
January 19, 2013: Individual Evaluations & Graduation Ceremonies
January 20: Sustainable Homes & Gardens Workshop plus Permaculture Potluck from 1-4 p.m.


Workshop participant Darkfeather Ancheta blowing coal into flame after lighting a coal by friction.

Megan collecting seeds from plants on the prairie at Wolf Haven, Int'l.

Spring Semester 2012 Schedule

Click for Visual Calendar of January 2012
Third Saturday in January: Open House Dinner for Spring Semester Apprentices from 5:00-7:00. Join us for Fall Semester Apprentice Graduation Celebrations from 7:00-9:00. Schedule a date for a personal tour of your study site this semester with Chris & Kim.
Middle of January: Start your blog and prepare Wolf Journey notes (goals, earth skills assessment, etc.), complete at lease two more Wolf Journey field exercises, and attend at least one Wolf Journey Class near you.
Second to the Last Sunday of January: Attend afternoon Permaculture Home & Garden Workshop or Wolf Trackers Training in Puyallup with extra choice of studying resident winter songbirds birds.

Click for Visual Calendar of February 2012
First Saturday of February: Attend Saturday Earth Lodge & Survival Shelters Workshop at on the Tulalip Reservation with option of receiving extra assignments to study taxidermy and instrument making.
First Sunday in February: Wolf Campus Study Day.
Middle of February: Attend at least one Wolf Journey Class near you and complete at least four more Wolf Journey field exercises.
Second Saturday in February:
Apprentice Field Trip to visit Snohomish County Permaculture & Tracking Sites.
Second Sunday of February: Attend afternoon Permaculture Home & Garden Workshop or Wolf Trackers Training in Puyallup with extra choice of studying hawks, owls and other raptor.
Presidents Week: First oppertunity to attend the one Training Camp included in your semester, with vanpool available for an extra fee to the Mojave Desert in California.

Click for Visual Calendar of March 2012
First Saturday of March: Attend Saturday Herbal First Aid Workshop at in Puyallup with option of receiving extra assignments to study Domestic Animal First Aid.
First Sunday in March: Wolf Campus Study Day.
Middle of March: Attend at least one Wolf Journey Class near you and complete at least four more Wolf Journey field exercises.
Second Saturday in March:
Apprentice Field Trip to Washington Coastal Sand Dunes.
Second Sunday of March: Attend afternoon Permaculture Home & Garden Workshop or Wolf Trackers Training in Puyallup with optional emphasis on farm animals.
Washington Colleges Spring Break Week: Second oppertunity to attend the one Training Camp included in your semester, with complimentary vanpooling to the Central Washington Sagebrush Steppe.

Click for Visual Calendar of April 2012
First Sunday in April: Wolf Campus Study Day.
First Saturday of April:
Attend Saturday Seaweeds & Shellfish Workshop at Deception Pass State Park - Cornet Bay.
Middle of April: Attend at least one Wolf Journey Class near you and complete at least four more Wolf Journey field exercises.
Third Sunday of April: Attend afternoon Permaculture Home & Garden Workshop or Wolf Trackers Training in Puyallup with optional emphasis on designing wildlife into the landscape.
Third Saturday in April:
Apprentice Field Trip to University of Washington Burke Museum the Fill Wetlands & Horticultural Center.
Last Sunday in April: Wolf Campus Study Day.

Click for Visual Calendar of May 2012
First Saturday of May:
Attend Saturday Birding Workshop at in Puyallup with option of receiving extra assignments to study the plant families of the Clark's Creek watershed.
Middle of May: Attend at least one Wolf Journey Class near you and complete at least five more Wolf Journey field exercises.
Third Saturday in May:
Apprentice Field Trip to Wolf Haven, Int'l Oak & Camus Prairie.
Third Sunday of May: Attend afternoon Permaculture Home & Garden Workshop or Wolf Trackers Training in Puyallup with an optional challenge to find bird nests and animal dens.

Click for Visual Calendar of June 2012
First Saturday of June:
Attend Saturday Wildlife Tracking Workshop in Puyallup with option of receiving extra assignments on the plants of the Puyallup River basin.
First Couple Weeks of June: Complete the Wolf Journey chapter you are working on.
Second Saturday in June:
Apprentice Evaluations in Puyallup from 9:00-5:00. Open House Dinner for Summer Apprentices from 5:00-7:00. Graduation Celebrations from 7:00-9:00.

Spring Semester 2013 Schedule

January 19, 2013: Open House Dinner
February 9, 2013: Trip into the Olympic Peninsula Rain Shadow
March 23, 2013: Trip to Cascadian Pine Forests
April 27, 2013: Trip to Northwest Trek & Ohop Pioneer Farm
May 18, 2013: Camas Bloom Celebration at Wolf Haven and the Mima Mounds Oak Prairie Preserves
June 15, 2013: Individual Evaluations & Graduation Ceremonies


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