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The Tracker Trail website has no
official connection to the Tracker School or Tom Brown Jr. whatsoever.
From my perspective, Winter I and II were amazing classes. The
focus of the first week was winter survival - shelter being the main emphasis. Each
group of ten built a long term shelter lived in it. The groups spent a lot of time
trying to figure out how to get the smoke levels up and how to stay warm. We did
have a storm dump about 8 inches of snow. We had temperatures in the 0 degree range at
night. All in all, everyone did well. Some felt that the pace of the first
week was a little slow, but in retrospect I think most would agree that the pace was also
an important part of the learning.
Week two we moved from the primitive camp to the scout camp.
Since the focus was on indoor skills, the lecture hall provided a degree of comfort that
would have been possible in the shelters, but would have required the expenditure of a lot
more energy. The second week was a little like getting a drink from a fire
hose. We dumped skills and workshops in rapid succession from Sunday through
Saturday. We covered several new hunting tools like the atl-atl, mace, crossed
throwing sticks, we bent and laced snowshoes, made several bow variations including
recurving, reflexing and sinew backing. We covered three water craft, a tule kayak,
a hide kayak, and a birch bark canoe. We made models of them as well. We
learned about 36 traps with another 15 variations on the traps to take the total close to
100 (from standard on).
On top of it all, we all got wicked cold/flu bugs that are still
with most of us. (Hack-hack) What I have heard from students was that it was an
awesome overall experience. |
