Our Philosophy
We are an academy for wilderness adventure, bushcraft, safety, and self-reliance. We provide a connection for learning the basic skills that will empower you to live a primitive lifestyle. We call this “Self-Reliance Craft”.
The essentials of the Self-Reliance Craft are the skills necessary to obtain shelter, water, fire, and food on your own. The basics of these skills can be learned in a series of one-day classes. Building on that foundation, the student learns more skills and is able to stay self-sufficient in the wild for longer time periods.
We offer a mixture of intermediate and advanced courses, some that are relaxed “camp outs” and others that are more adventurous and encourage participants to see what they are capable of. When participants leave our academy they will have the ability to face the wilderness with only a knife and feel confident they can provide for themselves.
In the past we referred to the craft as “survival skills”, but now we refrain from using this term because a survivor mentality embodies a struggle or fear of Mother Nature. We no longer promote this attitude. Our ancestors did not struggle with Mother Nature, they existed with her and so can we.
We are not a “doom and gloom” promoter. We do not use fear as a marketing tool for our school, and we believe that the benefits of self-sufficiency and self-reliance are worth the effort at all times—not just in an emergency.
We are also not a military based school. These schools push you to the edge and then expect you to go over the edge. This creates a conflict with Mother Nature that is aggravated by internal conflict with your own ego and competition with others in the school.
That is not our path. Ours is a journey of self-discovery and personal empowerment in harmony with nature and with others. We want our participants to come, grow, and arrive at the “edge” together, and when the participant is ready they will confront it themselves.