At Nature Reliance School we just completed our Advanced Survival course this past weekend. There were a lot of lessons learned by those who attended, including the instructors. For simplicity sake, I am simply going to list many of them here and try to be concise and clear. This will be like dwindlng 4 days of experiences into tiny snippets but here goes…
- Good rain gear is a must have for survival. It rained for 3 days and those that had good rain gear were ok throughout, those that did not, were wet most of the weekend.
- We processed several quail, two pheasant, and a sheep over the weekend. This can be very messy for those that are new to it. Use of water as a cleaner means your water supply goes fast.
- Dress in layers. We had temperature swings of close to 30 degrees. Two separate occasions we had a 10-15 degree swing in temps in just over few minutes of time span due to various fronts moving through. With the additional wind that brought it in, temps changed quickly.
- This was an advanced course and students were allowed to learn some lessons the hard way. That is sometimes difficult as an instructor to do. However it is the best way to learn some things. No one dropped out of the class and every body stayed hard and strong throughout. I was completely pleased with how how well folks, “embraced the suck”
- We had 26 people there and about 26 different knives, tarps, packs, water filters and on, and on….this is why I don’t get too critical nor too praise worthy on specific gear. Everyone was able to accomplish the tasks that we threw at them with the gear that they came with. Some of us learned that our sleeping system did not work very well. But for the most part the basics of knives, tarps and packs while they were all very different, were still OK under harsh wet and sometimes near freezing conditions.
- Our limit for this course was 25 lbs of gear. Most of the students who did this were new to these sorts of activities. Some of them had only minimal outdoor experience, and our basics class to help them before arriving. Everyone made it under 25 lbs. One student came in at only 10 lbs. From my perspective since they were new folks, I thought it was fantastic.
- It is never hard to find those that have military and/or first responder experience in our group. Even without them telling us. These folks are almost always, more composed, and more apt to help others. They have been taught that no one is OK, unless everyone is OK.
- Sunshine is your friend. On our last day the sun came out. You could see everyone’s mood lighten and people drifting to the sunshine to warm up and dry off.
Those were some of the highlights. Again, the instructional staff was there 4 full days so there was a lot more we could write about. I feel that these were the most important takeaways from this particular event. I will be doing a gear review on the items I used during class this week and will do a follow up post so you can see those thoughts as well.
Come on, join in, let’s learn together!
