Guardian Yearlong blog post originally posted 10/11/13

Leaves are falling like snow flakes in the maple woods, the ash trees lost their since quite sometime ago already….Now when us guardians find some choke cherries we all rush with excitment, as they become more and more scarce. We knocked down the last five apples from the apple tree on the way over to the support centre, were I have come in for another visit to the shinny screen and plastic buttons to update you all on what we’ve been up too!

For one of the last three moons we were scouting out one of the big bogs of the headwater wilderness area, more specificly the bogs and creeks that feeds Pine River. Learning about the diffrent types of bogs here, alder bogs, cedar bog, ash bog, spruce bog etc, and why these plants grow were they grow. How to travel smoothly and quickly if needed through a big bog, and how the diffrent animals run their trails…Solving riddles of how a creek can run into a cedar bog and dissapear and come out again on the other side. Discovering how river is formed, the springs that feed them. Feeling the ancient beuty that rests in the bogs which have never before been logged. We’ve worked hard at mapping out every whitepine, small trickle of water, spring hole and every big or small detail or this bog, and making a map out of it in our camp. A creative map consisting of stick, stones and bark. Every other sun we have added more details and changed the proportions of the map, it has been quite a project!

Doing the bog scouting I’ve climb trees like I never have before! Wonderfull being so close to the sky, and still grounded to the earth! It is an amazing opportunity I discoverved, not just to see the world from a diffrent perspective, but also for quickly gaining perspective on the landscape around me and finding what I am looking for over a huge area by just climbing one tall tree! This discovery certainly has open up many new doors (although we dont have doors out in the woods).
Now we just go for a stroll somewhere and it comes natural to send one of us up a tree,just to check the area =)

Now we have moved our canoes over the bog, and paddled up the river to set camp up by one of the big meadows. Our tarps, set up as lean-toos with only sticks (no cordage), are spread out over the meadow. Each tarp has it’s own charachter, a charachter that fits well with the person who set it up!
We’re now working on getting the hide tanning area together, and scouting out the beaver activity on the creek, we’ve located 9-10 beaver lodges close to us, and we are looking forward to building a realtionship with them, and getting to know them better! This is probably were our focus will be the next moon or soo. We also got some rice to process by hand that we keept from the quarter moon that were we harvesting wild rice awhile ago.
There is all kind of things happning, and still everyday is the same, in a beutifull way. We wake up at dawn, and then live, learn, learn experience, run in circles or run straight, stumble and fumble or stay balanced, in either case we usually fall asleep in the evening, and do it all over in the morning. =)

We’ve also been experminting alot with fire making…. Everyone in our group have now made fires…
We dont have any matches out here, so we make all our fires by friction using the bow drill thechnique, and using no tool in making our kits, no knifes or tomahawks… It is a whole world to discover we see! Now we are leaving our fire kits out in the rain for many suns, or soak them in water and make fires, or not using any fireboards, but just drilling in the logs around camp, making cordage from roots and wood and using other things than tinder to start a fire: there is so much to play with!
The practical skill of being able to do and learn these things is great and fun, but there is an even deeper learning we are gaining for doing what we do with fire. We’ve decided that every fire we make will be one were we are on our frontier, meaning that we will not settle for “just making a fire” a “quicky fire” doing what we already know and works just to get that fire so we can have dinner, we are always learning new things, just in our every day lives! I see that by applying this attitude towards fire making I learn much faster than I would other wise, but what would life be like if you apply this to all the things you do in life? Were the way becomes to goal. To become that curious child again that we once were, and still are. And to still be that child even when you are cold, tiered, hungry and irritated. Now this is what we’re learning!