Survival Skills & Bushcraft Immersion

Blade craft is the starting point for any and all bushcraft skills. Rather than evolve biological adaptations like claws or fangs, humans made a leap and evolved technologically. These days metal blades are the primary tool of bushcraft, but it comes with a responsibility and a need for safety, care, and awareness. We break this down in a way that is fun and easy to understand.

Binding things together is necessary for many skills: shelter building, carrying items, making traps, and so much more. In this class you’ll learn what local plants make the best cordage and how to spin it into strong fiber for all your needs. We’ll cover the best knots and lashings for all the bushcraft necessities.

Fire is one of the ultimate technologies that separates humans from other animals. Over hundreds of thousands of years humans have learned to master the arts of fire. In this intro class, you’ll learn what fire is, how to start with modern tools, how to tend it to keep it going–even in the rain, and extinguish it properly. While tending the fire you will learn some rudimentary cooking techniques.

In this class we will make a bow-drill set, one of the most classic methods for making a fire by “rubbing two sticks together”. Participants will each make a set to take home with them at the end of class. We will also go over the proper form for drilling and perhaps get a fire or two before the day is over!

While arrowheads are the pretty stone tools that dazzle the eyes, there are more practical stone tools that take priority over the eye-catching ones. The “Oldowan Industry” was the first stone tool technological innovation by human hands. These tools, while crude, are still practical today for bushcraft and survival. While basic, these tools take time and practice to be able to produce at will. In our class, students will walk away not with just a few new tools, but with an understanding of how to reproduce the tools on their own.

Once upon a time in history, the bone awl was one of the most important multi-purpose tools that people would carry with them wherever they went. Bone is one of the hardest natural materials. It breaks down over time and is eaten by animals. For this reason, stone receives more credit as a household tool of our “Stone Age” ancestors. Like most natural materials, bone is shaped through abrasion: scoring, scraping, snapping, splitting and sanding. In this class we will make a bone awl and a bone needle out of deer bones.

The more technology we need, the more things we have to carry. This basket is a simple container that will hold all the things we need to carry with us in our travels. It can be made relatively quickly and last a while. You will learn how to weave it and what local materials are best.

Traps are an important tool for acquiring protein. You will learn to make a deadfall and a snare. We will also teach you the various animal tracks and sign that you may come across in the NW, as well as techniques for increasing your awareness of your environment while in the outdoors. The landscape can tell you much about the place you are in, if you know how to read it.

Shelter is one of the most important survival skills. In this class we will build survival shelters, bushcraft tarp shelters, as well as how to properly set up a camp for a survival scenario or for a basic bush camp. Learn how to stay alive on a cold night, how to reflect fire, and what the needs of a camp are.

Knowing the hazards of your environment, and how to avoid or mitigate them is important whether you are just at a bush camp or in a serious survival situation. This class covers the classic dangers we face outdoors, but also methods of water purification and avoiding infection through good hygiene.

This class will focus on several containers for holding different things. We will make bark buckets and hand felted bags.

In order to move through the landscape, we need proper footwear and good navigation skills. In this class we will make sandals from leather and then go on a navigation journey learning to use maps and compasses as well as natural ways to navigate through the forest. We will also cover the basics of how to not get lost, and what to do if you end up lost anyway.

Peter Michael Bauer is the founder and executive director of Rewild Portland. He has been a practitioner and teacher of bushcraft and survival for over 25 years. His first merit badge in the Boy Scouts was basketry. From there he went on to receive his Eagle Scout rank. He has traveled the country attending Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School, Wilderness Awareness School, Rabbitstick Rendezvous, Echoes in Time, Wintercount, Lynx Vilden’s Stone Age immersion program, Boulder Outdoor Survival School and has served as a board member on the Columbia Basin Basketry Guild.

He was known during the 2000’s under the moniker “Urban Scout” for his clownish, avant-garde performance art in which he wandered the streets of Portland lighting cigarettes with a bow-drill while dressed in a loincloth, and giving street corner lectures on the tongue and cheek concept of “preemptive post-apocalyptic anarcho-neo-paleoism.” Since those days he has earned professional credibility as an influential educator and leader through his classes, speaking engagements, community organizing, and writing. He is the host of The Rewilding Podcast.