|  Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, places where peoples have been humbled and strengthened. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body, we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surroundings. The closer you come to the mountain, the more it disappears. The mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it. Its body begins to spread out over the landscape, losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain, the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step. Its crown is buried in space. Its body is buried in the breath.
—Joan Halifax It is both the blessing and the curse of the Web that there is just so much of it, and it moves so fast. Web sites appear and disappear and reappear in new locations or with new names. There is no way this page is going to keep up with it all. I have tried to provide some basic information resources that appear relatively stable, as well as a few tools for exploring further.
Featured Site  Caveman Chemistry This is the Web site for Professor Kevin M. Dunn’s basic chemistry course at Hampden-Sydney College in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia. You have never seen a chemistry course like this before; even if you hated chemistry, you will find this site filled with useful skills and comprehensible explanations. The idea of the site is to explore landmark technologies on the road to a modern industrial civilization. It begins with the concepts of making fire and stone tools and progresses up through plastics and semiconductors. Along the way, it discusses both the techniques and the science of the most important primitive living skills – stone tools, fire, dyes, cordage, weaving, metals, lime, potash, paper, lye soap, alcohol production, even homemade gunpowder. You even learn some chemistry.
Online Resources Abotech Calling itself “the cyber-shelter for primitive living skills,” this is a large, sprawling, and somewhat confusing site that is packed with articles, links, books and tools for sale, commentary, and lists of classes and gatherings. Countrylife This site, “the online simplicity village,” is an online resource for learning all about the practical arts of simple and self-sufficient living. This site provides a large number of articles on all aspects of homesteading, baking, gardening, and soapmaking – for example, finding the right wood heating stove, composting, cheesemaking, natural plant dyes, sauerkraut, solar power, winter gardening . . . well, you get the idea. The site is connected to the famous Lehman’s store, the source for old-fashioned, hard-to-find items such as pickle kegs, grain mills, wooden barrels, hand water pumps, wood cookstoves, heating stoves, and canning supplies. eNature.com This site, owned by the National Wildlife Federation, is an extensive online nature resource for both academic and recreational purposes. Its Field Guides – based on the popular National Audubon Society Field Guides and published for the first time online – contain full-color photographs and descriptions of more than 4,800 species found in North America. The Field Guides provide 6,000 photographs, two million words of text, recordings of the songs and calls of 550 birds, and cover mammals, fish, birds, wildflowers, trees, butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, insects, seashore creatures, and more. The site has zip-code search capabilities, so site visitors can quickly and easily identify local plant and animal life. Hawkwatch offers information on the best times to see hawks, harriers, and eagles during their fall migration, and the site offers the first Web-based guide to identifying local butterfly species by region. Definitely worth a visit. Equipped to Survive This site, maintained by survival authority Doug Ritter, is a comprehensive online resource for independent reviews of survival equipment and outdoors gear, as well as survival and Search and Rescue information. The emphasis is on downed aircraft survival, but the site covers the entire field; it reviews not only equipment but also schools, books, and videos; offers “lessons learned” reviews of airplane ditches and rescues; and sponsors the online Survival Forum. History and Primitive Technology This is a relatively small site with a number of interesting articles, dealing with such topics as the fire piston, drums, atlatls, and flintknapping. Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School This is the Web site for the school run by wilderness expert Tom Elpel. The site also provides a home for the Society of Primitive Technology, the Food Insects Newsletter, and the Newsletter of the Wild Food Institute. Although the site can be hard to navigate, it provides articles, essays, a calendar of primitive events, a list of primitive skills schools, and a comprehensive collection of books and videos for sale. Hood’s Woods Survival expert Ron Hood’s award-winning wilderness survival videos are for sale here, along with knives he designed and his own survival hot sauce, named Tongue Scab. Mixed in with all of this are a number of helpful free articles by Ron and others, dealing with everything from the use of fish poison in South America to wilderness scatology, and from edible insects to suburban trapping. Jack Mountain Bushcraft Although this Web site is primarily to promote the wilderness services of founder Tim Smith, it provides an extensive but unannotated bibliography of wilderness skills, a number of interesting short reviews of wilderness gear, articles on wilderness survival and primitive skills, a calendar of primitive skills events, and a list of outdoor schools. The Lightweight Backpacker As I get older and my bones get more and more achy, the idea of lightweight backpacking becomes more and more attractive. This Web site was founded in 1995 with a focus on lightweight backpacking and hiking, but since then has grown to become a knowledge base for all aspects of backpacking and hiking gear. Contributors share backcountry experience in articles, short stories, gear reviews, gearmaking instructions, and knowledge nuggets. Want to know the best lightweight down sleeping bag? Want to learn how to sew your own lightweight backpack? Want tips on researching and buying backpacking gear? Check it out. Mike’s Web Page This very brief site, produced by Mike Bennet, provides several essays on wilderness and primitive skills, including how to make lures, knives, cordage, arrowheads, and traps – even birdhouses. There are also essays on edible wild plants and firestarting. Native Tech This Web site provides comprehensive resources regarding indigenous cultures around the world. It contains a number of original articles focusing on materials of the Eastern Woodlands, providing historical and contemporary background, technical instructions, and references, and dealing with such subjects as beads and beadwork, birds and feathers, clay and pottery, leather and clothes, metalwork, plants and trees, porcupine quills, stonework and tools, and weaving and cordage. If you visit, plan to spend the day. Primitive Ways This is a very rich site, produced by Dick Baugh, Bob Gillis, Norm Kidder, Dino Labiste, and Chuck Kritzon, filled with useful articles on everything from making a pouch out of a roadkill raccoon skin to straightening handmade arrows, from weaving a lauhala mat to processing shark skin. There also are reviews of books, magazines, and videos. Primitive Technology This site provides an extensive but unannotated list of links to primitive technology and other related Web sites, in no particular order, and including everything from scrimshaw to braintain and from atlatls to mediaeval swords. If you have some time to spend and want to browse the Web, this is a good place to start from. The Ranger Digest Richard F. Tscherne – ”Ranger Rick“ – was a member of the United States Army who successfully graduated from the US Army Ranger, the French Army Commando, and the Belgian Army Para-Commando School. Retired from active duty since 1993, he now teaches how to survive and thrive in the outdoors, as he puts it, “military style.” His Web site is filled with information on expedient shelters, firemaking, lanterns, snares, water purification, spearing fish, improving military map protractors, and the many uses of homemade coil lanyards – tips, tricks, ideas, he says, that you won't find in other handbooks, military or civilian. Rocky Mountain Survival Group This is an incredibly rich set of resources for survival questions of all sorts. This is the largest collection of wilderness and survival links on the Web, well organized, and clearly put together with great care and attention. Survive Outdoors This site provides a number of useful papers primarily on topics related to wilderness medicine – for example, bees and wasps, snakes, ticks, deer stand injuries, dehydration, diarrhea, edible plants, hypothermia, poison ivy, hunting safety, lacerations, lightning injuries, and mushrooms. Traditional Tanners This is the site of Matt Richards, author of the classic Deerskins into Buckskins. Apart from selling tools, texts, and skins, both raw and tanned, the site provides over 240 pages of informational articles and tutorials on skinning, tanning, smoking, and history, with material on buffalo, goat, deer, elk, and moose hides. There are also links, a tanning bibliography, a directory of tanners, and a schedule of gatherings and events. Thrower This site is devoted to throwing weapons, for sport, survival, and self defense, primarily throwing knives, but also axes, hatchets, spears, atlatls, boomerangs, bolas, sticks, steel balls, and casting weapons like whips. There is an archive of articles and lists of organizations, competitions, clubs, and related sites. USRSOG Calling itself the United States Rescue and Special Operations Group, this paramilitary site is run by George W. Jasper, who served with the 3rd Ranger Battalion 75th Infantry Regiment and is the author of the survival book Six Ways in and Twelve Ways Out. According to the site, USRSOG, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in January 1994, when it “it became apparent that there was an increasing void in civilian law enforcement and foreign military hostage rescue capabilities.” There is lots of military talk on the site – it constantly refers to people as ”cadre” – and lots of military-style acronyms. With all that said, the site provides a number of interesting and thoughtful essays on survival topics, including selection of a survival firearm, firestarting, water procurement, shelter, fishing, and climate. Wild Food Adventures This is the Web site of Dr. John Kallas, who clearly has a passion for edible wild plants; he publishes an edible wild plant newsletter, The Wild Food Adventurer, and puts on a variety of wild food intensives and workshops around the country. Unfortunately, back issues of the newsletter are not available on the Web site. What is available, and very useful, is an extensive bibliography of books on wild plants – edibility, identification, poisonous plants, cookbooks, and reference texts – along with Kallas’s detailed and helpful reviews. The Wilderness Information Network This site provides a constantly updated news service, with articles concerning all aspects of the the wilderness. It contains the site for the National Wilderness Preservation System, which provides legislative news, an alphabetical listing of all 645 wilderness areas that make up the National Wilderness Preservation System with links to their Web pages, a wilderness area database, policy statements from the federal agencies that manage wilderness lands, and information on wilderness education, research, and current news. The site also provides materials on wilderness education, including thousands of pages of lesson plans for K-12 and wilderness managers to learn about wilderness topics such as fire, history, and mathematics. In addition, a wilderness research area provides access to papers published by the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, and information about the Institute’s research, programs, workshops, and conferences. Windsong Primitives This is the Web site of primitive skills expert Benjamin Pressley which, in addition to listing his classes and books, provides a number of interesting articles and stories, as well as a comprehensive calendar of primitive skills events.
Specific Skills As shown in the extensive collection of links and articles at several of the sites mentioned above, there is clearly no end to the resources offered by the Web. I am constantly amazed at what I am able to find out. The following are just a few pages, listed by subject, that I have found interesting or helpful or unusual.
Directories and Web Rings One way to keep track of what’s going on out there is through Web directories, which organize the chaos of the Web into a hierarchy of topics, like an encyclopedia. As opposed to search engines, which roam the Web with electronic spiders and rank results using computer alogorithms, directories are compiled by humans. Google provides a directory to Web sites dealing with Survival and Primitive Technology; Yahoo! has a similar directory to for Primitive Living; and the Open Directory Project provides a directory for Survival and Primitive Technology. Another useful tool for locating Web sites is the Web ring, which is a consortium of Web sites on similar topics. A Web ring may consist of fewer than a dozen to hundreds of Web sites. The primary provider of Web ring hosting services is now Webring, and the following Web rings may be of interest.
The Outdoor Business A number of Web sites provide resources for both producers and consumers of wilderness programs, such as challenge or ropes courses, wilderness therapy programs, and outdoor education programs. Adventure and Wilderness Therapy Treatment Programs This is a free listing of wilderness programs, consumer protection resources, and referral assistance for parents with troubled teens or youth at risk who have emotional, psychological, learning, drug and substance abuse, academic, and behavioral problems. The site is not funded by any wilderness or adventure programs. The Adventure Therapy Web Run by Lee Gillis of Georgia College and State University, this site provides reprints of articles, downloadable assessment instruments, dissertation abstracts, access to the Adventure Therapy mail list, links to adventure therapy Web sites, and the beginnings of an international history of adventure therapy. The site is cluttered and hard to navigate but full of interesting and helpful material. Institute for Outdoor Learning IOL is a British organization supporting, developing, and promoting learning through outdoor experiences. Their Web site provides news items, conference announcements, and information on professional accreditation primarily of interest to those in the UK. It provides abstracts – but not full text – of articles published in IOL’s Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, a peer-reviewed journal based in the UK with an international review board. The site also sells a number of books, IOL publications, games, and activities. Some areas of the site require IOL membership to access. Institute for Outdoor Leadership and Education Created by Prof. Alan Ewert and colleagues at Indiana University, this site is a resource for practitioners and academics in adventure education and outdoor leadership. The site provides a searchable database of accumulated research on adventure recreation and education, as well as Research Connections, a periodic update, with an emphasis on practical implications, in the fields of outdoor education, adventure education, outdoor recreation, and outdoor experiential therapy. The site also archives the Bradford Papers Online, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to scholarly research in the same areas. The first volume of the Bradford Papers was printed in 1981, with subsequent volumes printed each year, that included selected papers from the annual Institute held each May at Bradford Woods. The site also includes the Best of the Bradford Papers, featuring selected titles from the 1980-1985 Bradford Papers; back issues from 1980-1985 and 1996-1997; and the Bradford Papers Annuals from 1986-1988. National Association of Therapeutic Wilderness Camps The NATWC represents nearly fifty therapeutic wilderness camps located throughout the US. The organization works to solidify the field, raises public awareness about the effectiveness of outdoor therapeutic treatment with troubled youth, promotes standards of care, and provides training opportunities for those in the field. Its Web site provides potential consumers – both parents and professionals – with a wilderness therapy FAQ, a checklist of questions to ask when choosing a program, a database of NATWC member camps, a Counselor Recognition Program, and job postings. OutdoorEd.com The purpose of this Web site, according to founder Rick Curtis, is to provide a community for professional outdoor and experiential educators to come together and share their knowledge, ideas, questions, and issues. This remarkably comprehensive site offers searchable company listings for outdoor education and experiential education organizations, conference information, employment-related services, lists of schools offering degrees in outdoor education, news, articles, equipment lists, and the latest information on first aid techniques and procedures. The site maintains a searchable collection of more than 600 research articles. Outdoor Education Research & Evaluation Center James Neill, a psychologist in the field of experiential therapy and outdoor education.at the University of Western Sydney and editor of the Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, maintains this on-line resource for philosophy, theory, research, and evaluation in outdoor education and related fields. The incredibly rich site site offers full-text publication downloads of scholarly articles and student theses, links to authors who provide Web access to their articles, instruments and questionnaires for outdoor education research and evaluation, a contact list of researchers in the field, and articles on the research and evaluation process. It also offers a collection of group games, news articles, conference announcements, lesson plans – clearly a work of love. You can browse for hours. Very highly recommended. The Outdoor Index Roger Greenaway's Web site is a substantial collection materials on outdoor education, including materials on books, articles, research, evaluation, and activities. The site lists searchable databases of outdoor research and provides a collection of Greenaway’s own articles. There is a very rich set of links to activities, research, and researchers. The site is a bit overcrowded and hard to navigate, but definitely worth the effort. The Outdoor Network Calling itself “the online portal for outdoor industry professionals,” this Web site provides industry news, gear and book reviews, information about gear manufacturers, an industry calendar, job notices, and online sales of books and gear. Access to some sections requires an $85 subscription to to the hard copy edition of The Outdoor Network; other areas are accessible to visitors for free. Outdoor Safety Sponsored by OutdoorEd.com, this Web site is devoted to issues of risk management, liability, safety, protocols, and ongoing trends in the field. The site provides articles on first aid and emergency care, incident reports and analysis, list of risk management and legal consultants, lists of insurance providers, updates on transportation safety, and lists of equipment recalls. This site is an indispensible resource for the professional. Ropes Online This is the only online source devoted to the development and marketing of ropes or challenge course programs. The purpose is to provide a free source of information to ropes or challenge course owners, facilitators, users, and students. The site sponsors a ropes course mail list and email discussion group, and provides news clips, a contact list of challenge course programs, and a calendar of events. Wilderness Research Center The University of Idaho Wilderness Research Center is a university-wide research facility in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, whose mission is to study the human dimensions of wilderness ecosystems. The WRC recently completed a five-year program of research and course development on the the use of the wilderness for personal growth, therapy, education, and leadership development, and has developed the Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare Research Cooperative (OBHRC) to focus research on outdoor treatment programs for troubled adolescents. This site provides access to a number of research articles and studies in the field of wilderness therapy, both from WRC and published in other peer-reviewed publications. |
