Featured Young Writer - Tom Vogt

The Virtues of Wilderness Self-Reliance

I’m not sure what I hoped to find in the snow-laden woodland that afternoon. Carrying only a small backpack of water, binoculars, and field guides, I didn’t actually expect my amateur tracking skills would yield results. After spending the last week reading tracking manuals, I knew only that I wanted to test myself.

Slipping as quietly as I could under the dripping canopy of Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock, I attempted to emulate the tracker’s “fox walk”. Placing each toe deliberately, testing every step to ensure its complete silence, I gradually made my way towards a lake I had seen on the map. I knew from my studies that transitional areas of forest were the best place to pick up tracks, and that animal prints would appear clearly in the lakeside’s soft mud. I stalked closer with each painstaking step, trying to relax my vision to better detect motion, and to open my ears to the smallest rustle. Most of all, I concentrated on loosening my grasp on time. I needed to find a tracker’s patience to understand that it might take me an hour to cover a few hundred yards in silence.

At last, I found prints. A pair of white-tailed deer had crept through the snow, but as I beginner I had no way of knowing that they had passed only minutes before. Kneeling in the drifting snow, I began to track. The deer’s sharply pointed toes left clear marks, unfolding like lines on a map towards the forest’s center. As I crested another hill, I spied my quarry in the frozen streambed below. A doe with a fawn in tow grazed cautiously on a few sparse patches of uncovered greenery. Even as the icy cold of the snow soaked through my pants and the wind picked up, I stalked ever closer to the pair. I advanced only when they had returned to feeding. Within a few dozen feet, a crunch of icy snow betrayed my presence. Startled, the mother led her fawn bounding into the safety of the deeper underbrush. Silently thanking the deer for an experience I would never forget, I began my trudge homeward.  
   
The magic of finding those deer on my first attempt at tracking showed me the rewards of learning primitive wilderness skills. I had attended workshops to learn how to identify edible plants, build natural shelters, and make fire with nothing but twigs and friction. I learned what to do if I became lost, and how to “survive” the worst that nature had to offer. As I learned more, I began to realize that the idea of “man vs. wild” was fundamentally incorrect, and that going with the flow of nature represented the superior survival strategy.

My passion changed over time to an effort to understand nature more fully, and to strip away many of the layers between myself and the wild. The study that I now call “wilderness self-reliance” incorporates bird watching, tracking, botany, survival skills, and philosophy.
   

An important aspect of wilderness self-reliance is knowing how to replace any piece of modern gear with a natural substitute. When my family and I go backpacking, we bring many of the most modern outdoor conveniences: stoves, tents, and sleeping bags. I also carry with me the knowledge of how to replace every piece of that gear with something improvised from nature. If my stove fails, I can start a fire from nothing. If I get lost returning to camp, I can set up a shelter to replace my tent and sleeping bag using only debris from the forest floor. These skills provide a sense of security that stems from the knowledge that in any circumstance, I can still keep myself and my family members alive. Armed with this confidence, the wilderness is no longer something to be feared or avoided.

Beyond simple survival, wilderness self-reliance offers a way for us to return to our roots. Before I began my own journey of exploration, trees were simply trees and birdsongs merely attractive noise. After I learned about botany and ornithology, my experience became richer. To the student of self-reliance, the pattern of specific tree species speaks volumes on the nature of the surrounding forest, and the particular call of a song sparrow can provide clues about the movement of predators and foragers.

Traveling in the wilderness without at least a basic knowledge of what’s going on around you is like watching a foreign film without subtitles.
At their most basic level, wilderness self-reliance skills offer me a comforting insurance policy against disaster. At a deeper, more spiritual level, they have allowed me to connect with nature and find greater meaning in it.

     
As I walked home from the woods soaking wet and exhilarated after tracking my first deer, I knew I had discovered a lifelong passion. Learning to live off the land reintroduces you to humanity’s place in the web of nature, and reminds us of how closely the natural world’s well-being and our own are interconnected. I believe anyone who loves the outdoors would benefit from taking a few small steps towards self-reliance. Learn the five most common trees, and their uses. Try to start your next campfire without matches. Begin to identify the birds that appear most frequently in your backyard, and what their various calls mean. It’s amazing how quickly the wilderness will feel like home, and how much more there is to understand about the natural world around us. 



Editor's Note: If you're interested in learning more about wilderness survival, hear are some sources the Tom recommends: 

 Print:

• Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival (Berkley Publishing, 1983). "My favorite wilderness survival guide, by renowned tracker Tom Brown."
• Field Guide to Trees of North America (Chanticleer Press, 2008).
• Animal Tracks of Washington & Oregon (Lone Pine Publishing, 1997) "An excellent guide to tracking Northwest animals, by Ian Sheldon."
• "Self-reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Internet:

• youtube.com/user/wildernessoutfitters -- the webpage of Dave Canterbury, survival instructor
• natureskills.com -- a website containing a variety of articles on wilderness skills
• allaboutbirds.org -- the website for Cornell University's Ornithology Lab, the premier resource for bird watching.