Welcome back to another SurThrival Thursday from Cheat Mountain! I realize my posts lately have been heavy on foraging, but there is a reason behind this. Thriving in the wilderness is all about living in season, and spring is the season for eating in the forest. It’s the time when every animal finds reprieve from […]
Hi and welcome back to SurThrival Thrusday! This week I’m going to take y’all foraging with me and my family. Unfortunately my computer crashed mid-edit, so you’ll have to wait just a bit longer for the video! We are going to hike to one of our favorite places in the Monongehela National Forest, and show […]
We had an absolutely perfect spring day. You could not ask for better weather to spend time wander all over the woods with no shoes on. We started out the class with a warm-up…free-range style. Then, we followed it up with a hike up the hill. We paused for our snack break on a bare, […]
Welcome back to another SurThrival Thursday from Cheat Mountain. This week I’m very excited to begin featuring spring ephemerals! I’m referring to small plants that appear in the spring before the trees have leafed out, these plants usually flower and seed and sometimes die back completely by the time the canopy has filled in .The […]
Another beautiful spring day; perfect for spending time outside. What better way to prepare yourself for your next marathon (or your next marathon hiking adventure) than to run or crawl up and down a clay embankment! The students practiced climbing under the “overhang.” Then they had lots of fun running and jumping over the “hole” […]
Hello! Welcome back to SurThrival Thursday from Cheat Mountain. This week I’m going to talk a bit about finding water; we are very lucky to be able to find clean, drinkable water here in Appalachia. Usually, this means that you don’t have to hike with more than a small water bottle, because water is everywhere […]
Hello! Welcome back to SurThrival Thursdays from Cheat Mountain. This week I’m going to explore fire making: nothing fancy or very primitive, just a simple one-match fire. I laugh as I am writing this, because of course, there is nothing simple about making a fire on Cheat Mountain. As students from previous year’s classes remember, […]
Welcome back to SurThrival Thrusday from a really, really cold Cheat Mountain! It’s currently one degree Fahrenheit up here today, so I thought it apt to write about dressing for the cold. Now this is a tricky thing to teach, as each person’s clothing system will vary based on how your individual body produces and […]
Hello from a very snowy Cheat Mountain and welcome back to SurThrival Thursday! Today I’m going to feature our favorite kind of homemade shelter: the debris hut. A debris hut is a kind of shelter made entirely of materials found on site, in the forest where you plan to shelter. In many forest types, you […]
Hi! Maureen here, from Cheat Mountain. This is a back issue of SurThrival Thursdays from 1/14/16: Hey Folks, it’s SurThrival Thursday! SurThrival is a new word that we came up with a few years ago to describe the skills that we teach here on Cheat Mountain. Our goal isn’t just to teach survival, but […]
