Join Wilderness Survival Instructor Vincent Pinto for a diverse introduction to the fundamental stone-age skills that form the foundation of saving your life in the wild. Learn how to become Self-Reliant in Nature! Unlike many survival courses taught today, we focus exclusively on what Nature can provide, not fancy modern survival kits. Using only the surfeit of natural resources at hand, you’ll learn an empowering variety of time-tested Wilderness Survival Skills. We invite you to a private, transformative, and hands-on learning experience, bringing life to the old adage – “the more you know, the less you need!”
This full-day field course is our most popular, preparing you to face a plethora of life-threatening wilderness scenarios with both knowledge and skill. Anyone who ventures out even for short hikes, let-alone longer treks in Nature, will greatly benefit from this introductory course. Expert instructor Vincent Pinto likens venturing out into the wild without basic survival skills to driving a car without truly knowing all of the rules of the road – it’s needlessly reckless when you can instead empower yourself with life-saving skills. Even if you are fortunate enough to never need these skills in a real life situation, you will feel an extraordinary sense of empowerment, inner peace, and connectedness as you walk through Nature – realizing that you are now an extension of it and able to leverage its many natural resources to save your own life.
Your course will take place on our beautiful and sprawling 42-acre Raven’s Nest Nature Sanctuary, including in its unique Stone-age Village and expansive Sky Islands Discovery Center. There, Vincent will cover a wide range of Wilderness Survival Skills, including:
- Fire-making – fire-by-friction & creating safe fires
- Shelters – site selection, safety, materials, shelter styles
- Water Purification – water-finding & safety
- Wild Edible Plants – plant finding, Identification, processing, & safety
- Emergency Signaling – scenarios, materials, methods
- Natural Navigation – way-finding without modern tools
- Wilderness Safety – safely living in the wild; “do’s and don’ts”
- Basic Hunting & Trapping – procuring wild meat with basic methods
- Thorns, Stingers, & Fangs – welcome to Arizona! –identification & avoidance of dangerous animals & plants in the Southwest & beyond
- Wilderness Tools – flint-knapping, knives, saws, & more
- Cordage – contructing strong, natural rope from plants for a wide range of uses
Using only the natural resources of the land, Vincent will systematically and artfully teach you each skill which you will then practice on your own. Any real wilderness survival ordeal is inherently unpredictable as to which skill(s) will be most valuable. Accordingly, he will place equal emphasis on each and every survival skill that he imparts to you. The end result will be a body of invaluable knowledge that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Further, Vincent teaches every skill in a manner that allows you to apply your newfound knowledge to a wide range of natural environments – in the American Southwest and well beyond! As the Sky Islands of southeast Arizona host habitats ranging from deserts up to Spruce-Fir forest, there is likely a proxy environment here for where you spend the most time in the wild – regardless of where you are from!
Anyone who likes to venture into Nature and values their own life owes it to themselves to learn at least the basics of how to survive a wide range of potential dangers and outright calamities in the wild. Failure to do so may prove deadly.
