We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

               — Henry David Thoreau

About Wilderness Drum, Inc.

Wilderness Drum^® is an information and education resource for wilderness survival, primitive skills, and wilderness spirituality. What these three things have in common is a sense of being at home in the wilderness, close to the earth, in touch with our deepest human roots, and open to the remarkable powers of the wilderness to heal, strengthen, terrify, and transform.

This site is about how I can help you pursue this path. Here you will find wilderness resources of all sorts – schools, organizations, books, magazines, videos, news, writings. Perhaps more important, you will find wilderness adventures – vision fasts, retreats, workshops, gatherings, journeys to the heart of the Amazon, journeys to the heart of your own inner landscape, journeys to the spirits of the wilderness, journeys to your soul. And here too you can become part of the Wilderness Drum community, by signing up for the Wilderness Drum newsletter and joining our email discussion group for news, reviews, opinions, and collective wisdom.

Resources on this Website

This is where we list wilderness experiences and adventures – wilderness vision fasts, visionary journeys to the Amazon, searches for the sacred in the wilderness, workshops, gatherings, and other wilderness trips and programs offered both by Wilderness Drum and by people we know.

This is the place for interesting, helpful, or just plain strange news about wilderness topics. Did you know that Viagra may help prevent altitude sickness? What ever happened to the Swiss adventure company which led a canyoneering trip in which eighteen people died in a flash flood? How effective is wilderness therapy in the long run? What’s going on with those fifteen-passenger vans? Read all about it here.

There are dozens – probably hundreds – of schools that teach every sort of wilderness skill, including survival, primitive living, medicine, leadership, and counseling of all kinds. Here we list the schools we find most interesting and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.

This is where you will find lists and discussions of organizations, both large and small, that provide advocacy, training, and representation in the fields of wilderness skills, leadership, medicine, ecology, preservation, and spirituality.

Books, books, and more books! – about wilderness medicine, wilderness survival, primitive skills, outdoor leadership, adventure therapy, wilderness spirituality, the psychology of survival. And books of fiction, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to James Dickey’s Deliverance to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer. Here are reviews, critiques, and recommendations.

I am constantly surprised at how many magazines there are out there. This area provides a list and reviews of the magazines that I have found to be most helpful, interesting, aggravating, and surprising, covering every wilderness theme from trapping to mythology.

There are instructional videos on almost every conceivable aspect of wilderness living – from emergency survival to tanning buffalo hide to making beadwork moccasins. There are also theatrical movies that have dealt in almost every possible way with humans and their relationship to the wilderness, from Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout to Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Here is where you will find reviews, discussions, and maybe some videos you hadn’t thought of.

The Internet provides not only a wealth of Web sites for every wilderness interest, but also mail lists, newsgroups, and forums. Here we will sort through what is available and recommend the best, or at least the most interesting.

Everyone is interested in good gear – or at least unusual gear. Where do you find, say, blaze orange bandanas? What about ultralight tents and tarps? What is a source for those hard-to-find heavy-duty polyethylene zip-lock bags? What is better than a machete, a bush knife, or an axe? Here is where you will find suggestions, recommendations, and cranky opinions, and where you can send in your own.

From time to time I write things, some of which get published one place or another, and some of which don’t. In any event, I put them here first – pieces on subjects such as outdoor leadership, wilderness spirituality, and wilderness emergency care. There is also a growing collection of guest writings by leading experts in their fields.

Here is where you find information about me, my background, and what I think is important about wilderness survival, primitive skills, and wilderness spirituality.

There is also another small menu that lets you do the following actions:

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or above, clicking on this button will add the specific page you are viewing to your list of Favorites. If you are using any version of Netscape Navigator, pressing CTRL-d will do the same thing.

Clicking on this button will call up a blank email form, addressed to Wilderness Drum, which you can use to send us a message with any questions, comments, or suggestions you may have.

Here is where you find contact information for Wilderness Drum. In addition, we provide a form that makes it easy for you to subscribe to the Wilderness Drum newsletter, join the Wilderness Drum email discussion group, and send us a comment or review for inclusion on this site.

Clicking on this button brings up a search engine that lets you do a word search of the entire site. If you are looking specifically, for example, for reviews of books by Robert Heinlein, or whether we have anything useful to say about soap, this is the place to look.

Please feel free to explore, take what you need, and share your knowledge and experience.

Thanks for visiting.

Steve Beyer
“Walks Slowly”

Wilderness Drum® is the registered service mark of Wilderness Drum, Inc.,
an Illinois corporation.

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