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Pacing, timing or ticking off - measuring distance when navigating on foot
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How to choose the right map scale - 25k, 40k or 50k?
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Lost on Snowdon? Find a fence.
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You've just completed your Mountain Navigation course - what next?
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Learn a new skill in 2020 with Original Outdoors!
New Foraging Course Dates for 2019!
Wednesday, 23 January 2019
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New Foraging Course Dates for 2019!
New dates for our Foraging and Wild Foods course plus brand new courses in North Wales!
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]We have known for some time now that by far our most popular course is our Foraging and Wild Foods course – a one-day introduction to foraging in the woods, fields and byways of this corner of North Wales. 2019 looks like it’s going to be our busiest foraging year yet, with two of the 2019 course dates already fully booked and enquiries coming in thick and fast for other dates and private courses.To cope with the demand we have added some more dates to the calendar for the Foraging and Wild Foods course. The list of course dates for 2019 is now:
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- 13th April 2019 This date now full – Please get in touch
- 20th April 2019 NEW DATE!
- 21st April 2019 NEW DATE!
- 4th May 2019 This date now full – Please get in touch
- 26th May 2019 NEW DATE!
- 15th June 2019
- 13th July 2019
- 3rd August 2019
- 7th September 2019
- 12th October 2019
If you have received a gift voucher for 2019 then it will be redeemable against these new dates, and if you wish to move from a date that you have already booked onto one of the new dates then please get in touch and we will try our best to accommodate your request.
New Foraging Courses from Original Outdoors
If you have been following our courses for the last 12 months or so you have probably seen us start to offer our training courses under the EST Framework – a structured training pathway designed to give those attending the courses a clear route for developing their personal and professional outdoor skills. We have been running these course for ‘professional’ users through our partner brand outdoorprofessional.co.uk and now we are offering them to a wider public audience.
For foragers we have the Level 1, 2 and 3 (assessed) courses for inland and coastal foraging. There are a few audiences for these courses:
- Outdoor instructors and other outdoor professionals
- Teachers and educators
- Chefs and food professionals wanting to work with wild food
- Group leaders and coaches who want to integrate wild food education into their sessions
- Parents who want to give their children an education in wild food themselves
- Individuals that want to develop a deep understanding of the wild food available in the UK, and how to use it
This is the closest we can get to offering a foraging instructor course without delving into the depths of group leadership, duties of care and emergency techniques that come with leading any group in the great outdoors. These courses focus on the skills of finding edible wild plants, fungi and other items of wild food in the UK landscape AND on how to share these skills with other people in a sustainable, ethical and structured way.
These courses are certificated under the EST Framework and can be used in conjunction with other NGB outdoor training schemes.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][product_category per_page=”12″ columns=”4″ orderby=”menu_order title” order=”ASC” category=”wild-food-foraging-courses-uk”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Company News
Examining a wild camp site – tracking and reading the ground
Wednesday, 05 December 2018
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Examining a Wild Camp – Tracking and reading the story the ground is telling you
A story of tracking, site interpretation and a lesson for investigators
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]So there I was, wandering through the woods with the dog. This is one of several woodland sites that we occasionally rent to run some of our bushcraft, survival and other wilderness skills courses in North Wales. I am far from any of the footpaths, both the public ones and the ones made by locals through the trees. It’s about 15 minutes after sunset and the light is poor – nearly time for the head torch.After ducking past a couple of low branches I come to a more open area near the top of a small hill. There are a couple of mature oak trees, a dead-standing Rowan and a surrounding screen of Western Hemlock Spruce enclosing an area roughly 5m in diameter. Something seems ‘different’ about this site, and I pause to quickly look around. I’m fairly sure that I haven’t visited this particular glade before, but something is tickling my senses in a way I can’t vocalise…
Down at the foot of one of the mature spruce trees is a short, blackened and partially burned length of wood. This isn’t unusual near the areas where we run courses, but out here in this relatively untouched corner of the woodland it stands out – there is a reason for it being here, and I am suddenly compelled to investigate further.
A little bit of background information
As I have mentioned on this blog before – a good portion of the work that I do as an instructor and consultant in various outdoor fields doesn’t end up on the website as a public course or event – we even have a seperate website for that kind of thing: outdoorprofessional.co.uk.
Something that we do occasionally is to create bespoke training events for clients who want to be trained in a particular skill or activity. Following a series of connections and conversations we were asked to create training events especially for AFOs (Authorised Firearms Officers – armed response Police officers) and those they work closely with. They specifically wanted to have some training in tracking of subjects through woodland and mountainous areas – and particularly how to perform Site Exploitation (SE, other common terms are also used depending on the force or role) on areas where people had created camps or bivvy sites in conjunction with other criminal activity. Anybody familiar with the Raoul Moat incident in 2010 will have an understanding of why these particular skills were of interest to these particular clients. My own experience in SAR/Mountain Rescue and subsequently teaching tracking for search operations combined with experience teaching people how to camp in the woods without leaving a trace probably puts me in a good place for this kind of training.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Other Notes
This is, of course, just a bit of fun and in no way is an example of how to examine a site like this. The photos taken are quick shots on a phone camera, illumiated by an LED torch. There are no in-shot reference items or scale, and no other records taken.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10017″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
The Tell-Tale Log
So this was the item which first drew my attention – other than that weird, tingly spidey-sense that trackers and searchers get when they get close to something interesting. It’s a small lump of wood, partially burned on one side and cut to length with a saw of some kind. The marks on the end of the log suggest a chainsaw rather than bow-saw or similar, so it was probably lifted from a log stack elsewhere in the forest.
Partially burned firewood is a common piece of evidence in these kind of sites and disposing of these blackened, charred logs is a key problem for disguising a camp fire site. Best practice to burn them all away completely, gradually reducing the size of the fire until only ash and small lumps of charcoal are left behind.
This log was my IPP (Initial Planning Point) for the site analysis, but I knew that I would probably change that once further evidence was uncovered.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10018″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
The Circumference Sweep
I look over at the dog, who is now whining gently in the softly-falling rain. It’s pretty dark now, so I break out a small-but-powerful LED hand torch and start walking slowly around the edge of the small glade that the log is on the edge of. I want to see what there is to find in the transition zone where the ‘clearing’ stops and the dense woodland begins. This is the area where something may be thrown to, or placed ‘out of the way’ whilst activity occurs in the camp.
On the opposite side of the clearing I find a few more charred logs – longer, thinner pieces that have been burned through at some point.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10019″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Gridding it out
The rest of the circumference sweep revealed nothing obvious, at least not in the conditions and using this search method. Now it’s time to move into the clearing and methodically move across the area to identify any key features that may remain – specifically the site of the fire that charred those logs.
The easiest way to do this is to walk directly across the site along one edge, carefully stepping on the leaf litter rather than pushing it to the side and potentially covering something that is lying on the surface. Once you reach the other side you move across slightly and sweep across in the other direction, parallel to the first track.
I repeated this, moving slowly and sweeping with the torch, until I had covered the entire width of the clearing. One area interested me in particular – where some stones were clustered together at one edge – but I wanted to sweep the rest of the area before starting to mess around with the leaf litter and uncovering the stones.
Next I repeated the series of parallel sweeping motions – but at 90° to the original tracks. This gave me a different perspective on the terrain and made it more likely that I would spot anything unusual – the ‘break in the pattern’.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10020″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Examining the Point of Interest
Nothing else was coming up in my cursory examination, so it was time to investigate that pile of stones. It was made up of shale, very common locally but not often seen in small piles like this. The pile is partially covered by fallen leaves, and easily missed.
Kneeling down to get a closer look I could see that some of the stones were fractured and had slightly blackened edges. Common advice is to “surround camp fires with rocks to prevent the flames from spreading”. This is terrible advice with rocks like shale – they have a tendency to explode like grenades when heated by fire. Whoever made this fire had probably never experienced it before – but evidently had some knowledge of how “things should be done”. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10021″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Digging deeper
Under the layer of stones I found the blackened soil and vegetation residue that is always found around fire scars like this – something well known to archaeologists looking for evidence of human activity in the layers of excavated soil. There was no residual heat, dryness or any other sign that this fire was recently burning. In fact there were insect larvae/egg cases under some of the stones and other evidence that these stones had been undisturbed for several months at least.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10023″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Spiraling Out
Satisfied that I have discovered the likely fire site I can create a new IPP (IPP2) in my mind and base my search from that. The most effective method here is to ‘spiral’ out from that focal point and uncover anything that may be left under the leaf litter – scraps from food packets, pieces of foil or discarded plastic or maybe something like a cigarette butt.
Or a knife…
Yes. A knife. A folding, locking-blade knife with wooden scales and brass trim. It was buried under the leaf litter, roughly 100cm from the centre of the fire scar. It was open, laid out as it is in the photo above.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10028″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Closer Examination
As this is not a forensic analysis (but a fun way of practicing skills for real) I can of course pick the knife up with my bare hand and take a closer look.
It’s an inexpensive, Chinese-made stainless steel knife with wooden scales and tarnished brass trim. It’s quite well made for the type, which suggests an older knife rather than one of the modern, flimsier types that you will find on the market today. Maybe mid-1990s vintage?
The blade itself has been modified by the looks of it.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10029″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Modified Blade
It has been significantly shortened, and is now around 60mm in length. It looks like it has been re-shaped to make it into a slightly narrower profile, and a longer tip. There are scratch marks where it has been sharpened with something coarse, possibly a rough file or dry oilstone.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10032″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]
Moving Out
Nothing else comes up after removing the leaf litter for the surrounding 3m or so, and the dog is still gently whining (in the way that only a German Shepherd can). It’s time to cast the net wider and look up rather than at my feet.
The spruces surround the clearing have been trimmed of their dry, dead lower branches – probably for kindling in the same way that I do it in this video. A little further out there are signs that larger branches have been snapped off, and marks where a few tentative swings with a hatchet or large knife have been made against a dead tree.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10025″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”10027″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Reading the rest
A wider sweep reveals more of the same – broken or sawn branches and evidence of firewood collection. There is no apparent sign of shelter-building from natural materials, so if somebody did sleep out alongside this fire then they probably used a bivvy bag, tarp, tent or hammock. There was no obvious evidence of rope marks on the trees, but I only gave them a very cursory examination – there were certainly quite a few that were substantial enough to support a tarp or hammock setup.
Just how much detail one would go into for a site like this depends very much on the reason for you searching it. If it is a possible crime scene then a forensic analysis must be made and records taken of all associative, trace and transient evidence found. The records of the movements and actions of the initial searchers will need to be accounted for too – Locard’s exchange principle still holds true, even in the middle of nowhere.
If however the site is discovered whilst in active pursuit of a subject where time is critical then a rapid analysis to discover if it is relevant to the current investigation can be made within a few minutes. This will at least help those officers decide if it is worth further investigation and exploitation, or if it is just an unrelated or historic site.
This particular camp was probably made sometime between late 2016 and autumn 2017, judging by the depth of leaf litter covering both the knife and fire scar. This is based on my experience in this particular woodland though, and of course is a very vague estimate. As sites like this age it is increasingly difficult to accurately age them as time passes, especially without other evidence that could be used to date it (expiration dates on discarded food packets maybe, or algae/moss growth on items moved or used during the camp activity).[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Anybody missing a knife?
It looks like somebody has gone to some significant effort to modify or repair this knife, and if you think you know who owned it then please get in touch directly.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Our Courses
If you work in a law enforcement, investigation or security field and think that we could do something to help you do your job then please get in touch directly.
Not all of our tracking courses are open to the general public – but the courses and events with public dates should be listed below:[/vc_column_text][product_category per_page=”12″ columns=”4″ orderby=”rand” order=”ASC” category=”tracking-courses”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, EST Framework, Mountain General, Tracking
Survival Tips for Travellers
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
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Survival Tips For Travellers
Quick tips that SHOULD work for anybody travelling to anywhere
Earlier this week I was asked by a writer for an upcoming Lonely Planet book called Travel Goals. The request was for some simple tips on ‘wilderness survival’ and…, well I’ll let you read for yourself:[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]As you have probably guessed – what Lonely Planet wanted was somebody to write some unique content for them (for free) and then for them to make money from selling that content as one of the ‘expert voices’ in the book. Apparently they “never pay interviewees (they benefit in terms of exposure)“. Well, quite. Exposure can be a dangerous thing – too much of it and it can kill you. That’s why our survival courses always include some training in awareness and prevention of hypothermia.I am getting in touch as I am currently looking to include an ‘expert voice’ in a feature I am writing for a new Lonely Planet book called Travel Goals.
The feature is on survival in the wilderness, including around five/six expert tips. I’m afraid, though, that there is a fairly tight turnaround and I would need your input by tomorrow, if possible – so sorry for the short notice!
These are the points I’d love to cover and have your opinion on:
– What would be your top tips for surviving in the wilderness? Please feel free to go into step-by step detail on everything from foraging (and what to watch out for) to lighting a fire without matches, building a shelter, using medicinal plants, using a map and compass, mountain navigation, river crossings, etc. Our aim is to present you as the expert here and hopefully give you (and Wales!) some great exposure.
I look forward to hearing from you.
However, it prompted me to write this post – are there any generic survival tips I can give for people travelling the globe? Something quick and easy to read and as applicable to someone travelling to Mongolia as it would be to Mali? Tips that would work in Belgium or Belize?
It turns out I can. So here are some of those top travelling survival tips – given away to you for free – but I like you, so it’s OK.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”7761″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Knowledge weighs nothing
It’s easy to get distracted by shiny equipment and expensive outdoor toys, but the really important survival skills rely on good decision making and improvisation. Basic first aid training is easy to access and the lifesaving basics of being able to clear an airway, stop a major bleed and perform CPR requires only a few hours of training and either very basic or improvised equipment. When I teach people about survival in different environments there is always a lot more time spent on learning how to make good decisions and plan well rather than relying on gear and equipment.
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Pay attention to maps
Unless you’re going out do something like climb a mountain or travel along a certain route it’s unlikely that you will be carrying a detailed map of the area with you. Smartphones and online map sources are great but rely on access to the internet, or at the very least a functioning device with a charged battery. You can at least retain a good idea of what is around you by paying attention to any tourist or information maps you pass – probably found at ‘hub’ sites like fuel stops, railway and bus stations and some tourist sites. You don’t have to memorise each one, but it’s worth checking where important places are relative to your current position – which direction is the nearest town where you are likely to find medical care? Is that waterfall more than, or less than, halfway along the next section of trail? Does this road head more to the north, or more to the east? It may seem trivial at the time but being able to quickly orientate yourself in the direction of the nearest help will remove a lot of confusion and uncertainty from an emergency situation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”7157″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Carry the fire with you
If you are travelling to somewhere where there is an outside chance that if you are stranded you may need to light a fire to save your life then carry some form of firelighting with you. This could just be a box of matches, but it would be better to carry something that’s easy to use, is reliable and doesn’t weigh very much. It’s also worth taking something to help get that fire going – dry firewood can always be gathered without cutting tools, but finding dry tinder can be very hard in some environments. When I travel to places like that I take several cigarette lighters (the type with a spark wheel) and scatter them throughout my kit along with some strips of bicycle innertube. They’re cheap, light and small and you can put one in your first aid kit, one in your rucksack lid and one in something you ALWAYS have with you – like the bag you carry your camera in perhaps?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”9043″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
File a ‘flight plan’
When travelling in remote places away from other humans and access to reliable communications the best chance of someone getting help to you when you need is from somebody reporting you missing or overdue. If you are planning on returning to a hostel or other accommodation after completing a hike or other excursion see if there is a facility for you to leave notes of your intended route, your details and when you expect to be home. That way if you don’t return then there is at least SOMEBODY who will send help to the right area. You MUST make sure that you check in with that person when you get back from your trip – plenty of SAR missions have been sent out in search of somebody who had just forgotten to tell their accommodation that they were back safely![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”8976″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
You don’t have to go far to get into trouble
When most people start to think about ‘survival situations’ they tend to picture themselves as a castaway on some strangely uninhabited island or shivering atop a remote mountain. The reality is more likely to come from doing something fairly ‘safe’, like hiking along a trail not too far from a busy tourist area or exploring an area away from where you left your kit. A broken ankle or just misplaced footwear can incapacitate you very quickly in a place where you thought was ‘just a short walk’. Don’t assume the survival situation will be a big, dramatic moment – it’s going to arrive dressed up as something fairly boring and ordinary. Consider the ‘penalty of failure’ for what you’re about to do – although considering and working within that risk are an important part of any adventure.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Make Good Decisions at the Right Times
Survival training is fun. It often involves knives and fire and learning weird and fun skills in the woods or halfway up a mountain. But that’s not the lesson that we hope our course participants take away with them – what we want is for them to take away one VERY important lesson:
MAKE
GOOD
DECISIONS
Good decisions before you go out. Good decisions whilst you are there. Good decisions when you are back at home and planning the next trip. That’s all it is really – and the single best survival tip I can give any traveller is to learn how to make good decisions. That might mean learning about the potential environmental risks of the country you are travelling to – or how to do some basic first aid so you can make good decisions about whcih way round D,R,A,B, and C go.
I can outline every potential survival situation here, but you can take a good look at where you’re going to, what you’re planning to do when you get there and then decide if you are equipped to make those decisions yet.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Some of our public survival courses
[/vc_column_text][product_category per_page=”12″ columns=”4″ orderby=”rand” order=”ASC” category=”survival-courses”][/vc_column][/vc_row]- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, EST Framework, Mountain General, Personal, Skills, Survival
COURSE REPORT: Woodcrafter Course July 2018
Wednesday, 01 August 2018
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COURSE REPORT: Woodcrafter Course July 2018
The Woodcrafter – our original and long-established 2-day bushcraft and campcraft course – remains one of our most popular courses. The July 2018 course was a mixture of rain, sun and smoke – but everyone seemed to survive and have a great time!
The other course photos and report from the July Woodcrafter course can be found over on our new partner site – outdoorprofessional.co.uk.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”9207″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”9211″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”9213″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”9210″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_btn title=”Learn more at OutdoorProfessional.co.uk” color=”warning” align=”center” button_block=”true” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Foutdoorprofessional.co.uk%2Fcampcraft-bushcraft%2Fcourse-report-woodcrafter-l1-campcraft-july-2018%2F||target:%20_blank|”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Upcoming Woodcrafter Course Dates
[/vc_column_text][product id=”7338″][/vc_column][/vc_row]- Published in All Blog Posts, Behind The Scenes, Bushcraft General, Course Reports, EST Framework, Skills
Course report – Wild Camping Weekend June 2018
Monday, 18 June 2018
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Course Report – Wild Camping Weekend
Photos and notes from our June 2018 Snowdonia Wild Camping Weekend
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Last weekend I was joined by Richard, Allan and Amy for our 2018 Mountain Wild Camping course in the hills of Snowdonia. This course has two learning outcomes – planning and preparing for a wild camping trip in the British mountains and going through one or more iterations of the essential skills of this part of mountaincraft – finding a camping site, sourcing clean water, dealing with weather, dealing with toilet issues and everything else.We keep the group ratios fairly low on this course to make sure that we don’t have too much of an impact on the mountain environment, and to ensure a better experience for the course participants.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9011″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9016″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9031″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Day One
We met up at one of our favourite North Wales eateries- the excellent and friendly Moel Siabod Cafe and sat down with the maps to discuss our options. This is an intrinsic part of the course, and route planning and the logistics of plotting a circular or linear route needed to be looked over. We went through the options of walking from the cafe itself, of catching a bus to a different valley or even some convoluted system involving shuttling cars back and forth to walk between two points. In the end we settled on a circular route, starting from a little further down the road. The combination of time available and a mixed forecast (rain/wind and poor visibility at either end of the trip with a relatively dry and settled overnight period) led us to choosing a route that kept us at a fairly low altitude for the first part of the day before climbing up to somewhere a little more remote later on.
After going through our respective kit choices – and a shake-down of my own kit to show how I could remove 300g or so of unnecessary weight (my pack weight as a leader was around 13kg ‘dry’, and about 16kg ‘wet’/including food and water) – we set off into the hills.
The first section followed the track (Sarn yr Offeiriad) over the hill from Capel Tan-y-Garth to Dolwyddelan, climbing up through oak woodland and skirting the remains of slate quarries before descending back down amidst deep, dark forests and mossy boulders. We diverted off into some overhanging trees for lunch, hiding from the rain and going through a ‘Hudsons Bay Start’ by testing out stoves, filters and a few other key bits of kit before we traveled too far from civilisation and the option to fix/solve any problems caused by faulty or missing kit.
As we arrived at the edge of the village of Dolwyddelan the skies cleared, the sun came out and we took the opportunity to dry our bags and waterproofs out for half an hour in the beer garden of Y Gwydyr. Years of walking in wet places have taught me that if you have the opportunity to ‘reset’ and dry off equipment you should always take it – you’ll be glad of it when you’re sorting through your kit inside an otherwise dry tent later that evening!
The next section of path took us up behind Castell Dolwyddelan and into the woods under the southern flank of Moel Siabod. We dodged fallen trees, performed a river crossing or two and started to discuss the plans for the evening – camp low alongside a lake and risk the midges but avoid the wind, or go high and hope to find a flat, sheltered spot? We chose the latter option and strode on into the bogs and tussocks of Cwm Edno.
We headed out for a small stand of trees partway along the cwm, hoping to find a flat spot in the lee of the pines. In the end we found a near-perfect spot; close-cropped grass, relatively flat and with a decent water source not too far away. Crucially we were also well out of sight of roads and habitation where we could practice a true leave-no-trace ethic and leave only some flattened grass as signs of our overnight stay.
With a few hours left until sunset we pitched the tents, cooked dinner and watched the clouds scud by over the Moelwyns and Moel Siabod.
Our camping spot was about 1 km short of the crash site of Douglas Dakota EI-AFL at Bwlch Y Rhediad. This airliner crashed into the side of the mountain here in 1952, killing all 23 passengers and crew on board.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9039″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9036″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9015″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Day Two
The night passed peacefully, with some gentle rain at around 5am finally forcing me to close the tent porch. The weather was deteriorating though, with the forecast rain and stronger winds looking almost certain. The visibility had also dropped down to a few hundred metres and the low clouds scraped over the top of Carnedd y Cribau just to our north – time for a quick breakfast and careful packing of kit to make sure everything important stayed dry!
After striking camp, and making sure that we had left nothing behind, we set off once again into the marsh and tussocky grass on the floor of the cwm, heading for the sanctuary of the sides of Carnedd y Cribau – dry ground, shorter grass and easier walking with heavy packs.
Next up was a gentle rollercoaster of rocks, small ponds and handrailing a fenceline over to Bwlch Rhiw’r Ychen in slowly worsening weather and visibility down a dozen metres or so. This continued as we climbed up to the summit of Moel Siabod, strong winds buffeting us from the south-west and turning this section of the trip into something verging on Type-2 fun.
We topped out on the 872m summit, hanging around long enough to touch the top of the cairn and grab a photo before starting the descent back to Capel Curig, dropping below the clouds and enjoying the views down over Plas y Brenin and the rest of the valley.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9042″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9013″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9043″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Mountain Wild Camping Course is slightly unusual in our range of skills courses in that most of the content is not taught in the abstract – it’s done for real. We’re not discussing key subjects with theoretical scenarios, we’re doing things in the same environments that the course participants will be visiting and working in. We’re plotting a route into the mountains of Snowdonia, responding to the conditions that are presented to us and practicing good mountaincraft to keep ourselves safe.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]- Published in All Blog Posts, Course Reports, Mountain General
Why tracking doesn’t work for misper SAR in the UK
Wednesday, 13 June 2018
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Why tracking doesn’t work for Misper SAR in the UK
(And why every SAR team member needs to learn basic tracking skills)
Here we go… this post will attract a minimum of two types of response:
1. “you don’t know what you’re talking about, if your skills were as good as mine you could follow a flea across a glacier”
2. “tracking is too slow/doesn’t work/is overrated”
Well, quite.
Both views have some validity, and that’s the point of this post.
Tracking, within the context of SAR/non-combat scenarios, is often represented by evangelists who want to present tracking as a panacea to locating any human OR by those who have sworn off it having tried the techniques (sold to them on a course) on a live operation and found that it just slows everything down and eats up resources. Each side will defend their own hilltop to the last man – neither attitude being actually that helpful to achieving the end goal.
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Looking for Jim
Let’s consider Jim. Jim wasn’t actually called Jim, wasn’t necessarily a him and didn’t necessarily have this motivation – but Jim is roughly based on a real person and a real job.
******
Jim knows this forest well and runs here regularly. He likes to drive into the forest, park at one of the secluded public car parks and head off into the woods for a 5-10km run along the paths and forest roads.
It’s 06:44 and he has just locked the car and has set off on the trail leading to the lake. It’s a last-minute decision but it’s a trail he knows well.
At 08:44 Jim’s wife is wondering what time he will be back. At 11:30 she is really starting to get worried and at 12:37 she tentatively rings 999 and asks for the Police.
By 14:00 a police officer has contacted her to see if Jim has made contact yet. By 15:00 a PolSA (Police Search Advisor) has started to co-ordinate the early response to this incident, and by 17:00 a police officer in a vehicle has discovered Jim’s car in the secluded car park. It’s sat safely amongst the slamming of car doors and shouts of dog walkers, families with kids on bikes and mountain bikers returning or leaving their vehicles at the beginning or end of their forest adventures.
At 17:32 a message is sent through SARCALL to the local volunteer search and rescue team and the incident moves to the next level of response.
******
It’s a fairly standard missing person callout – someone without any previous indications of despondency, medical distress or other factor goes out into a relatively remote area for a short activity and just doesn’t return to their vehicle, and a steady but measured response unfurls from the emergency services – allowing for various scenarios but also not assuming immediately that Jim is dying in a ditch, and it’s most likely to be a miscommunication between Jim and his wife, and Jim is happily doing something blissfully unaware of the multi-agency search developing in the forest.
The volunteer Search and Rescue (volSAR) team will follow their own protocol for calling the team members together, establishing a search control/staging area and gathering other assets – dogs, helicopters, even drones. A Search Manager will speak with the PolSA, Jim‘s wife and possibly anyone else involved in the response thus far. This will lead the Search Manager to come up with a variety of scenarios in the following categories:
- Jim is in the area, but stationary and possibly in medical distress (or worse)
- Jim is in the area but mobile (either in a good cognitive state or otherwise)
- Jim is somewhere completely different (Rest of World)
Search Managers may be good but they are not omniscient so they must focus on the first two categories – Jim is somewhere out there in an area they can search with the resources they have now, and the resources they are likely to have in the future.
So they work out a search area, based on a combination of barriers to travel, previous search incident data for profiles similar to Jim, his own patterns of behaviour and fitness and what can be accomplished in the next few hours and days. They have a Last Known Point (LKP) – Jim‘s car, as he HAD to be there in order to park it and run off somewhere. He did this unseen by anyone else (as far as the Search Manager can know) but it gives them an Initial Planning Point (IPP) to set a radius around and begin the process of planning search areas, calculating probability and the other wizardry and dark arts of Search Theory.
The next steps are a combination of good personal skills exercised by both SAR team members on the ground and their party leaders and data gathering/handling. Search parties are deployed to an area or areas with a brief of what Search Control expects them to do – it might be a ‘hasty’ (fast search along trails and tracks to ensure that the misper isn’t lying in plain sight) or an area search of a section of woodland or open ground marked out on the map. They perform their search brief, return to control and pass on the information they gathered. This feeds back into the search plan and a new tasking might be generated.
Rinse, and repeat. Until either Jim is found or a decision is made to stop searching for Jim.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8781″ img_size=”300×300″ alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8973″ img_size=”300×300″ add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8972″ img_size=”300×300″ add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Deploying the trackers
The above is probably familiar to anyone involved in misper SAR around the world. A person leaves their car in a busy parking area, heads off into increasingly ‘wild’ terrain and doesn’t return. They had to leave SOME sign of their passage surely, so couldn’t trained trackers be deployed to go out, find those signs of passage and link them together into SOME kind of narrative?
When it comes to looking for humans and the physical signs they leave behind on the ground (training humans to search by scent has been largely unsuccessful and unpleasant for all involved) there are two things a tracker will hope to find:
- Prints (foot or occasionally hand, often referred to as a subject-print) – including partial prints, vague smears on muddy banks and impressions left in soft surfaces
- Physical sign – everything from vegetation bent at unnatural angles and broken off in unusual ways, foliage turned over the wrong way by a trailing foot or hand and even broken cobwebs and a thousand other clues
Finding signs of some human passage through an area isn’t that hard – in a few hours you can train somebody to look for the obvious signs of a track in most terrain. It’s the noise-to-signal ratio that matters – which of these dozen prints or physical signs belong to your misper and which are just the dogwalkers and hikers?
In the above scenario any SAR tracker deployed as part of the search would either hope to find a print or series of prints that they could, with good certainty, assign to Jim and use for tracking further down the trail.
In an ideal world they would be able to find out exactly what brand, model and size of running shoe Jim wore that day, if they had any unique wear patterns and even what clothing he was wearing, which snacks/gels he carried and anything else he might discard by the trailside. They might even be able to get a calibrated photograph of a print from somewhere at Jim‘s home.
It isn’t an ideal world though – and Jim‘s wife doesn’t know what shoes he wore other than “the blue ones”. He’s a size 11, but sometimes 10. He probably took a water bottle but maybe not. She can’t find his expensive GPS watch she bought for him last Christmas though… And so it goes. Information dribbles in over time and analysis is made as to how accurate or useful it is.
On the ground
The gravel area around the car has been heavily trod since Jim was declared missing. Several members of the public parked close by and walked either side of the car, the police poked around the vehicle when they first found it and again when they forced entry to see if there was any clue inside to Jim‘s whereabouts. The volSAR team members had a good poke around too. Any hope of discovering a sterile print is probably lost – but what about further out?
As the laid surface of the car park ends it turns back to mud and soil and there is a chance of finding a print at the start of the various trails that radius out from the parking area. There are plenty of partial prints – from the public, police and volSAR. They are layered down into the damp soil and the most recent start to obscure the previous ones. There is a bottleneck at the start of most trails and the prints cluster together. It takes time and careful examination to find a few candidates that match the vague criteria for a Jim-print: running shoe, roughly UK size 10-11 and laid roughly twelve hours previously. With several possible trails and a limited number of trackers they must make a decision about where to move to next.
Meanwhile the search parties move along the trails, sweep through open areas at a regular spacing and gradually reduce the Probability of Area (POA, the likelihood that Jim is in that bit of woodland or open ground) for their tasked areas. They trample and crush, make new trails through vegetation and turn untouched wilderness into a footpath – but move far ahead and faster than the tracker teams.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”8974″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Limited Resources
The enemy for Search Managers is not nature herself or the elements – it’s depletion of limited resources:
Time and Daylight
Jim could be lying somewhere in a poor medical condition and getting worse by the second. Eventually he will reach a point where his recovery is unlikely and then expire. All searches run the possibility of becoming a recovery rather than a rescue if too much time passes before the search subject is located. A slow and methodical search would probably find that misper EVENTUALLY, but the whole point of SAR is to try and locate that person and help them.
The sun is also setting over in the west and it’s not unusual for volSAR to not be called on until the end of the day – to allow enough time for the misper to be located by the initial response, or just wander home under their own steam. As soon as darkness falls the whole job has become harder – reducing the effectiveness of the searchers and potentially compromising their safety.
Personnel Availability
Voluntary SAR teams all suffer the issue of availability of their team members. You don’t join unless you are able to help and attend callouts, but the 24/7 nature of volSAR means that not everybody will be able to attend every callout. Work, family, health and even finances can keep a team member away for part or all of a search and a volSAR team that boasts 50 members might be only able to field 15-25 at one time. Those team members on the ground also have a limited time they can search for – whether due to fatigue/operational effectiveness or just the demands of their ‘real’ lives. Eventually every volSAR team member will need to return home and a Search Manager cannot guarantee how long they will have that team member for. A good Search Manager will start to stack up potential reinforcement and replacements from neighbouring teams as soon as it looks like a search will run for that long.
Skills
Specialist search teams are a boon for any Search Manager, but use of them can pull resources away from other parts of the operation. The moment the search moves to near-water (T6 or T7 terrain) then a decision needs to be made about whether that area is left unsearched or to redploy part of the search teams for water search – something that cannot be done without several team members plus specialist equipment and PPE.
Dogs are another exhaustable resource – they can only work for so long, and although they can cover a large acreage quickly they can still only ‘search’ part of the area at once.
So with the above resources dwindling, does a dedicated tracking cell within a volSAR team actually work? Where and when would they deploy – prior to the hasty teams and when the minimal amount of damage had been done to what trail remains? Are trackers a specialist search asset to be deployed from the SAR toolkit like Swiftwater Rescue Technicians and dogs?
You’re burning daylight and with a limited number of searchers available for the next few hours is it appropriate to separate out a few tracking-trained team members to faff around on the fringes with elastic bands and sticks?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”8975″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”8976″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
The cohesive approach
Although we teach tracking as a distinct skill from search techniques as part of the EST Framework courses I do not think the two can be completely separated. By the very nature of the skills required a good searcher can be a good tracker, and vice versa. The skills of Land-SAR search (searching the cube, staying in formation, personal safety) are all essential skills for a SAR-tracker, but an understanding of the importance of certain patterns (or indeed, breaks in those patterns) can highlight certain things to a tracking-trained searcher.
When a tracker is either looking for a specific print or any relevant sign of passage then she or he can pick them out from the background scenery and analyse them – if they are also searching then they can do that in-context and feedback information to their Party Leader of Search Control.
Basic tracking skills and an understanding of both the benefits and limitations of those skills within a SAR context should be seen as an essential skill for any volSAR ground team member (and indeed, understood by Search Managers and Search Coordinators).
Any sign of Jim?
What if every team member on the ground in this search had been given some basic training in tracking (e.g. how to extrapolate an entire print from several partial prints, or to spot the signs of passage by an adult human through dense vegetation etc) and had been deployed by a Search Manager who also understood this?
What if those initial hasty parties had been on the lookout not only for an adult male runner somewhere within their search radius, but also slowing down to check likely track-traps such as the edges of puddles or choke points between trees? Or if they had performed their first search around the edges of the car park, looking for candidates for a Jim-print?
This is how it SHOULD be done, but rarely is. Tracking is often seen as a separate skill or occasionally an afterthought when previous efforts are proving fruitless – but it should be part of the mindset of any volSAR deployment where the misper could possibly leave sign of their passage. Too much emphasis is often put on looking for the body of the misper, not a 20% partial print that could become the next LKP and shift the whole search in a positive direction.
How to deploy tracking in a SAR operation
This is part of the guidance that we give to candidates on the Level 3 Search Operations Management Course but is relevant for anyone involved in planning search operations and deployment of SAR assets for missing person search:
- Tracking awareness should be seen as a vital skill for all trained searchers deployed on the ground and training should reflect this, challenging team members and preventing skill-fade whilst promoting personal skill development.
- Search teams should be equipped and prepared for tracking re-deployment in the field.
- Acquiring information for tracking-trained search teams should be a vital part of witness and family interview techniques and efforts made to isolate footwear type and shape – social media photos, prints at home and so on.
- Tasking of search parties should reflect the potential usefulness of tracking, and time allowed for an initial search around the IPP for potential print candidates.
- Be ready to re-deploy search teams to another area/track if they discover a potential trail on the ground – this highlights the need for Search Managers to have a good awareness of the limitations of tracking and the relative importance of the information being fed back in to Search Control.
For most applications tracking should be seen as a vital SAR skill, not a specialism and subset of strange folk with feathers sticking out of their gear and castration rings on a trekking pole. Of course training contact time is limited for volSAR teams, but once those skills have been gained they can be maintained fairly easily.
SAR Tracking isn’t THAT hard
Unlike some of my clients, nobody is going to be shooting at you whilst you are tracking within a SAR context. Your search subject is unlikely to be actively trying obscure their tracks or slow pursuers down with traps and IEDs, and they aren’t a small and fast mammal scurrying across a forest floor without even turning over a dead leaf.
Humans (well, ones not trying to avoid capture) are pretty lazy and bumbling. We step into soft mud, scrape our feet across mossy logs and boulders and trample over leaves and twigs crushing them into the floor under our bulk. We wade through long grass and vegetation turning the leaves and blades of grass over to flag our passage and even discard plastic and paper objects from our pockets as we walk.
It’s why our Level 1 Tracking Technician course is run over only 3 days, and that also includes crossover with navigation skills and interoperability with other organisations and a final exercise – tracking shouldn’t be seen as a mysterious and ethereal skill, but nor should it be dismissed out of hand because your deployment plan doesn’t allow for it.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
TL;DR
Tracking is good and useful within a misper SAR context in the UK, but is often misrepresented by poor deployment and inflexibility of existing deployment procedures. There is also a lack of understanding by Search Managers who see it as an ineffective delay in the search operation and don’t ask pertinent questions when speaking to informants and witnesses. Tracking-awareness should be a vital part of any SAR search party members and be an intrinsic part of the training programme.
Tracking also has many limitations, and more so in the densely-populated UK where volSAR teams have to try and identify a potential subject-print early on in the search rather than hoping to the find the ‘sign of passage’ in the wilderness and following the resultant trail.
It’s also not that hard, and with a bit of training most competent SAR party members can become effective trackers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, EST Framework, Mountain, SAR, Skills, Tracking
Why is foraging still so popular in the U.K?
Tuesday, 14 November 2017
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Why is foraging still so popular in the U.K?
For a decade our foraging and wild foods courses are filled – but why?
My name is Richard Prideaux, and I am a forager.
It’s not much of a confession really – through Original Outdoors I have been leading foraging courses and walks for a decade or more, as well as working as a supplier of foraged plants from a local organic estate and working with chefs and restaurants to find new ways to use wild plants, fungi and lichens in dishes served to the most discerning of clients. It is safe to say that a large part of my working life outdoors has been linked to foraging and wild food, even if peripherally on our bushcraft courses. But none of that would have been possible if there hadn’t been such a demand for information and training in this ancient activity – so with shops and food suppliers all around us, why is there such a cultural draw towards edible plants and fungi?
I have two theories on this, and they require a little unpacking. They may also be complete cobblers, but allow me to explain…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7768″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7772″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7769″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
The TV Chef
The first is what I call the ‘Fearnley-Whittingstall Effect’. Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall is inextricably linked with the long-running cooking, downsizing and Dorset-promoting stable of TV shows, books, courses and eateries bearing the ‘River Cottage’ name. The first series (River Cottage) was broadcast in 1999 and featured Hugh (Ferrously-Washinghaste) embark on a life living in a gamekeeper’s cottage in the grounds of Slape Manor near Netherbury, Dorset – growing vegetables, raising livestock and trying the life of a smallholder. There was an emphasis on barter-economies, food as payment and self-sufficiency where possible in the narrative of the show. Subsequent series expanded into the wider world of smallholdings and downsizing leading to the River Cottage empire as it stands today. It is pretty undeniable that River Cottage was the big break for Hugh Ferretingly-With…(OK, I’ll stop now I promise) and led to his rise as a campaigner for everything from sustainability within the fishing industry to highlighting the standards and conditions of commercial poultry-rearing. Hjs profile and brand has genuinely done some good, and I remain a firm fan. But River Cottage wasn’t his first TV escapade – that came several years earlier in the form of A Cook on the Wild Side.
This was a wild food-adventure in two parts, the first being a tour of the countryside in a converted Land Rover (the Gastro-Wagon), hunting for and cooking edible plants, fungi and protein in the feathered, furred, finned and shelled form. This was broadcast in 1995, with the second series moving to a narrow boat cruising the waterways of Britain. This is where I think the Fearnley-Whittingstall Effect began, not with River Cottage. When I speak to clients and interested folk about foraging in the U.K, and particularly on television, A Cook on the Wild Side does seem to have found it’s way into the group consciousness about foraging but is often confused as being part of a River Cottage series. I think the second-life that TV shows have online as YouTube clips has no small part to play in this, and you can find most of the series online in some form or another. It’s over 20yrs old at this point, but the content all holds up and the accompanying recipe book is still on our list of recommended foraging books.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was obviously not the first person to really popularise foraging in the U.K. – my personal belief is that honour goes to Richard Mabey and his seminal Food For Free, first published in 1972 but the very first book I pull out of the bag when I talk about foraging field guides. His work came at exactly the right time, coinciding with the birth of the sustainability movement and the post-hippy ‘hobbitification’ of the British countryside by downsizers, small-scale farmers and those seeking The Good Life. A guide to the most commonly found edible plants, fungi, seaweeds and coastal foragables in the U.K. with background information and illustrations that just draw the reader in. It was hugely successful, and is still popular – but I think Hugh had a greater effect just by being on television. In the same way the Ray Mears did not invent the term bushcraft (or bush craft), or even write THE book on the subject – his early appearances on the BBC magazine show Tracks in 1994 led to the many shows that firmly embedded him in the national consciousness as “that bushcraft bloke”. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with A Cook on the Wild Side and River Cottage did not invent the idea of foraging or wild food, or indeed first bring the idea to the modern public – but they did create the content that most people identified with.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7776″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7775″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7774″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
An Ancient Urge?
The next theory is that of a dormant instinct embedded in all Homo sapiens (you lot). I think we can safely say that we’ve done quite well as a species – we’ve certainly killed off (literally) the competition from other hominin species over the last few hundreds of thousands of years. Reassuringly we are also deemed to be the species of “least concern” by International Union for Conservation and Nature (according to the IUCN Red List). So we have that going for us.
Our success is built on many things – language, development and use of tools, group communication and shared goals, the ability to discuss and visualise something we haven’t seen. We ‘won’ the evolutionary race (a dubious honour) through adaptation and improvisation, through problem-solving and out-thinking our stronger, faster and more resilient hominid cousins.
How long we have been doing that for is under some debate, and new evidence suggests that we may have evolved as a distinct species as much as 350,000 years ago (or even earlier, it’s not difficult to get anthropologists arguing over this). The broad point is that we have a few hundred thousand years under our belts, and the ancestors we evolved from (and alongside, there’s plenty of overlap between the timeline of species) shared a lot of our physical and mental characteristics. To achieve any of what we have we needed to fuel ourselves. This means eating, and prior to the invention of farming (probably around 20,000 years ago, depending on your definition of farming), that meant foraging.
To wander through a forest, an open scrubland, a meadow or along a river or seashore and be able to spot the edible or useful plants and the potentially harmful ones is certainly a skill, but it should be one we are still hard-wired for. There is a theory that any ability we have to visualise a mental map of things that are useful to us (our home in relation to the local shops or pub, or the layout of our workplace or home) comes from the mental maps our ancestors created to locate and memorise the ethno-botanical resources that we needed for daily life. It’s likely a paleolithic resident of the British Isles would know the likely spots to find the fungi that were good to eat after the autumn rains, or the trees that provided thorns that could be used for fishhooks. When every physical object you use or create has to come from nature you need to know where to find it – and without paper or Google maps it needs to be stored in your head.
The way we process information and ‘data’, and the biochemical system that follows on from that processing, is built on our extensive history of foraging and hunting for our food and gathering the raw materials for everything else we used. The part of our timeline where we live in communities of more than 60-100 people, grew our food in fields and penned enclosures and exchanged labour in return for food and resources provided by others is just a blip at one end. It can be argued that the way we live now is essentially an experiment, and some would also argue that we’re probably failing at it.
But what has that got to do with modern humans paying good money for a man with a beard to lead them through a forest and point at edible weeds?
Okay, so this is the theory I work to – we are interested in foraging for the same reason we enjoy sitting next to a campfire poking the embers with a stick. It is quite literally what we are built to do. We evolved to do just that, and any parallels we can find in modern human activity (Hunting for Pokemon anyone? How about chasing down other hominins over obstacles and through muddy watercourses in Tough Mudder events?) is not coincidental – we’re just finding ways to exercise our hunter-gatherer brains and exploit the chemical reward system of dopamine. We pursue the idea of foraging for the same reason we do other things that bring us closer to ‘nature’ or ‘the landscape’ – deep down we know that is where we came from and what we are part of. Any ideas we have that we are civilised urban beings separate from the mud, twigs and rain ‘out there’ is justification after the fact – we removed ourselves from nature so we need to justify it as ‘development’ and ‘progress’. We’re still just shaved apes after all.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
A Prime Time to Forage
So that’s it. It’s based on my own experience which is 99% from the U.K., and no doubt I have some unconscious bias that makes me overlook something that is blindingly obvious to you. The places are already filling up for our 2018 Foraging and Wild Foods courses as people buy places as gift vouchers for friends and family and I have a couple of TV and media enquiries about doing consultancy on different shows (as happens every year). The interest in foraging shows no sign of slowing, and I think it comes from cultural highlighting of the subject in the right way at the right time (Sunday or Tuesday evenings at around 8pm?) married with the innate need to hunt for our resources in the wild woods.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][product id=”7241″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][product id=”7449″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][product id=”7604″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Foraging, Gather
Foraging and Camp Cooking with 16 Hospitality
Friday, 15 September 2017
Foraging and Wild Food with 16 Hospitality
Last year we teamed up with 16 Hospitality for their first external training course – a day of foraging and wild food cooking in the woods.
For 2017 they wanted to push things forward a little and really challenge their learners with something even more challenging. Time for some creative thinking on our part!
After a bit of planning I came up with the following task – create a three-course meal (with two dishes per course) from 90% foraged/wild ingredients.
Oh, and cooked in the woods over an open fire.
And served in a dining room they had to build…
After a short briefing on what they needed to accomplish the group was split down into teams to light the fires, erect the dining area and start identifying the wild plants. From there it was straight into preparing the first ingredients, the game (rabbit and trout) and improvising and problem-solving as they went.
Cooking outdoors over an open fire is always a little challenging. Unpredictable cooking temperatures (and times), a lack of flat working surfaces and just keeping everything clean and maintaining food hygiene standards all need to be worked out. We have been cooking fairly complex meals in the middle of nowhere for over a decade and it’s always good fun to share our experience with those who are more used to working in kitchens and restaurants – but in this case the learners from 16 Hospitality really took to the tasks and were finding solutions to the problems quickly and without prompting.
We love working with companies like 16 Hospitality that really embrace the idea of finding new ways to teach, and of course we will always champion the idea of learning in the outdoor environment.
If you think that we can help with a training day or event for you and your team then please get in touch.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Company News, Course Reports, Foraging
VIDEO: Choosing an Air Rifle Scope
Thursday, 14 September 2017
Choosing an Air Rifle Scope
Over the last 12 months or so we have made a couple of visits to Tonys Camo in Saltney to take advantage of his generosity and create some short videos on buying an air rifle, choosing an airgun caliber and how to zero a scope.
In this video I ask Tony about buying a scope for an airgun, what all of those numbers mean and how much you should spend on a scope.
This is the last video from the footage we have shot so far – but we will return soon to film more!
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Original Outdoors Tutorials, Videos
Do I need to bother with bow drill?
Thursday, 07 September 2017
Bow Drill Skills: Are they worth learning?
One of the skills most associated with the world of ‘bushcraft’ is that of making fire by friction. The image that normally accompanies that description is somebody crouching over a contraption that looks like a fiddle crossed with a rolling pin, furiously sawing back and forth with (ideally) smoke billowing from the base of the device.
This is the ‘bow-drill’ (Bow Drill, Bowdrill, Firedrill, Fire Fiddle etc etc) method and has become inextricably linked with the popular image of bushcraft and survival skills.
We teach this method on our bushcraft courses, and it is often something that clients look forward to and specifically request when we have a free moment in the itinerary and ask them “what next?”.
So we break out some pre-prepared bow drill sets and get down to making some embers…
I’ve found over the years that the course participants normally pick up three very important things from seeing the demonstrations then having a go for themselves:
– It’s a lot harder than it looks to get a consistent rotation of the drill without something going awry
– It’s physically demanding and needs patience
– Success is not guaranteed
With skill, patience and the right materials an experienced user can normally get an ember with less than a minute of actual ‘drilling’ action but it is dependent on several variables all lining up correctly to achieve that.
Why do people want to learn how to do it?
Here are 3 direct quotes about fire by friction/bow-drill from instructors that I have heard over the years:
“This is the most important outdoor skill you can learn”
“If you lose all of your equipment this will save your life”
“If you can’t do this then you are not a real outdoorsman”
A quick trawl through the various bushcraft/wilderness skills Facebook groups, forums, YouTube channels and magazines will come up with statements and comments that might not be as succinct as those above but are along the same lines. Then there are the hundreds of articles, blog posts and videos offering tips and techniques that will improve your chances of success. “Bow Drill” is now one of the keywords of bushcraft, along with “knife”, “axe” and “Ray Mears”. You can even purchase knives with divots in the handle so that you can use it as a bearing block (the top of the ‘drill’) in a dire survival situation.
There is undoubtedly some merit to the bow drill firelighting technique:
– It mostly makes use of materials from the environment, not items carried
– Components can be replaced as they wear out or are damaged
– Does not require electricity, flammable liquids/gas or metal components to use
It is also a truly ‘primitive skill’ and would have been understood by our paleolithic ancestors (or indeed indigenous people around the world today). In a world before lighters, ferrocerium rods or even steel then fire by friction would have been a skill passed down throughout a community and as important as making a blade or finding edible plants.
For the modern outdoorsperson and enthusiast it is touted as being an “essential bushcraft skill” (see instructor quotes above) and it is both expected by bushcraft course participants and a requisite for all good bushcraft and wilderness skills course providers.
Are Bow Drill skills that useful?
Yes.
No.
Maybe.
It depends.
Deciding if something is actually useful is of course dependent on the intended use. In a world where we do have lighters, matches, ferrocerium rods, chemical firelighting, electronic firelighting (you can have a lot of flammable fun with wire wool and a battery) and dozens of ways of keeping them dry the Bowdrill set becomes a little redundant.
But what if you lose all of your other gear?
There is another quote from an eminent instructor that I think answers this quite eloquently:
“If you are stupid enough to lose your lighter and firestriker and get all of your matches wet then you are probably too stupid to learn how to bow drill”
A real survival situation is something you try to avoid by making good decisions and with careful preparation. If you lose your lighter your fallback shouldn’t be to rip the laces out of your boots and start whittling a drill – it should be to call yourself an idiot and then go get the other lighter from your pack. Or the firesteel on your belt or clipped to your pocket. Because you brought multiple firelighting methods, right?
If you are travelling somewhere that it is quite possible that you will find yourself in a situation where lighting a fire will make a big difference to your immediate health or safety then you need to carry a way of making fire.
If you are travelling somewhere that you will have to light a fire to cook on, purify water or perform other basic tasks then you will need to carry MULTIPLE methods of making fire.
Accidents happen. Kit is lost on river crossings or can fall overboard. You might be separated from your pack or kit due to unforeseen circumstances. Things break or get lost due to carelessness. We’re human and things happen. But in the modern age we have so many cheap, lightweight and reliable firelighting methods that there aren’t many reasons not to carry more than one way of making a spark, a flame or an ember.
If I am hiking, canoeing or otherwise moving or working in an environment where fire is either required or desireable I will have on my person or in my kit:
1. Ferrocerium rod and striker (clipped to trouser pocket loop or belt)
2. Disposable lighter with ferro (‘flint’) striker (normally in pouch on belt or in pocket of PFD if canoeing)
3. Lifeboat/windproof matches (2 or 3 packs in various places in rucksack)
I also normally carry some prepared tinder or similar either in waterproof plastic bags or in a waterproof form (such as strips of bicycle innertube).
So if I lose my firesteel or it breaks in two then I can use my lighter. If I lose that too then I can still light a fire using the matches and warm myself whilst simultaneously deciding if I need to re-examine the decision-making process that led to me losing all of my other kit…
But what if it’s unplanned?
There are of course situations where you can find yourself thrust unexpectedly into a genuine survival situation. However, outside of contrived and survival TV shows like Naked and Afraid or Alone the number of possible scenarios where you will need to make a fire and you have arrived there with no other equipment whatsoever are pretty slim:
The Plane Crash
If you were a passenger on the plane then chances are that you hit the ground somewhere close to, if not actually inside, the aircraft itself. A big pile of jagged metal, flammable liquids and materials and batteries, electrical components and probably SOME survival equipment like flares etc. You have plenty of options to explore before you need to start trying fire by friction.
The Stranded Vehicle
In this scenario it is a broken or stuck car or truck somewhere far from external help. It might be deep in winter or high summer in the desert, but as with the downed aircraft scenario you are basically sat in a big shelter/survival kit. It is powered by flammable liquid and needs a battery to keep the engine and ancillary components running. Also – if you are for some reason travelling through such a remote area why haven’t you thrown in a few emergency items for just this scenario?
The River/The Sea
It’s not beyond the realms of possibility for even an experienced kayaker or canoeist to find themselves washed on a beach or riverbank watching their very expensive canoe or kayak, stuffed with their camping and safety kit, drifting away downstream or on a current. Dressed only in a drysuit (at best), some kind of footwear and a PFD (Personal Flotation Device) what are they going to do? Well, if you have decided that yes, a fire is the thing that you need then you should just grab the small firelighting kit from the pocket of your PFD or belt and get cracking on looking for some dry kindling. You didn’t think of this possibility and have found yourself far from help, paddling alone with no provision for possibly falling out of the canoe? Well, natural selection is still in effect, and your corpse might provide food for another creature at least.
The scenarios could continue, but they all come down to either:
1. You will rarely travel without there being SOME other way of making fire around you
2. If you are travelling in a way that you won’t have other items around you – carry fire WITH you.
The root of all of this is that fire by friction and making a bow drill set should be a long way down your list of solutions when the need for a fire arises. It is fiddly and time consuming to make (especially if you need to make natural cordage), requires a lot of skill to use and success is NOT GUARANTEED. It is also quite wasteful of calories and can be very demoralising if not successful. It can be hard enough to get right when well-fed in ideal conditions under a parachute shelter in some pleasant woodland. There are normally aggravating factors in a survival situation, such as injury, lack of food/water and (if fire is required) the risk of hypothermia. Would you be better off building a simple shelter and getting out of the wind, off the cold ground and conserving body heat and energy?
What if I just want to learn how to do it?
That’s fine. It is very rewarding the first time you get an ember, and I admit that I really enjoy watching someone battle through the multiple failures to get to their first glowing coal in the notch of the hearth board. The point of this post is to highlight the difference between an IMPORTANT SKILL and one that is fun to learn and achieve, not to put you off learning how to do it for yourself.
It is also good to learn a skill that connects us with our ancestors and to start off with a pile of wood and maybe some cord and end with a roaring fire. The first time you see it it looks like a magic trick, and I suspect that is part of the reason that so many are interested in learning how to do it for themselves. The first time I saw it I immediately wanted to try for myself – a very similar thing happened the first time I saw someone turn a bowl on a lathe, shoot a bow or play Tomb Raider (a good indicator of my age/generation!).
So, should I bother to learn how to make and use a bow drill set?
This is normally where the demonstration of the bow drill comes to on our courses. After watching several people fail, succeed, get frustrated and learn patience with the technique the mood of the group can be a little less enthusiastic than it was. At this point I go through the points above – where are you going to use this technique? Is it as easy as you thought it would be? Are other methods easier/more reliable? What is your motivation for learning this skill?
The final decision is of course down to the individual user and it is up to you to form your opinions. I’ll leave you with a few things to consider:
- Are your fireskills good enough to reliably make a fire from a bow-drill ember every time?
- If you’re travelling somewhere you will need to light a fire are you carrying enough backup methods?
- If you lose your kit will you still have a firelighting method on your person?
- What’s your motivation for learning this technique?
- Do you need to improve your skills elsewhere too?
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft, Bushcraft General, Personal, Skills
Tracking Training and Awareness with North Wales Police
Thursday, 31 August 2017
Track and Sign Awareness with North Wales Police
A training and skill-sharing session with the NWP Rural Crime Team
A few months ago I was joined by police officers from the North Wales Police Rural Crime Team for a session on track and sign awareness and to discuss techniques and strategies for using tracking in their work in the countryside of North Wales.
I’ve worked with other police forces as a trainer and have run tracking courses for SAR teams and other professional users and it was a pleasure to pass on some techniques they will find useful in their work in the farming and rural community of North Wales – and also to learn a little more about how this team works.
Learning how to interpret the signs left by human activity is like learning a language – you can quite quickly pick up the basics and understand key words and phrases but it takes time to fully understand everything that is being communicated to the reader. Even a short session with an experienced tracker can start to show new things in familiar ground.
We also had the opportunity to discuss subjects such as foraging and wild food, ecology and even the equipment used by outdoor enthusiasts and how a rucksack with an ice-axe or bow saw strapped to the side might appear to an unsuspecting member of the public.
We run a one-day tracking introduction course for the general public:
http://backup.originaloutdoors.co.uk/tracking-courses-uk/
If you or your organisation would like more information or think that we can help put together a bespoke training package then please get in touch:
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Company News, Mountain General, Private Training
How to put together a first aid kit for the outdoors
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
How to put together a first aid kit outdoors
Wilderness personal medical kits
How do you put a first aid kit together for the outdoors? Or a bushcraft first aid kit? Are first aid kits for mountain biking different to ones for kayaking?
Carrying a first aid kit in your rucksack or in your personal kit is pretty difficult to argue against. The problem is – how much do you carry, and what exactly do you carry? Once you start going down the road of visualising every possible emergency medical scenario and wanting to ‘be prepared’ for it. Before long you end up carrying several kilograms of equipment that in all likelihood you will never use – but you somehow feel that you need to.
The reality is actually a lot simpler. There are two important points to remember for outdoor emergency first aid:
- Training is the absolute most important thing you can put your time and money into. Knowledge weighs nothing and the most important lifesaving techniques require good personal skills but little to no equipment.
- If you are on your own in the middle of nowhere then the options open to you self-treatment are actually very limited.
With that mildly-sobering thought in mind – how do you put together a first aid kit for the outdoors?
The answer is dependent on several factors:
- The environment you are travelling too/through and specific hazards it may contain
- The length of trip
- Distance/time to evacuation and medical care in case of emergency
- The number of people (and animals) in the party
- The existing medical conditions of those in the party
- The training and skill level of those in the party
- The activities you are performing
- Your carrying capacity (rucksack, canoe, vehicle, porters etc)
For example – the medical kit for a 5-week sailing voyage to the Lofoten islands would be different to that of a solo lightweight backpacker on a 3-day summer trip in the Cairngorms. For the former a Bag Valve Mask (BVM) and full suture kit would be appropriate but would a little ridiculous for the solo hiker.
I have used various medical kits in my work over the years. In my time in a Mountain Rescue team I carried a small personal first aid kit that contained a minimal number of items and drugs – but it was designed to be pooled with the other kits carried by fellow rescuers to form a larger and more comprehensive kit. I supplemented this with items purchased myself such as Tuffcut shears and nitrile gloves. When working as a remote-area medic as support on long-distance races and outdoor challenges I was either carrying a very comprehensive kit issued by the company employing me, or I was given a budget to supply my own equipment at my own specification. I have also put together my own for various trips, plus also kits for Original Outdoors staff and freelance contractors to use when working with our own clients. Each case has been slightly different…
The easy answer to “what’s the best outdoor first aid kit?” is – they all are. The real skill is choosing or building one that suits where you are going, what you are doing and what you’re doing when you get there. To that end I’ve put together a video on the decision-making process that I go through for any trip or scenario, and the items I carry in one of my personal kits:
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First Aid Kit Contents
The list below is based on the items shown in the video, with links to buy them directly from Amazon. Some of the brands or sizes are slightly different or only a few representations of what I carry. The items are not listed in order of importance, just to roughly match the order from the video.
I’ve also put a link to the Lifesystems first aid kit which is a very similar off-the-shelf kit that I can personally recommend – even if it’s used as a base to add other items to.
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Nitrile Gloves
Get them in any colour other than red or black – you need to be able to see if blood suddenly appears on them when giving a primary or secondary survey as it will steer you towards a major bleed you may have missed.
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Resus Face Shield
An item of personal safety that should be somewhere easy to reach but can also make your CPR technique more effective.
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Anti Bacterial Wipes
Great for cleaning up after dealing with a minor wound and preventing your kit contaminating everything it touches.
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Alcohol Hand Gel
Be aware that carrying alcohol in your first aid kit may cause issues when travelling to countries where alcohol is banned or severely restricted
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Normasol Sachets
Sterile topical solution in sachets for careful application over wider areas.
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Sterile Eye Wash Pods
Sterile topical solution in pods for washing foreign bodies from eyes.
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Fabric Adhesive Dressing Strip
Adhesive dressing strip on a roll for making custom plasters/band-aids for tricky areas like between fingers.
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SteriStrips
Temporary adhesive suture strips for wound closure.
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Blister Plasters
Being able to treat or manage a blister can make the difference between carrying on or turning around to go home
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Non-Adherent Dressings
General use dressings without any adhesive.
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Triangular Bandage
I have yet to use one of these as a sling, but they are quite useful for holding other dressings on or wrapping over wide areas.
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Wound dressings (Various sizes)
Absorbent wound dressings in various sizes
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Travel Mirror
Great for reaching places that the eyeball can’t!
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Glucose Gel
Glucose gel for hypoglycemic emergencies.
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Round-Tip Scissors
Small scissors with rounded ends for safety
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TuffCut Shears
Tough shears for emergency clothing removal
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Tweezers
For removal of small foreign bodies
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Microlance Needles
Tiny sterile needles for making small holes to drain blisters etc
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Disposable Thermometer
Of limited use in a first aid environment but helpful for long-term monitoring of a patient
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Tick Removal Card
For safe removal of ticks
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CAT Tourniquet
Not for general carry and must be trained in use
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SAM Splint
Useful but heavy and other items can be improvised to replace it.
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Lifesystems Mountain Leader First Aid Kit
A comprehensive and well-designed outdoor first aid kit.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, First Aid, Mountain General, Personal, Skills, Tools and Equipment, Videos
UK Knife Law Explained
Sunday, 05 March 2017
UK Knife Law Explained for the Outdoors
UK legal carry law discussed with a former police officer
What can I carry in the UK? Is my knife illegal? What knife can I carry for bushcraft?
The above is a good example of questions we’re asked with regards to knives, axes and what we can carry for working in the outdoors in the U.K.
We of course discuss all of this on our bushcraft courses, but sometimes it’s easier to listen to a discussion than a lecture. For that reason I got one of our instructors, Kevin Field, to talk through his understanding of the current UK knife laws and how they might affect a bushcrafter or other outdoor enthusiast or professional.
Kevin was formerly a police officer, and I am an experienced outdoor instructor – but neither of us is a solicitor and we cannot give formal legal advice. The content in the video is our best understanding and interpretation of the current laws, but it is down to each one of you to do your own research and make sure that what you have in your pocket or bag is legal for your situation.
UK Knife Law Key Points:
- The legal length for a non-locking, folding blade is 3inches/7.62cm
- A knife with legal length can still be deemed an offensive weapon if it can perceived as such by someone else
- Locking folding knives, fixed blade knives and knives longer than 3inches/7.62cm are all illegal for carry in a public place without a further defence
- It is the duty of the person carrying the knife to know and understand the law – ignorance is not a defence
- Access land and public footpaths are also public places
- More information can be found on the gov.uk website
So what can I carry?
Well, the broadest answer is a folding blade, without a locking mechanism of no more than 3inches/7.62cm. That leaves you with something like the Victorinox Swiss Army Knife – however, even though it is not illegal necessarily to carry this as a knife, you could still be accused of carrying an offensive weapon.
The actual wording is:
“It is an offence for any person, without lawful authority or good reason, to have with him in a public place, any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed except for a folding pocket-knife which has a cutting edge to its blade not exceeding 3 inches.” [CJA 1988 section 139(1)]
There are specific defenses listed for the carry of knives outside of the definition above – including use for work, for religious reasons or as part of a national costume. The crucial part here is “without lawful authority or good reason”. What constitutes a ‘good reason’ is very subjective, and can depend on everything from how you act and behave with that item in public to how a member of the public perceives it. It is also not limited to knives, but hatchets, folding saws, ice axes and other sharp/bladed articles that an outdoor enthusiast may use.
Whilst it is impossible to give cast-iron guarantees and advice on what knife or other item you may carry, and how you can carry it, there are some generic situations where it is common for knives to be carried in public space:
- A small, folding locknife with a serrated blade on the harness of a climber or the PFD of a canoe/kayaker for the purpose of cutting through rope, webbing or line in an emergency
- A fixed-blade bushcraft knife being used by somebody camping on land where they have legal permission to do so, and ensuring it is being used safely and responsibly
- A multitool with a locking blade in the toolkit of a mountainbiker at a trail center
- A long filleting knife in the tacklebox of an angler on a pier where the public has access
All of those are fairly common scenarios, and there is a very good chance that a police officer, the Crown Prosecution Service and potentially a judge agreeing that it is a ‘good reason’ for that item to be carried or used in public, in that way, at that time.
But what if that climber still has that knife in their pocket when they sit down to a bowl of goulash in the Siabod Cafe later that day? Or if that bushcrafter forgets they have a knife on their belt when they pop into Tesco on the way home? Could the mountainbiker get into an argument with a stranger whilst adjusting their derailleur and threaten the stranger with the knife on the multitool? Can the angler drop into the pub when walking back home, dropping their tacklebox under the table?
The short answer to all of the above is that they are much more likely to have committed an offence. By making poor decisions, not paying attention to how they are handling the potentially illegal item in their kit and being complacent or just foolish they have moved outside of their (potential) legal defence.
One also needs to consider if they are trespassing, which in itself is a civil matter not a criminal one – but if you are found to be in possession of an offensive weapon then it can possibly become armed trespass.
There are so many variables that it possible to turn any hypothetical scenario into a situation where a law has been broken.
Seriously, what can I carry?
The best advice I can give – as an instructor and somebody who was once the victim of knife crime – is to make sure that the knife, axe, saw or whatever you are carrying is:
- appropriate to the activity you are conducting, or about to/have been conducting and there is no other practical way to transport that item
- not being used or carried in a manner which can cause distress or alarm to a member of the public
- not likely to be accidentally carried on from your place of lawful use and activity to a public place (on the belt of your trousers etc)
- not an item otherwise prohibited from being carried or owned (including flick knives, butterfly knives etc)
- transported and stored in a way that cannot be misconstrued as being a weapon (i.e. in a rucksack in the boot of a vehicle, not in the cupholder next to you)
You also need to ask yourself if you REALLY do need to carry that item. Is there a ‘good reason’ for carrying a machete-like survival tool on the PYG Track of Snowdon? Do you need to have a £500 craftsperson-made bushcraft knife on your belt at the local game fair? Do you actually need a knife to go foraging, or will a pair of scissors or secateurs be more appropriate? There is a world of outdoor media, from Instagram to old episodes of Ray Mears shows on Youtube that may trick the unwary into thinking that anything is allowed because you’re being ‘outdoorsy’…
So please, make sure that if you are carrying a knife or bladed item in the U.K., no matter what the style or length, that you are aware of the rules and laws around the use and carry of those items. More importantly, you should also be aware of how your behaviour and actions could be seen by another person. You know that you are a safe, responsible person who is a student of wilderness skills and want to try out your new knife and axe – but has the person walking their dog just seen a threatening-looking scruffy person heading into the woods with camouflage gear and a Rambo-knife?
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Axes and Saws
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Zombie Killer Knives
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Foraging, Law and Ethics, Mountain General, Videos
VIDEO: How to zero an airgun scope
Thursday, 20 October 2016
How to zero an airgun scope
Setting the sights on your target
Tony from Tony’s Camo and Airgun Centre in Saltney comes back for this second video on the use of airguns. In the shooting range adjacent to his shop he shows me how he teaches people to setup the telescopic sight on an air rifle, for consistent and accurate shots.
A scope isn’t strictly required for accurate shots with an air rifle, but it does make the job a lot easier and allows for greater consistency.
The steps for zeroing an air rifle scope at 25 yards
- Find a safe and legal place to shoot over the distance you wish to set up your scope for
- Set up a target that will clearly show where you have hit it (a piece of white paper works well)
- Mark a point on the target (a dot will do)
- Set yourself up in a comfortable and safe shooting position
- Fire three shots with the centre of the crosshairs lined up with your dot on the target
- Your group of shots will likely be off to one side and above or below your target dot
- Carefully unscrew both dust covers on the adjustment turrets on your scope
- Decide if you are going to adjust the up-and-down (elevation) or side-to-side (windage) turrets first
- Most scopes use a system where each ‘click’ as you rotate the turrets will translate to 1/4 of an inch of change in the place the pellet hits a target 100yards away
- As your range will is closer than that you will need to perform some calculations to set your scope
- For a range of 25 yards each ‘click’ will move the ‘aim point’ 1/16th of an inch, or 16 clicks will move the ‘aim point’ one inch.
- If your first three shots are half an inch below your target dot you will need to move the elevation turret 8 clicks in the direction marked on that adjustment turret
- Once you have made your adjustment fire another three shots. Your grouping should now be on the same level as the target dot, but may still be off to one side
- Repeat the above process for the side-to-side error (windage)
- If you can repeatedly shoot a pellet through the same hole at that range you have ‘zeroed’ that scope
Tony’s Tips for Successful Zeroing
- Be consistent with your choice of pellet brand and types
- Zero from a safe and stable shooting position
- Only adjust for windage or elevation at a time, not both
- Don’t try and zero on a windy day
- Take an average of three shots after each adjustment, not just one
- Only ever shoot where it is safe and legal to do so
Finally, remember that you are doing this with a potentially lethal firearm, and the responsibility is on you to make sure that you are shooting in a safe and legal manner, and that you are behaving as a safe and responsible airgun owner.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Foraging, Original Outdoors Tutorials, Videos
VIDEO: How to choose an airgun
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
How to choose an air rifle
Buying your first airgun
Tony Dobson from Tonys Camo and Airgun Centre in Saltney kindly gave us some time to explain the basics of buying an air rifle in the UK.
The video details the different types of air rifle commonly available in the U.K. including break-barrel, underlever, CO2 and PCP rifles and their relative merits. We also touch on the information that all airgun owners and users should be aware of (see links below for more information) including the laws on using and storing airguns.
This is a relatively long video for us, but we only just touch on the information you need to know. If you are considering buying your first airgun (for target practice or hunting/pest control) you need to visit your local airgun dealer or airgun club to find accurate and up to date information for your area. Be aware that the law is different in Scotland (as of 31st October – see HERE) and that whilst you do not need a licence for an airgun under 12ft/lbs power in England and Wales you still need to stay within certain rules on the storage and use of that air rifle. The British Association of Shooting and Conservation has a very useful section for airgunners on their website.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Foraging, Original Outdoors Tutorials, Videos
How to sharpen an axe!
Monday, 26 September 2016
How to sharpen an axe!
In another of our series of tutorial videos with green woodworker (and axe hoarder) Doug Don we look at his technique for sharpening axes, using inexpensive materials and a technique that can learned easily and done safely.
It’s a longer video, but worth sitting down to watch is you want to learn how to get that razor-sharp edge on your cutting tools.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Original Outdoors Tutorials, Videos
How to make a spatula (flat spoon)
Friday, 23 September 2016
How to make a spatula (flat spoon)
In this video I spend some time in the woods with Doug Don learning how to split down and process a log into a useful kitchen implement. Even if you aren’t interested in making a spatula there is a lot of useful information in here on working with green wood, processing timber into planks and general knife, axe and drawknife safety.
We’re working with green woodworker Doug Don of Heartwood Treen for this series of instructional videos and to run green woodworking and axecraft courses for Original Outdoors in the coming months. If you want to be notified as the new videos go online please subscribe to our Youtube channel.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Original Outdoors Tutorials
VIDEO: How to rig a tarp
Wednesday, 15 June 2016
VIDEO: How to set up a tarp in the woods
Simple rigging for a DD Hammocks tarp
In a two part video I share how I set up my DD Hammocks 3m x 3m tarpaulin for wild camping and general camp use. It’s a quick, simple and versatile system that I use almost eveyr time I set this tarp up between two trees.
In Part 1 I run through the setup and packing away of the tarp in one go:
In Part 2 I go into more detail for each of the knots required to replicate this system, plus a few other tips on setting it up:
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Equipment Used:
The equipment featured in this video includes:
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DD Hammocks 3m x 3m Tarp
A basic but tough and functional tarp, perfect for woodland camping setups and general bushcraft use. I have one that has lasted for 6 years of regular use and abuse, and is still going strong.
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Maillon Rapide fastener
Essentially an adjustable chain link, this rigging item is a reliable and secure way of hanging the tarp from the ridgeline.
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Climbing Accessory Cord
The main ridgeline used, stronger than paracord and easier to work with when wet and/or wearing gloves. I use 5mm for the main ridgeline, and 2mm for the prussic loops.
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Tent Pegs
Not the same ones as in the video, but nearly identical. These angular tent pegs are easier to place and seem to hold better in stony ground and are a good upgrade from the ones included in the DD Hammocks kit.
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Equipment for Sharpening Knives and Axes
Tuesday, 31 May 2016
How we sharpen knives and axes – the equipment we use
We use a variety of metal cutting tools on our bushcraft and wilderness skills courses, and on our own trips. Knowing how to safely use a cutting tool is only part of the skillset you need – proper care and maintenance will not only ensure your blades last for a lifetime – but that they will hold the razor-sharp edge required for safe use.
Below are our favourite tools for sharpening and maintenance at home and in the field. Some are the best brands we have found on the market, some are just the ones we have chosen, and others might be equally useful. If you have your own recommendations please list them in the comments section below.
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Gransfors Bruks Axe File
An axe or hatchet is a very useful camp companion, and a properly sharpened axe can be as useful as a knife IF you can maintain a clean, sharp edge. However, as axes are most often used for chopping and heavy splitting and and shaping tasks they are prone to being nicked or damaged along the cutting edge. Any sharpening stone can remove enough material from the blade to reshape it to the correct profile again, but it is much easier (and faster!) to use a small file, then finishing with a sharpening stone for the fine edge. The Gransfors Bruks file is small enough to be worthwhile carrying on multi-day trips, and is simple and rugged in design.
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Gransfors Bruks Axe Stone
This is the tool I turn to for general re-sharpening and care of my axes. It is a manufactured ceramic stone, with two grit sizes (180 and 600) and a protective rubber outer casing. It is meant to be used with water, but can be used dry if you are unable to spare any! The shape lends itself to a circular sharpening motion, and if you rotate the stone as you use it you can ensure it will wear evenly.
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DMT Double Sided Folding Sharpener
I have used the DMT sharpeners for several years and they continue to impress me. There are many diamond sharpening whetstones on the market, but they are either too big for use in the field or too fiddly or poorly designed for regular use. The DMT Diafold range has two grit sizes, one on each side and a folding handle that protects the stone when not in use, and acts as a sturdy hand placement when sharpening. It can be used as a bench stone if placed along a flat surface, or even used freehand (carefully!) on complex blade profiles. I personally carry the Coarse/Fine (blue/red) version.
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Ice Bear Waterstone Sharpening Set
Japanese waterstones are ancient in design, but still matchless in quality and performance. This is my bench sharpening kit, and lives in my workshop. It is the tool I use to care for my knives and axes when I return from a trip or course, and ensures a razor-edge with mirror finish.
Using a bench waterstone requires practice and care, and the stones themselves need some maintenance to ensure they stay clean and work effectively – but once you get the hang of it you will wonder how you managed without it.
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Leather Strop
This is another workshop sharpening tool, but I have a home-made pocket version I carry on trips. A leather strop works in a different way to a whetstone – it doesn’t remove metal from the blade, but realigns it and can be used to polish the blade into a mirror finish, if used with a suitable polishing compound (see below).
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Polishing/Buffing Compound (Smurf Poo!)
There are many versions of the so-called ‘Smurf Poo’ (it’s blue!) on the market, and it is fairly simple to use. In conjunction with a leather strop (above) it can leave your knife or cutting tool with a mirror-finish. This is not entirely necessary for a razor-sharp edge, (which can be achieved with a waterstone and a LOT of practice) but it does help when using the knife for very fine tasks on delicate materials and for preventing corrosion.
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Garryflex Abrasive Blocks
Not a sharpening tool, but something I find essential for maintenance and care of tools that have a ‘hard life’. These blocks, available in different grit sizes, are impregnated throughout with an abrasive that quickly removes rust, corrosion or tarnish from metal surfaces. They work particularly well on knives or blades that haven’t been cared for that well in the past, or have been used with materials than stain or tarnish the blade. Think of them as a metal ‘eraser’, rubbing away the mistakes until you reach the surface you want.
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Napier Gun Oil
I use silicone gun oil such as this after sharpening axes or knives that are going into storage, or won’t be used for a long time. It is specifically formulated for preventing corrosion on metal surfaces, and for ‘sticking’ to the surface for a long time. It isn’t ideal for knives that be regularly used for cutting and preparing food, and something food-safe would be more suitable there – olive oil works reasonably well, but will need regular re-application.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General
Foraging with 16 Hospitality
Monday, 25 April 2016
Foraging with 16 Hospitality
On Tuesday we were joined a by a group from 16Hospitality, owners and operators of pub, bar, hotel and restaurant businesses in North Wales and Cheshire. We had been approached by Operations Manager Matt Parker to create a unique foraging and wild foods training day for their trainees from The Hub, a hospitality training programme they run – and we leapt at the chance. We have a passion for wild food, and working with enthusiastic and engaged clients who share our passion is our idea of a good day in the woods!
We began with a foraging and plant identification walk along the banks of the Afon Clywedog (and a short lecture on paleoanthrobotany!) before climbing the hill to our woodland camp and classroom. Here we covered firelighting, safe use of cutting tools and simple game preparation before handing it over to the 16Hospitality team to prepare a meal over an open fire. Rabbit, trout, sorrel, rumex, nettles, wild garlic, golden saxifrage, marsh samphire, herb robert and other spring greens and herbs were all on the menu.
After lunch we had micro-lectures on foraging law, ethics and foraging guidebooks then moved to the clearing to build a hot-smoker and finishing off with a bit of competitive spear-throwing to test out their primitive hunting skills, with 16Hospitality Managing Director Edward Barlow as official adjudicator.
16Hospitality operate two of my favourite North Wales restaurants – The Oystercatcher at Rhosneigr and The White Eagle at Rhoscolyn, and their ethos and and quality of service can be seen in the trainees from The Hub. The entire team were a joy to work with throughout the day, and their chefs taught me a few new techniques that will hopefully improve my own culinary skills!
Original Outdoors can create bespoke training days and events for a wide variety of outdoor skills and activities – if you have an idea or think we might be able to help you, your group or business then please get in touch.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Course Reports, Foraging
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
Friday, 11 March 2016
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
we’ve been working witht he team of volunteers at the Brymbo Heritage Project near Wrexham for over 6 months on a few projects, but the one that has really inspired us has been the pilot of a new outdoor qualification and training scheme that we are going to be able to announce in the next few weeks. The very tail-end of that scheme was training in Outdoor First Aid for the volunteers – and we brought in the talented and lovely Teresa from event and remote-area medical specialists Ultramedix.
Here is the video of the course, with testimonials from some of the course delegates and clips from the training scenarios they were put through.
If you want to book your own private Outdoor First Aid Course in North Wales please get in touch.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Course Reports, First Aid, Mountain General, Videos
10 Books you need for your Summer Mountain Leader Award
Thursday, 04 February 2016
Ten books for your Summer Mountain Leader Award
The Mountain Leader award is often seen as the gateway into a career in outdoor instruction in the UK. The effort required to gather enough Quality Mountain Days, to go through the registration, training and assessment process and to ensure that you are presenting yourself as an outdoor professional should not be underestimated. No matter how skilled a navigator, mountaineer, communicator or coach you are there is always room for improvement.
We’ve pulled together a list of 10 books that helped Richard through his ML years ago, or that we think will help anybody going through the same process today.
If you have more suggestions then please post them in the comments section below!
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Hillwalking: The Official Handbook of the Mountain Training Walking Schemes (Steve Long)
This should be the obvious starting point for anybody looking to register and train as part of the Mountain Training schemes. It is clearly and logically laid out with helpful diagrams and updated photos. The book covers everything that a Mountain Leader would be expected to demonstrate, but it is also extremely useful for anybody who wants to upskill and become a more competent hillwalker or hiker.
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Mountaincraft and Leadership (Eric Langmuir)
First published in 1969 and now in its fourth edition. This is the first comprehensive handbook of hillwalking leadership skills published in the UK, and the updated editions have been rewritten to update the techniques discussed. As with Steve Long’s Hillwalking, Mountaincraft and Leadership covers all aspects of safely spending time in the mountainous areas of the UK; from day walks and navigation to campcraft, safety and incident management.
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Outdoor First Aid (Katherine Wills)
This is a practical manual on first aid, but heavily focused on the unique challenges and opportunities that come from managing a first aid incident in the outdoors. Written by an experienced first aid instructor and member of Llanberis Mountain Rescue team. The images are very helpful, the advice and instruction given is relevant and practical and it covers areas that are often omitted from other first aid manuals.
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Nature of Snowdonia (Mike Raine)
Ecology and knowledge of the natural upland environment is a big part of the Mountain Leader award, and often an area where candidates struggle. Mike Raine’s Nature of Snowdonia is the first field guide for the upland environment of Snowdonia, but the information contained within can be applied to the Lake District and other mountainous areas of the UK. Plants, lichens, fungi and geology are all covered in detail, along with broader information on the ecosystems within the Snowdonia National PArk.
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Rock Trails Snowdonia : A Hillwalker’s Guide to the Geology & Scenery (Paul Gannon)
Another Snowdonia-specific book with information that can be applied to other upland areas of the UK and a partner to Mike Raine’s Nature of Snowdonia. There are similar volumes from Paul Gannon for the Lake District, Peak District and Scottish Highlands. If you understand how geology has shaped the landscape of the UK then you can communicate it to your clients and gain a closer connection to the mountains, valleys, rivers and rocks all around you.
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The Geology of Britain (Peter Toghill)
This book provides an overview of the past 2,000 million years of geological history in the UK, helping place our current landscape in a wider and older context. It is written for the lay person, covering basic geological principles and terminology in a way that all readers should find accessible without patronising.
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Food For Free (Richard Mabey)
This Collins Gem pocket-sized version of Richard Mabey’s classic on wild food is perfect for throwing in the top of a rucksack to help identify some of the more common edible plants, lichens and fungi that you will find in the fields, hedgerows and waysides of the UK. Whilst not exhaustive and difficult to use as a standalone field guide it is useful to either confirm an identification of a plant, or to supply further information that a wild flower key or guide might not.
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The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs (Tristan Gooley)
Whilst not a true navigation manual in its own right, this book is one of several from ‘Natural Navigator’ Tristan Gooley that is a worthwhile accompaniment to traditional navigation guides. It covers some of the basics of navigating using natural clues and signs, but also delves much deeper into the landscape and how we interact with it. I promise that you will find something in here that you will want to pass on to your future clients, even if it is just about navigating via the colours of certain lichens!
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Safety, Risk and Adventure in Outdoor Activities (Bob Barton)
This book covers an area that is also dealt with by other books in this list, but in a way that cannot be done in just a chapter or two. The balance between managing risk and inspiring others in the outdoor education of children and adults can be a delicate one, particularly in activities that can appear very dangerous from the outside. Bob Barton is safety advisor to the Outward Bound Trust. He draws upon years of experience as a safety consultant to the outdoor industry to outline how we can lead, educate and nurture the outdoor experiences of others whilst also protecting ourselves as outdoor professionals.
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Outdoor Leadership: Technique, Common Sense and Self-confidence (John Graham)
The leadership element of the Mountain Leader award can be biased towards safeguarding your clients and colleagues from the potential hazards of the mountain environment, and the associated roles and responsibilities. What cannot be ignored are the wider aspects of leadership, particularly if you move on to expedition leadership, team building or running your own business. Whilst not the only book on leadership skills and coaching, this American guide demonstrates techniques that are of direct relevance to the outdoors and learning development in the mountains of the UK.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Books, Bushcraft General, Mountain, Mountain General, Skills, Top Ten Tips
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