Tristan Gooley, natural navigator and author, returns to the Paul Kirtley Podcast for a conversation centred on on becoming more attuned to the clues and signs surrounding you in nature, and finding the keys that help unlock these secrets…
John Hudson, Chief Instructor at the UK military’s Defence SERE Training Organisation, joins me in conversation on the Paul Kirtley Podcast. Originally an RAF helicopter pilot and now the survival instructor responsible for training all the survival instructors in the UK military, John is the real deal when it comes to survival training and advice. In the civilian world John’s expertise has been called on for Discovery Channel TV show Dude You’re Screwed as well as other projects. He has laid down some key principles we can all apply to our lives in his book How To Survive: Lessons For Everyday Life From The Extreme World. In this podcast we talk about all this and more, including which survival myths need killing once and for all…
Lessons From Applying The North American Winter Camping Style In the Scandinavian Boreal Forest was the snappy title of a presentation I gave on the main stage at the 2019 Global Bushcraft Symposium (GBS) in Alberta, Canada. The main theme of the symposium was “skills in context”, and I wanted to make a presentation that tapped into this core messaging, as well as providing an example of some of the global exchange of ideas and techniques we are seeing across bushcraft specifically and wilderness skills more generally…
David Wescott, Dave Holladay, André-François Bourbeau and Mors Kochanski come together in a panel discussion chaired by Les Stroud (a.k.a. Survivorman) at the 2019 Global Bushcraft Symposium, Alberta, Canada. Recorded June 11th 2019. Listen now…
The 2019 Global Bushcaft Symposium was an international gathering to promote bushcraft, survival, and traditional skills instruction through the open exchange of philosophies, pedagogical methods and dissemination of best practices within the industry. I was honoured to be invited to present a keynote talk at the symposium. In this post, I share a recording of my presentation, into which I have edited my slides, as well as links to many of the references and books mentioned through my keynote. You can also access my slides directly.
Mors Kochanski joins me for a conversation about wilderness living skills, bushcraft and survival. Mors explains his background in these subjects, going right back to his school days, along with learning from his mentor Tom Roycraft, through Mors’s own unique contributions and inventions , including the super-shelter. Along the way we cover a lot of fascinating ground….click to find out more and listen to this podcast…
I love travelling by canoe. And I love campfire cooking. I definitely prefer cooking over a campfire to cooking indoors at home and, moreover, I think some of the dishes I cook are actually better over the fire than in the more controlled domestic setting. Cooking is an important part of most canoe camping trips. Even if you feel like you can take plenty of gear in a canoe, you should still select it carefully. In this article I share the canoe-camping cookware I really rate and have put together into my outfit….
Dave Canterbury of the Pathfinder School joins me to talk about his perspective on bushcraft, particularly the contrasts he sees between bushcraft in the UK and USA. We use his popular concept of the 5C’s of survivability as well as applying the Six Sigma concept to bushcraft/survival as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging conversation, including building a YouTube channel, writing books, putting your own spin on existing knowledge, re-invigorating old works, getting kids interested in the outdoors, prioritising what you learn, different ways of learning, immersion training, first aid kits and the differences between bushcraft and survival…
In this blog I share a brief description, photos plus a full-length video, featuring a multi-day, wild camping canoe trip down Scotland’s longest river, the River Tay. We travelled light and put bushcraft and campcraft to good use on each overnight camp. It turned out to be an epic, highly memorable trip for a good number of reasons…
As spring moves towards summer, there are plenty of wild edibles to choose from. Some of the easiest to collect are the green aerial parts of readily recognised plants as well as some of their flowers. Many of these provide great additional flavours to seasonal salads and some can be used as stuffing herbs or as the basis of a soup. All of these uses provide additional micronutrients to your diet. Flavoursome teas can be made with several of the featured plants and some also have medicinal uses. In this article I present a dozen easy-to-recognise and easy-to-collect seasonal plants for this time of year…