Less Equals More In The Wild

   I went to Wal-Mart recently and the aisles are overflowing with gear greedily grasping for any prospecting buyers.  Two compasses grabbed my attention, and like dyslexic children they shewed me North in opposite directions.  A whistle seemed a bit too high at four dollars.  And then there were the plethora of knives, some sharply contrasting from each other.  I felt like a starving man faced with a buffet of delicious food and only a saucer on which to capture it.  What do I want?  All of it!  What do I need?  I need hardly any of all this variety of mediocre gear.  As a hiker you will soon grow from newbie packer to thinned down traveler.  It is said that in the Civil War soldiers looked like pack mules bundled down with a laughable array of useless gear even including entire small metal ovens!  This soon changed as red welts and screaming feet lent to a general unburdening until the roads were littered with their debris.  As a hiker, camper, or dedicated survivor you will realize there is a specific genre of gear you need, namely addressing the needs of Fire, Signaling, Navigation, Shelter,  and Sustenance.  Thus you can breath an enormous sigh of relief knowing that you don't need a two hundred pound pack to hike five miles!  Enjoy the beauty of nature without trails of vaporized sweat and sounds of agony ricocheting through the forest.  Learning what to take and what to leave behind is a somewhat personal journey that can be much enhanced by sound advice.  Don't compile and save every list of essential gear!  Bookstores and articles online are spilling out hundreds of items every hiker must have!  Instead take the essentials.  Don't know what the essentials are?  Good, then keep reading!

The Forest-Our Old World

     In our fluid changing space we call time, humans are rapidly becoming managers numbly tasking technology to fulfill all tasks.  Our country was once a wooded wilderness populated with a relatively few native peoples.  Then with a slow trickle that rose to a surging crescendo, our forefathers swept into this country.  They learned or relearned the basic skills to survive time and again.  As each area was settled from the East to the West basic survival had to be relearned.  Heroes like George Washington emerged from dark forests and harsh bitter lives to govern and pour the foundation of our country.  A leader like Abraham Lincoln traversed from reading by the flickering wick of an oil lantern to bursting forth as President of the United States of America.  The harshness and sweaty toil of life etched furrows of character in the soul of this country.  Now as families meet, cousin Fred is on his phone, Aunt Jill is catching up on facebook, and you?  You are wishing the family would all leave so you can get back to, like a hermit, watching all the gross stuff people do on youtube.
   Then suddenly the lights blink and in a moment accompanied by the tenor of horrified shrieks and the bass notes of gulping gasps, your neighborhood is engulfed in broken technology.  Isolated, a people on an island of mutilated technology; will you rise to survive or collapse in utter hysteria?  Take heart!  On the Mountain Man Minimalist you'll learn the secrets to becoming a professional civilian survivalist.  So wake up and begin the hardest adventure of your life!