So a major update is order but unfortunately this is not going to be it. I just don’t have the time or – apparently – the clarity of mind to get into any details right now.

Egret haing out in the front lawn.

In short, I’m back in Sarasota staying with my Dad. There’s always a lot going on in the yard. Hawks in the backyard picking off an occasional pigeon leaving piles of bloody feathers, Egrets hanging out in the front yard. Just the other day I saw a squirrel building some kind of leaf nest in the crook of a tree (see photo below). I’m guessing it may be some kind of matting display as the next day (which would be today) he had some grooming company and was running around like a madman, falling about 30 feet from a tree at one point. Now it’s dark outside and for the first time I can hear birds chirping at night. Spring celebrations have begun.

I made it to Florida but not before spending the weekend at the Tracker School during one of the strongest blizzards to have impacted the east coast in several years. The Tracker class was held at the Joseph A. Citta Boy Scout reservation in New Jersey and started on a Friday. By Saturday morning there was at least a foot of snow on the ground and by Saturday evening two feet of snow and it was still coming down at a steady clip. So much snow covered the ground that by late Saturday evening I could not even find my tent as it had turned in to a barely recognizable mound of snow. When I did find my tent it had collapsed under the weight of the snow.

I left West Lebanon New Hampshire for the New Jersey Pine Barrens at around 6am.  It was -4 degrees that morning, everything was frozen solid and the ice already in the driveway was refrozen.  Even with the car warmed up the heater could hardly knock back the cold until the sun came up.

Starting out with almost no traffic, dawn in the New Hampshire mountains, a pleasant drive through New England country.  I remember watching sun rise above mist filled valleys, absolutely amazing views.  Six hours later I was on the Jersey turn pike.

As I mentioned in a previous post I’m on my way to the Tracker school.  Many people look perplexed when you tell them you are going to (or just came from) a survival school in New Jersey.  As Tom Brown tells it New Jersey is the front lines of an environmental war.  Most polluted, most densely populated, most sick state in the whole country.  You really notice it on the Pennsylvania New Jersey border I shot this video.

I made it to New Hampshire at about 6 am on Friday morning after driving straight through from Louisville.   I’m visiting my Mother until tomorrow morning when I’ll be heading south, first to New Jersey for another Tracker Class then to Florida to visit with my Dad and most likely hang out around Florida until the last throws of winter in Indiana, around February, March, or April.  Looking forward to the warm weather, the 6inches of snow on the ground in New Hampshire is nice, but it’s going to be -1 degrees tonight…

My main focus for this winter season in Florida will be food: gathering plants, hunting animals, and tracking.  I’m excited to get some dirt time dedicated to these survival skills as they are multidisciplinary skills and practicing one furthers ability in other areas.  Gathering plants is all about knowing the landscapes and habitats, hunting is all about understanding ones game including habits, preferences, personality, etc.  Working on these skills improves other skills (shelter building, cordage, bow drill, etc.) as at the end of the day the art of finding food and nourishment in the bush is grounded in observation and awareness.  They’re gateway skills, physically and spiritually.

Guy can learn a lot from a beaver.

Well it’s about time I updated my blog and this is going to be a rather quick and very incomplete update at that. I thought by now I would have had all kinds of survival skills to talk about and all kinds of time to develop this site but the fact of the matter is most of the last few weeks (err…months) have been consumed just building a shelter with an occasional break to practice fire making with a bow drill and cold invigorating dips in the creek.

aaron wolf in the white mountains

I considered titling this post “how not to hike the White Mountains,” because to be perfectly honest while I had an absolutely unreal experience, the White Mountains kicked my ass. To anyone who would consider a journey through the White Mountains, do heed this piece of advice: pack light. My pack was way too heavy, I had among other goodies some fishing gear (+5lbs), loads of stove fuel(+3 lbs), a spare pair of camo pants (+ 5 lbs), and most gratuitous of all a nice Canon Digital Camera weighing at least 7 lbs which made it out of the pack for all of 15 minutes (mostly used my pocket sized Fujifilm). In all my pack must have starting out weighing at least 50 lbs. By the time the trip was over the tent was weighed down with ice, and two pairs of frozen socks added more weight.

Near the swim area at the Tracker Schools primitive camp.

Stayed an extra two weeks at the Tracker School to volunteer for a “back-to-back” series – one week of the advanced standard class followed by another week of the advanced tracking class.  Volunteering at the Tracker school is definitely a piece of work and I left exhausted but it was well worth it.  I really can’t begin to describe what an awesome experience I had these last two weeks.  Tom Brown was very involved with the classes and focused a lot on the spiritual and physical mind duality and how it relates to survival skills and tracking.  It was incredible, there were things happening in the background that are impossible to describe and reducing it down to a sentence does no justice to the concepts or the skills covered over the two weeks.  Unfortunately I don’t have the time to hash out everything that’s going through my mind.   Just have to save it for another time.

Charles River Sailing club, I set sail from here a few times.

From the NJ Pine Barrens I headed North to stay with my sister in Boston for a couple days.  Much to my surprise I was able to I find the remains of a debris hut I built several years ago in the Needham woods.  Spent a rather dull Sunday evening in Harvard Square.  I was hoping to run into a few old friends but honestly it’s been so long since I’ve seen most of my Boston buddies I could have passed right by them on the subway and not even noticed it.  I also made my way down to Plymouth Plantation before heading to New Hampshire to visit with my mom who is recovering from surgery.

A photo of the remains of a debris hut I built in the Needham woods.

There’s a lot of ideas and notions floating around in my head from the experience of the last few weeks.  I’m way too busy to process them now.  When I return to Indiana it will be full on preparation for winter, which up here in New Hampshire does not feel very far away at all.  If my computer does not freeze I should have plenty of time to organize my thoughts and actually post a few practical articles.

Tomorrow I’m heading into the White Mountains.  Unpredictable weather, possible snow next week.

Barnegat Bay in New Jersey

Another dream post.  Last night’s dreams were another in a series of dreams in which the events of the dream occur in the same location I’m sleeping in.  For example, three days ago just before leaving for New Jersey I was sleeping in a Chippewa style wigwam which is pretty much what I call home these days.  In this dream several friends had stopped over to check out my new home in the woods.  It was a pleasant enough dream with everybody laughing and their faces lit up by the full moon.  When I woke up everything looked exactly like it had in my dreams minus the visiting friends. It was in fact a very positive dream and put at ease some of the doubts I’ve been having lately about the whole idea of living in a primitive shelter.  Unfortunately last night’s dreams along the Jersey shore were not quite as reassuring.

Strange dreams, if only I could remember them.  Yesterday I woke up in a blind panic after having slept soundly for at least six hours.  When I woke up the world was spinning, I don’t mean like I woke up and felt hung over or a little tipsy.  No when I woke up yesterday I felt like I was descending on a roller costar or trapped in an airplane corkscrewing down to earth.  I was violently dizzy.

Being half asleep I was in a confused irrational panic unsure what universe I had woken up to – all gravity and no bottom, falling, falling…I rolled on to my stomach and got on my hands and knees.    Eventually I made it on to my feet and after about 5 minutes of total confusion I was able to regain some sense of balance and wandered over to LongHall.  Thinking food was the culprit, I ate a couple of bananas.  No sooner had I tried to lie down and relax for a spell then the world started spinning again.  I had to stand up.

All day I felt lightheaded, like I was tripping on LSD.  I even had the thought that maybe I had ingested something sinister, maybe food poisoning.  That was impossible thought because I had just been sleeping of at least six hours.  I found that as long as I was standing or sitting up I could maintain  control but if I lied down and really started to relax I would slip into a kind of trance which would start pleasantly enough but would then escalate into a feeling g vertigo resulting in a panic, a feeling like I was losing control, as though the laws of physics suddenly broke down around me and I was getting sucked into the sky.

Crowley Tarot - The Fool

Finally a rainy day and I can spend some time updating my blog.  As mentioned in my previous post I’ve set put upon a three year journey to see how much I can learn about primitive living and survival skills.  Along the way I’ll be documenting my experience as best I can and providing survival tutorials and updates on lessons learned in hopes of helping out others who – like me – finding the daily grind and routines of modern life unsustainable and are desperate to find some other mode of existence.

While my ultimate goal is to live a full year in a minimalist survival situation without any modern conveniences, for now I’m setting up a home base camp at Lothlorian nature sanctuary in Needmore Indiana.  Lothorien is the perfect place for me right now, a community of nature loving folks with a passion for creating a sustainable community living in harmony with nature.  This may sound like a lot idealistic mumbo jumbo to some but by my reading of the current state of humanity the future – if there is any future to humanity – is much more likely to be arrived at though communal experiments like Lothroien then from Washington think tanks, New York bankers, or LA marketing execs.