Primal Living with Honorable Hunting Full-Time Stone Age Skills Apprenticeship with Prerequisites The Full-Time Residential Semester of Primal Living with Honorable Huntin is a Stone Age Skills Apprenticeship with an ethic of cultural conservation, and may be repeated for an additional semester to earn a Traditional Technologist Certification. Prerequisite: Graduating from our semester of Outdoor Living with Traditional Technology. • Space on land on which to live traditionally; alone, in a small group, or in community with others in the program: • 15 on-site, one-on-one and group mentoring sessions with your instructor, Chris Chisholm, or a minimum of three times per month. • Graduation Rite of Passage Ceremony, and choice of complimentary Traditional Technologist Certification Evaluation.

This Stone Age Living Experience is available to adults for just $100 per month, but completion of a Summer Residential Environmental Education Apprenticeship & Outdoor Living with Traditional Technologies are prerequisite. Moving from Primitive to Stone Age Living is basically a self-directed experience utilizing Wolf Camp and surrounding public lands, with guidance available from experienced Wolf Camp staff, and logistical support facilitated by Chris Chisholm. If you want a sense for what achieving this, the ultimate objective for earth skills practitioners, would be like, click on this message from Nikki & Micah that will inspire you beyond words.

Moving from a Primitive to Stone Age Living Experience usually takes the most diligent student a minimum of two years of intensive, full time training. However, most people who lived back in the stone age seem to have thrived best in clans of 20 or so. That means if you want to go it alone, chances are slim that you will thrive. However, Nikki and Micah pretty much accomplished this feat, and they realized that Primitive and Stone Age Living is very different from wilderness survival. To be sure, embarking on a stone age living experience requires wilderness survival practice, because you have to know what to do in any emergency - they happen regularly, especially those little crises. But in reality, a stone age living experience is not something you just jump into; it is a slow replacement of your modern goods with things you developed from scratch.

Why is it a slow replacement? Because modern humans have lost not only the knowledge of the ancestors, but also the crafted goods. In other words, not only do you have a huge amount to learn, but you need lots and lots of time to craft all the materials (livable shelters, hunting and storage gear, medicines ... everything) you will need. Once you have built all your primitive artisanry apparati and learned to gather and preserve all the plant and animal products needed for long-term survival, we look forward to watching you walk into the wilderness with nothing - and we mean nothing - from modern society:

Your blades you made from indigenous rock, bone, wood and cordage. Your shelter retrofitted to remove any modern support. You have two seasons worth of firewood that you gathered without modern blades, and two seasons of food preserved and primitively chached away from scavengers. You can go out and get all the food you need with completely stone age tools in case your food is spoiled. You can keep yourself healthy with herbal medicine, and you can heal your basic wounds with primitive medicine. You have plenty of bent cedar boxes, water tight baskets, tanned hides for clothing and preserved furs for bedding. You have a dougout canoe that you made for transporting yourself and what you harvested in Puget Sound and in the Skykomish River back to your primitive camp.

In the meantime, read on for how to get ready through the Summer & Three Seasons Primitive Skills Preparation Programs, during which you can live as primitively as you like: using one of our shelters until building an earthen lodge; supplementing your wild foods with garden vegetables, oil and grains you trade for; maintaining embers from your friction fires and drawing water from the camp well until you can consistently purify water; wearing your old clothes until donning cedar and leatherwear; storing medicinal herbs in class jars until making bent cedar boxes ...

This level of expertise is what everyone in the earth skills field wishes they could attain. It usually takes a minimum of two years of intensive, full time training to reach this level, and most people who lived in the stone ages seemed to have thrived best in groups of 20 or so. That means if you want to go it alone, chances are slim that you will thrive. However, a couple of our senior staff have pretty much accomplished this feat, and this is what we recommend after completing the Summer & Academic Year Apprenticeships.

Once you have built all your primitive artisanry apparati and learned to gather and preserve all the animal products you will need to survive on top of all of your skills with plant materials that you learned previously, we look forward to watching you walk into the wilderness with nothing, and we mean nothing, from modern society. Your blades you made from indigenous rock, bone, wood and cordage. You retrofitted your shelter to remove any modern support. You have two seasons worth of firewood that you gathered without modern blades, and two seasons of food preserved and primitively chached away from scavengers. You can go out and get all the food you need with completely stone age tools in case your food is spoiled. You can keep yourself healthy with herbal medicine, and you can heal your basic wounds with primitive medicine. You have an abundance of bent cedar boxes, water tight baskets, tanned hides for clothing and preserved furs for bedding. You have a dougout canoe that you made for transporting yourself and what you harvested in Puget Sound and in the Skykomish River back to your primitive camp.

Stone Age Living Experience with Wolf Camp

Scroll Down or Click for Specifics:
• Goals
• Skills Covered In This Program;
• Program History;
• Program Schedule;
• Applying & Expectations;

Overview of Costs & Benefits:

The Stone Age Living Experience costs $100 per month, with a prerequisite of the Summer & Academic Year Apprenticeships. Of course, if you already have extensive survival experience, then you may jump into this program after rounding out your education by attending the courses you most need to prepare for your primitive living experience. But believe us when we tell you that it takes at least one year of intense practice before you can walk into the wilderness with nothing from society.

While you are preparing to launch into a full primitive living situation, you will also need to give 10 hours work trade per week for camping, use of common facilities, and food supplies. Living on campus also means sharing responsibility for maintenance of all common facilities as well as your own shelter space just like if you were renting a house elsewhere and needing to spend time cleaning, etc. However, it is much more efficient to live in a community like this where you are taking turns cooking, cleaning, recycling, shopping, organizing supplies, caretaking farm animals, etc., etc., rather than having to do all that on your own, and thereby leaving more time for your studies.

Blog entries, making foods from scratch, maintenance checks and first aid drills can also take up some time, and they are important aspects of your learning program. However, many community living projects are counted toward work-trade depending on your prior skill level, such as gardening, mechanical repairs, seasonal grounds maintenance, building improvements, etc., as prioritized by your program facilitator.

Health insurance is required, but you shouldn't need to spend another dime while living here except for entertainment, travel, emergencies, etc. It’s a great way to live simply, learn greatly, and lay a foundation for your future. We have availability for just 4 individuals or families in this program for 2008.

Goals of the Stone Age Living Experience

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, multitask 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 acheive success. Study herbal health cures to prepare for the absense 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 naturalists.

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)
• Political Environmentalism (left and right wing strategies, legislative and artistic strategies)

Applying & Expectations

No application is required. Simply complete the Summer & 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