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Learn to survive in the Great Outdoors By JOHN DARLING ASHLAND - Anyone can go into the wilderness and survive with a 50-pound backpack. But at a new weeklong Wilderness Living and Survival Skills program, trainers want to teach you to do it with just the clothes on your back. And maybe a knife. The class, an offshoot of Tom Brown's Tracker School, is being organized by Ashland High School counselor Shianna Walker and taught by Karen and Frank Sherwood of Seattle, head instructors at the Brown School for 15 years. Brown is author of the 1978 wilderness survival classic "The Tracker" and other books. The Sherwoods teach how to build cozy huts from debris, make fire with a bow drill, read animal tracks, find wild edible plants and berries, make primitive hunting tools and traps and foster a "tremendous self-confidence," said John Schleining, an Ashland youth counselor, graduate of Brown's wilderness trainings and assistant teacher of the seminar. Students learn how to make arrowheads, kill small game with a long "rabbit stick" (nothing is actually killed in the training), catch fish using lures of wood and stone, make bark baskets, de-scent themselves so they smell like the woods, make string for fishing line and find themselves when lost. And they learn to do it all without the crutch of a survival kit. Knowing you can't get lost is half the battle, Schleining said, because panic can whip up a "psychosis" that keeps people from thinking straight so they can survive. For example, one lost man found by Brown trackers nearly died of thirst while hiking along a stream because he thought he needed a cup to drink the water, Schleining said. While the training teaches survival techniques, its deeper lessons are about finding inner strength and a new kinship with nature, he said. Students of AHS Wilderness Charter School who took the Sherwoods' course last year emerged with a deepened respect for people and for the world around them, said Walker, who also took the course. "You see a lot of disrespect these days in the way young people talk to their parents or the way they leave the lunchroom a wreck each day," she said. "The world is so much faster now and kids are overstimulated with sports and lessons. It's just too much. "The good thing about being out in nature like this is it takes you away from all that and teaches you a whole new way of being. They come to stillness. They come out with real self-respect, and that's the basis for respecting others and the world." The Sherwoods teach esoteric yet ancient skills such as "splatter vision," which means looking at the big picture of nature instead of its details, Schleining said. They also school participants in "foxwalking," a way of moving invisibly through nature so wildlife are not alarmed, he added. The class runs Aug. 15-19 from a base at Greensprings Inn east of Ashland. It's $550 ($500 before July 15) and $250 for high school students. John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.