Review of Natural Pathways: Tracking One Course.
Duration: One Weekend
Location: Nr. Canterbury, Kent
Instructors: Geoff McMullan and Hannah Nicholls
Cost: £197.00 including all meals and tea/coffee
Contact: http://www.natural-pathways.co.uk
Objectives:
Attributes of a Tracker
Looking at signs, defining and explaining the factors that affect them
Movement by Day and Night
Deception Tactics
Principles and Techniques of Stalking
Track Pursuit Drills
Lost Track Drills
Nature Awareness
Background to why I went:
I have had an interest in bushcraft since before I was in the cub scouts, as I have got older so I have learned new bushcraft skills and enjoyed the outdoors more and more.
One day I read something about tracking, it sounded interesting and I looked into it more and more, I came across an American Tracker called Tom Brown Jr and read a few of his books, both the story ones and the field guides too. I learned as much as I could from these books but as we all know you cannot learn everything from a book and particularly not the very practical skill of tracking.
Tom Brown runs his Tracker School in the Pine Barons of New Jersey in the USA and I simply couldnt afford either the time or money to go on one of his courses no matter how much I wanted to. I therefore started to search for a UK Tracking school.
It was odd but I stumbled across the Natural Pathways website over a year ago and although I liked the sound of their courses I was a little too hasty to say the least with my judgement of the Instructors, looking back it was a classic case of me ignorantly judging a book by its cover. If you look at the website you will see that both Hannah and Geoff have a deep understanding and awareness of nature and try to live not only their course time but whole lives like this. Being only a few years out of the army myself and with a pretty black and white attitude to life, my initial thoughts were That looks interesting but those two look like a couple of mad old hippies dont think thats for me, theyll have me hugging trees and allsorts! Well, how wrong could I be (but not about the tree hugging).
A year or so later and still having not found the UK school I wanted I happened to bump into Geoff at a camp we held down in Sussex, he was introduced to me by a friend of mine called JP.
We went for a walk in the woods on the Saturday afternoon and I was amazed at Geoffs awareness and understanding of nature, but more so by his gentle manor and willingness to freely share his knowledge. Hed come down to say hi to a few of his mates and certainly wasnt working but was still more than happy to show us a few of the wonders of nature. We found deer, dog, fox and badger tracks that afternoon and I was even more hooked on tracking. I made up my mind then to book a course and learn more.
Finally several months later I got my stuff together and on Friday morning I headed down to Kent.
The course itself:
The joining instructions and kit list were both spot on, I actually got to the site an hour early which, to those of you who know me will attest, is not a normal thing at all.
Because I was an hour early I waited in the car park. The team put out arrows for you to follow into the woods but due to my being early they werent out yet.
Being the nosey type, I wondered into the woods anyway and found the team just finishing the setting up. I grabbed my gear and set up camp with the other course member Andy (there can be up to about 6 people on this course which I think is a nice small group for my course we had four booked but two had to drop out so it was just me and Andy this meant we had three Natural Pathways staff to two students, how good was that! Many other schools would have cancelled the course but not Natural Pathways).
As soon as my camp was squared away I headed to the main camp area and was handed a cup of coffee and introduced to those I didnt know.
We had a very nice lunch cooked by Hannah and were then straight into our first lesson, it was only 13:15hrs!!! All meals are cooked and prepared by the Natural Pathways team, as they rightly point out, you have far to much to do and learn to worry about cooking .and theyre not wrong either!
Geoff ran us through the rough course outline and explained that although there were certain areas we needed to cover there was also scope for us to delve deeper into certain parts if we so wished. Hannah then went through the health and safety stuff that we needed to know about.
I wont go into exactly what was in the lectures as youll enjoy them more if they are passed on by Geoff and Hannah rather than via a review.
We did about half an hour by the fireside on attributes of a tracker and related books that Natural Pathways suggests you take a look at and then went straight to the sandbox. The sandbox is exactly what it sounds like, a low walled wooden box on the path that is filled with sand. Although it is possible to track any creature on any surface, for beginners, sand makes a very good learning medium.
The next exercise was the Tree hugging, I scoffed at earlier, all I will say is before you scoff at it too, go to the exercise with an open mind and see what you get from it. I very much enjoyed what we did although I couldnt rationally explain it! I can also assure you that having done it, I would no longer scoff at it ha ha.
We had more lectures back at the camp and some tea/coffee and chocy biscuits, then Hannah showed us how to walk and move through the woods without making a sound (a skill we would need the following night on the Fire Stalk). Then it was dinner time. Dinner was cooked over the open fire and it was nice to see a school that used its fire properly, actually changing the style of fire to suit what they were doing, I saw a star fire, a trail fire, a trench fire and an evening council fire all used at the correct times and then Tipi fires in the morning to rekindle from the night before. To me this shows me that the Instructors are truly at home in the woods and know how to live there comfortably.
After dinner we went to do a drum stalk in another part of the woods, again Im not going to go into details but it involves using every sense other than your sight to stalk up on a lone drummer in the woods sounds easy? Again, try it youll get lots out of it.
Next morning (wed only been there half a day and a night and it felt like ages) we got up and had breakfast, then Geoff took us to the next field and we were able to identify and then track foxes from the night before, we also saw stoat and pheasant tracks too and on the way back we tracked Geoff back to the camp.
After another hearty lunch we moved onto aging a track with Hannah and then Geoff gave small bullet sized lectures on the first 10 to 15 Pressure releases. We then went back to the sandbox and looked at these pressure releases in operation with Hannah being our guinea pig for each one we looked at.
Hannah also showed us a smaller sandbox she had made to show how time and aging of tracks can be studied.
The last thing we did before dinner was our first full trail tracking. The instructors set off before us walking through leaf litter and off trails, about half an hour later we were taken to the start of their trails and had to follow them. It was hard at first but by using the skills we had already been taught we were both able to follow our trails to their ends and also explain to the instructors (who shadowed us along their trail) more or less exactly what they had done at each part of the track and even managed to touch on what they were thinking as they walked through the woods. I cant explain it properly here but through tracking something you really do get to know it and its plans very well .almost spookily well!
Then we had dinner and prepared for the Fire Stalk. I very much enjoyed this and so wont say anything about it to spoil it other than you will need all your wits and cunning about you to pull off a win at this game and you should expect to spend a little bit of time crawling on the floor on your belly.
The Fire Stalk starts at about 8pm and usually goes on until about midnight, however, if you tell the instructors as you start (they will ask you anyway) then they are happy to let the game run ALL NIGHT if you so wish. Because there was only a couple of students on my course we were all finished by 11:30pm and this suited me fine. We chatted round the fire about what wed all done during the stalk and then hit the sack by just gone 12.
Next morning we were sent to go check the sand traps and other baited areas for prints and Andy and I had a great hour or so tracking foxes, stoats, rabbits and goodness knows what else.
When we got back we did a few more Pressure release Lectures and then backed that up again with practices in the sandbox.
We did some more Spirit tracking, games and I assure you that you will find these very interesting and the results somewhat strange those who didnt believe before surely will now.
Geoff also gave us lectures on Lost track drills and a warning lecture about deception tactics and the outcome of not being aware of all around you when concentrating on the track in hand.
We then had lunch and then it was time for the final exercise. This is often done alone but in our case as there was just two of us we were given the option to track together as a tracking team and we chose to do this.
Again, like the first live track we did alone yesterday, one of the instructors headed off for a walk and a while later we were taken to the start of the trail. By working together we were able to follow the track fairly fast and were doing well until we came to a place were we both felt uneasy about a direction indicator, using methods taught to us we were able to continue the tracking and shortly after found the instructor hiding in a hedgerow. It turned out that where we had felt uneasy about the track direction was were the instructor had stopped and not been sure himself which way to go, he had headed off one way for about 20 metres and then doubled back on himself 30 metres the other way and then ducked through a barbed wire fence and crossed a small road. What was interesting to us was that although we werent sure what had happened, both of us knew just from a feeling that this part of the track wasnt straight forward this is a very basic level of what is known as Spirit tracking and although I was very sceptical before the course I can assure you that it does work very well once you open yourself to it. As a wise man once said The mind is like a parachute, it works best when its open.
We were given course notes and further home study to do and were then given a very brief outline of what we could expect should we choose to return on the Tracking Two course.
Conclusion:
All in all I thought this was an amazing weekend and I got so much out of it. I have made sand traps up at my local woods and even tracked a few army units over on the MoD land near me. When I spoke to the Officer of one group he was staggered to find out how much I knew about him and his men. From group sizes to eating and smoking habits.
I would very much recommend this course to anybody that has an interest in Tracking and in Nature Awareness in general. The instructing staff are first class and the whole course is conducted in what is known in modern teaching circles as a safe learning environment, this means you can ask any questions you like and know that nobody will laugh at you or ridicule you for not understanding. If the Staff arent getting their message through to you then they change the way they are doing it rather than look at you like youre stupid as I know other lesser instructors can do. They are happy to listen to what you have to say as well as teaching you and you definitely get a feeling of being looked after but never patronised by them.
We covered other subjects I have not mentioned here including Sit Spots, Laying Sand Traps, Awareness and Observation games and Tracking Team organisation but if I covered everything we did in this review then Id still be writing it!
I hope this review is of use to some of you, Im going to spend the next year putting everything I was taught into practice and then I will definitely be booking myself on their Tracking Two course.
Cheers,
Bam.
Review of Natural Pathways: Tracking One Course
Duration: One Weekend
Location: Nr. Canterbury, Kent
Instructors: Geoff McMullan and Hannah Nicholls
Cost: £197.00 including all meals and tea/coffee
Contact: http://www.natural-pathways.co.uk
Objectives:
Attributes of a Tracker
Looking at signs, defining and explaining the factors that affect them
Movement by Day and Night
Deception Tactics
Principles and Techniques of Stalking
Track Pursuit Drills
Lost Track Drills
Nature Awareness
Background to why I went:
I have had an interest in bushcraft since before I was in the cub scouts, as I have got older so I have learned new bushcraft skills and enjoyed the outdoors more and more.
One day I read something about tracking, it sounded interesting and I looked into it more and more, I came across an American Tracker called Tom Brown Jr and read a few of his books, both the story ones and the field guides too. I learned as much as I could from these books but as we all know you cannot learn everything from a book and particularly not the very practical skill of tracking.
Tom Brown runs his Tracker School in the Pine Barons of New Jersey in the USA and I simply couldnt afford either the time or money to go on one of his courses no matter how much I wanted to. I therefore started to search for a UK Tracking school.
It was odd but I stumbled across the Natural Pathways website over a year ago and although I liked the sound of their courses I was a little too hasty to say the least with my judgement of the Instructors, looking back it was a classic case of me ignorantly judging a book by its cover. If you look at the website you will see that both Hannah and Geoff have a deep understanding and awareness of nature and try to live not only their course time but whole lives like this. Being only a few years out of the army myself and with a pretty black and white attitude to life, my initial thoughts were That looks interesting but those two look like a couple of mad old hippies dont think thats for me, theyll have me hugging trees and allsorts! Well, how wrong could I be (but not about the tree hugging).
A year or so later and still having not found the UK school I wanted I happened to bump into Geoff at a camp we held down in Sussex, he was introduced to me by a friend of mine called JP.
We went for a walk in the woods on the Saturday afternoon and I was amazed at Geoffs awareness and understanding of nature, but more so by his gentle manor and willingness to freely share his knowledge. Hed come down to say hi to a few of his mates and certainly wasnt working but was still more than happy to show us a few of the wonders of nature. We found deer, dog, fox and badger tracks that afternoon and I was even more hooked on tracking. I made up my mind then to book a course and learn more.
Finally several months later I got my stuff together and on Friday morning I headed down to Kent.
The course itself:
The joining instructions and kit list were both spot on, I actually got to the site an hour early which, to those of you who know me will attest, is not a normal thing at all.
Because I was an hour early I waited in the car park. The team put out arrows for you to follow into the woods but due to my being early they werent out yet.
Being the nosey type, I wondered into the woods anyway and found the team just finishing the setting up. I grabbed my gear and set up camp with the other course member Andy (there can be up to about 6 people on this course which I think is a nice small group for my course we had four booked but two had to drop out so it was just me and Andy this meant we had three Natural Pathways staff to two students, how good was that! Many other schools would have cancelled the course but not Natural Pathways).
As soon as my camp was squared away I headed to the main camp area and was handed a cup of coffee and introduced to those I didnt know.
We had a very nice lunch cooked by Hannah and were then straight into our first lesson, it was only 13:15hrs!!! All meals are cooked and prepared by the Natural Pathways team, as they rightly point out, you have far to much to do and learn to worry about cooking .and theyre not wrong either!
Geoff ran us through the rough course outline and explained that although there were certain areas we needed to cover there was also scope for us to delve deeper into certain parts if we so wished. Hannah then went through the health and safety stuff that we needed to know about.
I wont go into exactly what was in the lectures as youll enjoy them more if they are passed on by Geoff and Hannah rather than via a review.
We did about half an hour by the fireside on attributes of a tracker and related books that Natural Pathways suggests you take a look at and then went straight to the sandbox. The sandbox is exactly what it sounds like, a low walled wooden box on the path that is filled with sand. Although it is possible to track any creature on any surface, for beginners, sand makes a very good learning medium.
The next exercise was the Tree hugging, I scoffed at earlier, all I will say is before you scoff at it too, go to the exercise with an open mind and see what you get from it. I very much enjoyed what we did although I couldnt rationally explain it! I can also assure you that having done it, I would no longer scoff at it ha ha.
We had more lectures back at the camp and some tea/coffee and chocy biscuits, then Hannah showed us how to walk and move through the woods without making a sound (a skill we would need the following night on the Fire Stalk). Then it was dinner time. Dinner was cooked over the open fire and it was nice to see a school that used its fire properly, actually changing the style of fire to suit what they were doing, I saw a star fire, a trail fire, a trench fire and an evening council fire all used at the correct times and then Tipi fires in the morning to rekindle from the night before. To me this shows me that the Instructors are truly at home in the woods and know how to live there comfortably.
After dinner we went to do a drum stalk in another part of the woods, again Im not going to go into details but it involves using every sense other than your sight to stalk up on a lone drummer in the woods sounds easy? Again, try it youll get lots out of it.
Next morning (wed only been there half a day and a night and it felt like ages) we got up and had breakfast, then Geoff took us to the next field and we were able to identify and then track foxes from the night before, we also saw stoat and pheasant tracks too and on the way back we tracked Geoff back to the camp.
After another hearty lunch we moved onto aging a track with Hannah and then Geoff gave small bullet sized lectures on the first 10 to 15 Pressure releases. We then went back to the sandbox and looked at these pressure releases in operation with Hannah being our guinea pig for each one we looked at.
Hannah also showed us a smaller sandbox she had made to show how time and aging of tracks can be studied.
The last thing we did before dinner was our first full trail tracking. The instructors set off before us walking through leaf litter and off trails, about half an hour later we were taken to the start of their trails and had to follow them. It was hard at first but by using the skills we had already been taught we were both able to follow our trails to their ends and also explain to the instructors (who shadowed us along their trail) more or less exactly what they had done at each part of the track and even managed to touch on what they were thinking as they walked through the woods. I cant explain it properly here but through tracking something you really do get to know it and its plans very well .almost spookily well!
Then we had dinner and prepared for the Fire Stalk. I very much enjoyed this and so wont say anything about it to spoil it other than you will need all your wits and cunning about you to pull off a win at this game and you should expect to spend a little bit of time crawling on the floor on your belly.
The Fire Stalk starts at about 8pm and usually goes on until about midnight, however, if you tell the instructors as you start (they will ask you anyway) then they are happy to let the game run ALL NIGHT if you so wish. Because there was only a couple of students on my course we were all finished by 11:30pm and this suited me fine. We chatted round the fire about what wed all done during the stalk and then hit the sack by just gone 12.
Next morning we were sent to go check the sand traps and other baited areas for prints and Andy and I had a great hour or so tracking foxes, stoats, rabbits and goodness knows what else.
When we got back we did a few more Pressure release Lectures and then backed that up again with practices in the sandbox.
We did some more Spirit tracking, games and I assure you that you will find these very interesting and the results somewhat strange those who didnt believe before surely will now.
Geoff also gave us lectures on Lost track drills and a warning lecture about deception tactics and the outcome of not being aware of all around you when concentrating on the track in hand.
We then had lunch and then it was time for the final exercise. This is often done alone but in our case as there was just two of us we were given the option to track together as a tracking team and we chose to do this.
Again, like the first live track we did alone yesterday, one of the instructors headed off for a walk and a while later we were taken to the start of the trail. By working together we were able to follow the track fairly fast and were doing well until we came to a place were we both felt uneasy about a direction indicator, using methods taught to us we were able to continue the tracking and shortly after found the instructor hiding in a hedgerow. It turned out that where we had felt uneasy about the track direction was were the instructor had stopped and not been sure himself which way to go, he had headed off one way for about 20 metres and then doubled back on himself 30 metres the other way and then ducked through a barbed wire fence and crossed a small road. What was interesting to us was that although we werent sure what had happened, both of us knew just from a feeling that this part of the track wasnt straight forward this is a very basic level of what is known as Spirit tracking and although I was very sceptical before the course I can assure you that it does work very well once you open yourself to it. As a wise man once said The mind is like a parachute, it works best when its open.
We were given course notes and further home study to do and were then given a very brief outline of what we could expect should we choose to return on the Tracking Two course.
Conclusion:
All in all I thought this was an amazing weekend and I got so much out of it. I have made sand traps up at my local woods and even tracked a few army units over on the MoD land near me. When I spoke to the Officer of one group he was staggered to find out how much I knew about him and his men. From group sizes to eating and smoking habits.
I would very much recommend this course to anybody that has an interest in Tracking and in Nature Awareness in general. The instructing staff are first class and the whole course is conducted in what is known in modern teaching circles as a safe learning environment, this means you can ask any questions you like and know that nobody will laugh at you or ridicule you for not understanding. If the Staff arent getting their message through to you then they change the way they are doing it rather than look at you like youre stupid as I know other lesser instructors can do. They are happy to listen to what you have to say as well as teaching you and you definitely get a feeling of being looked after but never patronised by them.
We covered other subjects I have not mentioned here including Sit Spots, Laying Sand Traps, Awareness and Observation games and Tracking Team organisation but if I covered everything we did in this review then Id still be writing it!
I hope this review is of use to some of you, Im going to spend the next year putting everything I was taught into practice and then I will definitely be booking myself on their Tracking Two course.
Cheers,
Bam.
