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, […]
SurThrival Thursday: Coltsfoot
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 […]
March 16: Free-Range Fitness
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” […]
SurThrival Thursday- Finding Clean Water
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 […]
SurThrival Thursday: One-Match Fire
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, […]
SurThrival Thursdays from Cheat Mountain: Winter Clothing
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 […]
SurThrival Thursdays from Cheat Mountain: Debris Huts
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 […]
SurThrival Thursdays from Cheat Mountain: Spruce Tips
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 […]
Mountain SOL had a fabulous first semester!
We are so very pleased with our first semester of Mountain SOL. This semester we offered both an in-school program for students at the Morgantown Learning Academy as well as afterschool programs open to all local students. Our In-School Mountain SOL program worked with Morgantown Learning Academy classroom teachers, from Pre-K 3 through Middle School, […]
The Daily Update- Oct 22nd
What we have been up to: We have been exploring our property and creating new hideouts as well as working on our tracking skills! We found new fox and even bobcat tracks today on our property. (these images are not ours, but we used them to show our online students what a West Virginia bobcat […]
