What are 'Wilderness Skills'?

Hawk Circle uses many wilderness skills as a foundation of our program's content and environment.   These skills are grouped into several areas, covering wilderness survival, nature awareness, knowledge of trees and plants, animal tracking, native skills and crafts and also group communication, leadership and community skills.

These skills are vital to our program, as they help create an environment where we work together to meet our needs.   Wilderness skills also provide opportunities to share important life skills to students, such as safety and hazard awareness, communication, co-operation, decision-making,  and self-worth development.   Nature, in this context, can be a neutral mirror for a student or group of students, to reflect their abilities to meet the challenges of survival, without instructors or teachers creating artificial scenarios that students feel are contrived or forced.

Survival skills can include fire making, shelter building, cooking food, gathering natural materials, making rope and string, making tools and implements that help us to live more easily. 

The wilderness survival skills we teach come to us from all over the world, because all of our ancestors had hunter gatherers in our family history, and lived close to the earth.   We use these skills to teach self-reliance, boost self-esteem when a skill or craft is accomplished, and because most children today have limited access to meaningful contact with nature.

Native crafts and skills also teach us appreciation for the earth and her gifts, as well as how to work with different, renewable resources, how to gather materials sustainably, as well as how to connect with the different worlds of animals, plants, trees and ourselves.

Making a shelter and sleeping in it is not only hard work, but brings together many important skills to create an experience that is life-changing.   Students are, in effect, asking nature to take care of them, through the night, so that they might sleep safely, and this concept can help us as human beings to work with nature to meet our needs rather than seeing nature as a force that is at odds with our survival and our success.

Wilderness skills also serve as sources of inspiration for biology, ecology, earth sciences, anthropology and archeology, as well as many cultural values such as cooking, leadership, group dynamics and outdoor adventure.   There are seeds ripe for planting everywhere in our program, for students to get a taste and see what feels good and where they might go for more.

There are many more reasons for using nature and wilderness skills in our programs, and we would be happy to answer any further questions you might have, so feel free to contact us!

-Ricardo Sierra