Where can I go to legally practice all aspects of Bushcraft without permission?
- Thread starter Billy1
- Start date
tsitenha: sustained yield in forest and wildlife management is critical.
I live with people with traplines. It's a stupid person to totally clean out their nest.
I live with people with traplines. It's a stupid person to totally clean out their nest.
I always imagined british columbia as a pretty damp place, not forest fire country at all. I had quick google about it this morning, seems you got it pretty bad atm
It's bad, going to even worse with a week of electrical storms (but cooler temps and maybe some rain) in the offing.
The Fog Zone is a 2km wide strip on the west coast of Vancouver Island which seems pretty safe, still.
I have been growing grapes successfully since 2001. Many has been the summer with no need to water any of them.
This summer, 5 times already and many more to come, all I can say.
One problem with any kind of wild camping here this summer is that a wild fire will race up the mountainside during the day
and when the evening downdraft starts, the damn fire will flow down hill at night. If there's no air, even hiding in a creek can't save your butt.
Resources are more than fully extended with crews arriving from Australia and New Zealand.
Canadian Armed Forces working fires in the province of Saskatchewan now, 13,000 people moved in the biggest evac in SK history.
The Fog Zone is a 2km wide strip on the west coast of Vancouver Island which seems pretty safe, still.
I have been growing grapes successfully since 2001. Many has been the summer with no need to water any of them.
This summer, 5 times already and many more to come, all I can say.
One problem with any kind of wild camping here this summer is that a wild fire will race up the mountainside during the day
and when the evening downdraft starts, the damn fire will flow down hill at night. If there's no air, even hiding in a creek can't save your butt.
Resources are more than fully extended with crews arriving from Australia and New Zealand.
Canadian Armed Forces working fires in the province of Saskatchewan now, 13,000 people moved in the biggest evac in SK history.
Terrible calamity but it's good to see the cooperation. Interprovincial and international.
It's a really big place. It's pretty hard to generalize about a province that has roughly four times the area of the UK. The coast is temperate rainforest. The southern Okanagan valley is almost desert. The interior is boreal.
Most of BC is very wet in the winter, and very dry in the summer. More so in recent times thanks to global climate change. Here on Vancouver Island we can get up to 3 metres of rain a year. But where I am we've had 7.5 mm of rain since May. The majority of the rain will fall between October and April.
Thank you for all the helpful responses and advice, I appreciate it. To everyone else: I really don't how else I can explain this but I will try again...
I have not once mentioned cutting down trees. I said that I would like to cut live trees. When necessary. With minimal impact to the tree and the environment. Where it will actually encourage thicker growth. Not cut down trees. I would like to cut small branches off of large trees. The only reason I mentioned shelter several times was because that would be the limit of what I want to do with regards to cutting live trees. And still I would not be cutting down whole trees.
To people telling to "just take a tarp"... Firstly, how is a plastic tarp more environmentally friendly than sustain-ably cutting a couple of live branches? (Yes it doesn't have to be plastic, but most are).
Secondly, how exactly am I supposed to use a tarp for making cordage, fishing poles, baskets, birch bark containers, pot hangars & cooking utensils, bows & other weapons, green woodworking, camp tools, items of high structural integrity and heat resistance etc...? There are so many aspects of bushcraft which require cutting live trees. Taking a tarp doesn't solve that.
I have not once mentioned cutting down trees. I said that I would like to cut live trees. When necessary. With minimal impact to the tree and the environment. Where it will actually encourage thicker growth. Not cut down trees. I would like to cut small branches off of large trees. The only reason I mentioned shelter several times was because that would be the limit of what I want to do with regards to cutting live trees. And still I would not be cutting down whole trees.
To people telling to "just take a tarp"... Firstly, how is a plastic tarp more environmentally friendly than sustain-ably cutting a couple of live branches? (Yes it doesn't have to be plastic, but most are).
Secondly, how exactly am I supposed to use a tarp for making cordage, fishing poles, baskets, birch bark containers, pot hangars & cooking utensils, bows & other weapons, green woodworking, camp tools, items of high structural integrity and heat resistance etc...? There are so many aspects of bushcraft which require cutting live trees. Taking a tarp doesn't solve that.
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In the wilderness you are likely to encounter these days, this is far more useful.
[video=youtube;Vc6TG7Y3RK4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc6TG7Y3RK4[/video]
[video=youtube;Vc6TG7Y3RK4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc6TG7Y3RK4[/video]
Billy1
"Could you please explain what gives you the right to have a "need" to use them, but not anyone else?"
I don't give myself or anyone else "the right" to cut live trees as I wish. When "need to use" in a true survival situation then I, You, anyone else will do what NEEDS to be done.
Proper tree harvesting like Robson Valley has said is using resources in a sustainable way, much different.
You think that by "cutting" only a branch or so from a live tree, will do no harm? Sap will try to heal the wound (do you bring a sealer?), it does not always work. I imagine cutting the tip of my finger would prove to be similar, not necessarily deadly but painful, but allowing an entrance to bacteria.
As to birch bark containers well using a live tree will eventually kill it.
We have been trying to tell you that dead trees are Ok to harvest for your uses, needless use of live trees is not.
I use a nylon tarp, I bring my own cordage etc... I trek with an appropriate kit.
You have your mind set to do as you wish, so be it, glad you are away.
I see to many misguided people devastate a camping area, a scenic spot near and far, because????
I am thinking that you are an innocent, young person, with romantic notions not deliberately wanting to do damage but trying to prove yourself.
All good intentions still results in waste if no understanding of what you do.
"Could you please explain what gives you the right to have a "need" to use them, but not anyone else?"
I don't give myself or anyone else "the right" to cut live trees as I wish. When "need to use" in a true survival situation then I, You, anyone else will do what NEEDS to be done.
Proper tree harvesting like Robson Valley has said is using resources in a sustainable way, much different.
You think that by "cutting" only a branch or so from a live tree, will do no harm? Sap will try to heal the wound (do you bring a sealer?), it does not always work. I imagine cutting the tip of my finger would prove to be similar, not necessarily deadly but painful, but allowing an entrance to bacteria.
As to birch bark containers well using a live tree will eventually kill it.
We have been trying to tell you that dead trees are Ok to harvest for your uses, needless use of live trees is not.
I use a nylon tarp, I bring my own cordage etc... I trek with an appropriate kit.
You have your mind set to do as you wish, so be it, glad you are away.
I see to many misguided people devastate a camping area, a scenic spot near and far, because????
I am thinking that you are an innocent, young person, with romantic notions not deliberately wanting to do damage but trying to prove yourself.
All good intentions still results in waste if no understanding of what you do.
Some of the comments to this thread are bordering on the ridiculous when you consider a few 'minor' points.
We're a tiny island that has decimated our natural forests. We consume far more every day than would ever be sustainable for the island we live on and I would argue that the majority who have commented kill more trees with their lifestyle choices every day than Billy ever would by practising bushcraft, enjoying the outdoors and most importantly, learning to live in a natural environment rather than the manufactured boxes the majority of us live in.
Rather than berating someone who dares to admit on the internet that he'd cut some branches from a live tree, wouldn't the time be better used campaigning about how we buy everything from China these days? China plows through more acres of forest per day than any other nation on Earth, but as long as we can get a cheap tent or that shiny pot so we can sit outside and pretend we're environmentally friendly, that's okay! We'll sit back while developers mow down a local woodland to build fancy houses, not a murmur can be heard at the supermarket checkout with the mountains of paper and plastic packaging on such essentials as the 'baking potato' but someone suggests he might build a natural shelter in a British woodland so he can get closer to nature... hang him! Hang him!
No doubt there will be a rebuttal that you personally don't buy things with excessive packaging, you personally try to source everything you own from natural sources and without a hint of irony, you don't personally condone the proliferation of Chinese goods throughout our tiny island. Well done... now just 68,000,000 other people on our island to persuade to do the same and 1,357,000,000 people in China to convert into your way of thinking... then we've cracked it!
Oh, then there is the rest of Asia, Africa and South America to persuade until we get to the waste capital of the world, the good 'ole USA. Close behind them is the rest of Europe. That is quite a number of people who need persuading, but I reckon with a decent leaflet campaign and a few marches, we'll be done in say, what, a few hundred years?
Billy, as I said earlier in this thread, find yourself a local group who practise bushcrafting, or alternatively travel out to some of the meets elsewhere in the country. You'll find varying attitudes to what you want to do, but if your persevere you'll find a spot you enjoy, great people who share your passion with doing what you want to do in a guilt-free environment and hopefully you'll hone your skills so you know what to chop and where to plop... what you can eat and what should be considered a treat. I wish you the best of luck with it, but I'm afraid when you ask for some simple advice on the internet you have to watch every single word you type. Somebody somewhere is waiting to pick fault with your words whilst casually ignoring their own place in the increasingly cruel and wasteful world we seem to have found ourselves in.... no doubt by wasting our efforts on nitpicking rather than creating, embracing and generally thinking before we speak. The latter is one of my greatest failings
We're a tiny island that has decimated our natural forests. We consume far more every day than would ever be sustainable for the island we live on and I would argue that the majority who have commented kill more trees with their lifestyle choices every day than Billy ever would by practising bushcraft, enjoying the outdoors and most importantly, learning to live in a natural environment rather than the manufactured boxes the majority of us live in.
Rather than berating someone who dares to admit on the internet that he'd cut some branches from a live tree, wouldn't the time be better used campaigning about how we buy everything from China these days? China plows through more acres of forest per day than any other nation on Earth, but as long as we can get a cheap tent or that shiny pot so we can sit outside and pretend we're environmentally friendly, that's okay! We'll sit back while developers mow down a local woodland to build fancy houses, not a murmur can be heard at the supermarket checkout with the mountains of paper and plastic packaging on such essentials as the 'baking potato' but someone suggests he might build a natural shelter in a British woodland so he can get closer to nature... hang him! Hang him!
No doubt there will be a rebuttal that you personally don't buy things with excessive packaging, you personally try to source everything you own from natural sources and without a hint of irony, you don't personally condone the proliferation of Chinese goods throughout our tiny island. Well done... now just 68,000,000 other people on our island to persuade to do the same and 1,357,000,000 people in China to convert into your way of thinking... then we've cracked it!
Oh, then there is the rest of Asia, Africa and South America to persuade until we get to the waste capital of the world, the good 'ole USA. Close behind them is the rest of Europe. That is quite a number of people who need persuading, but I reckon with a decent leaflet campaign and a few marches, we'll be done in say, what, a few hundred years?Billy, as I said earlier in this thread, find yourself a local group who practise bushcrafting, or alternatively travel out to some of the meets elsewhere in the country. You'll find varying attitudes to what you want to do, but if your persevere you'll find a spot you enjoy, great people who share your passion with doing what you want to do in a guilt-free environment and hopefully you'll hone your skills so you know what to chop and where to plop... what you can eat and what should be considered a treat. I wish you the best of luck with it, but I'm afraid when you ask for some simple advice on the internet you have to watch every single word you type. Somebody somewhere is waiting to pick fault with your words whilst casually ignoring their own place in the increasingly cruel and wasteful world we seem to have found ourselves in.... no doubt by wasting our efforts on nitpicking rather than creating, embracing and generally thinking before we speak. The latter is one of my greatest failings
Some of the comments to this thread are bordering on the ridiculous when you consider a few 'minor' points.
We're a tiny island that has decimated our natural forests. We consume far more every day than would ever be sustainable for the island we live on and I would argue that the majority who have commented kill more trees with their lifestyle choices every day than Billy ever would by practising bushcraft, enjoying the outdoors and most importantly, learning to live in a natural environment rather than the manufactured boxes the majority of us live in.
Rather than berating someone who dares to admit on the internet that he'd cut some branches from a live tree, wouldn't the time be better used campaigning about how we buy everything from China these days? China plows through more acres of forest per day than any other nation on Earth, but as long as we can get a cheap tent or that shiny pot so we can sit outside and pretend we're environmentally friendly, that's okay! We'll sit back while developers mow down a local woodland to build fancy houses, not a murmur can be heard at the supermarket checkout with the mountains of paper and plastic packaging on such essentials as the 'baking potato' but someone suggests he might build a natural shelter in a British woodland so he can get closer to nature... hang him! Hang him!
No doubt there will be a rebuttal that you personally don't buy things with excessive packaging, you personally try to source everything you own from natural sources and without a hint of irony, you don't personally condone the proliferation of Chinese goods throughout our tiny island. Well done... now just 68,000,000 other people on our island to persuade to do the same and 1,357,000,000 people in China to convert into your way of thinking... then we've cracked it!
Billy, as I said earlier in this thread, find yourself a local group who practise bushcrafting, or alternatively travel out to some of the meets elsewhere in the country. You'll find varying attitudes to what you want to do, but if your persevere you'll find a spot you enjoy, great people who share your passion with doing what you want to do in a guilt-free environment and hopefully you'll hone your skills so you know what to chop and where to plop... what you can eat and what should be considered a treat. I wish you the best of luck with it, but I'm afraid when you ask for some simple advice on the internet you have to watch every single word you type. Somebody somewhere is waiting to pick fault with your words whilst casually ignoring their own place in the increasingly cruel and wasteful world we seem to have found ourselves in.... no doubt by wasting our efforts on nitpicking rather than creating, embracing and generally thinking before we speak. The latter is one of my greatest failings
A bit lengthy but well said. However the OP asked specifically where he can do all this legally. That means his choices are limited. Either he can find a private landowner willing to give him permission (highly unlikely even if he's willing to pay for the privilege) or he can find a small acreage of 10 to 40 acres and but it outright. Even then it needs to be in an area with minimal regulations on land use; that might necessitate immigrating but y'all there in the UK could better advise him about your regulatory laws.
Realize that this approach will leave you limited to practicing only as it applies to bushcrafting in that exact climate/habitat/environment. Move just a county or two away and some of those factors might be different.
That leaves the third option which has also been suggested: find a club/school/group that practices on a regular basis and join them. No you won't have the freedom that you're looking for to practice what and when you want but will have to follow the group's pace.
There just isn't a perfect solution and only you know what will give you the best balance and fit your budget.
Exactly. Just because there is a local group does not mean they will have the same wants as Billy, so its a case of travelling and searching until he finds a group that suits what he wants to do. When he finds it, he'll have a great time and some night time chats that won't soon be forgotten.
I've been extremely lucky to find such a group first try and to a man, they are a bunch who are not only unique, but compliment each other in their skills and conversational vigor
I truly hope Billy finds the same and enjoys his outdoors experience. It may take some trial and error, but the right experience is out there. And that right experience should hopefully make Billy smile from ear to ear
Alaska.
Assuming the bushcraft mores are adhered to you can do what you like there, including dying miles from help.
I really don't understand the 'don't touch a living tree' brigade. I spent many happy years managing woodland and coppicing (et al) really only works on live trees - you can of course apply the principle to dead ones but it's a bit like necrophilia...
And before anyone says it, a one shoot coppice will not do the slightest harm. It is actually almost impossible to kill a tree in that way. Even chopping it down won't kill most common species. Will annoy the owner enormously of course, which of course contravenes at least one bushcraft resolution. Unless it's a hedge in which case you may well get paid for it.
Assuming the bushcraft mores are adhered to you can do what you like there, including dying miles from help.
I really don't understand the 'don't touch a living tree' brigade. I spent many happy years managing woodland and coppicing (et al) really only works on live trees - you can of course apply the principle to dead ones but it's a bit like necrophilia...
And before anyone says it, a one shoot coppice will not do the slightest harm. It is actually almost impossible to kill a tree in that way. Even chopping it down won't kill most common species. Will annoy the owner enormously of course, which of course contravenes at least one bushcraft resolution. Unless it's a hedge in which case you may well get paid for it.
But you have said you do need to use them... are you regularly in survival situations then?
Let me ask you some questions... Are you sitting on a chair? Are you in a room with walls? Are you looking at a computer screen? A phone? Where do you think the materials from these things comes from? The manufacture of them certainly didn't "leave no trace".
Here is some information on the nylon which you choose to use then... http://schoolworkhelper.net/nylon-background-dangers-disposal/
Finally, this excellent article explains everything about how I feel about the matter much better than I ever could... http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/content.php?r=537-The-Importance-of-Traditional-Woodcraft-Skills It talks about how we should live with, and be a part of nature, not just observe it.
If you have the time, please give it a read, I feel that it may change some people's views.
Sorry Billy but that is a false comparison. A plastic product that is used for many years does not have the same proportional impact as cutting trees every time you want a shelter.
The article you linked to is written in a country that has a population density far lower than the UK, with vast forests. The UK has lovely rolling countryside, to be sure, but it isn't forested to the same degree. Bush woodcrafting skills won't be of much use in the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors, most of the Lake District, etc.
I don't want to put you off learning skills, but don't expect to be able to tramp the UK and camp using them everywhere.
The article you linked to is written in a country that has a population density far lower than the UK, with vast forests. The UK has lovely rolling countryside, to be sure, but it isn't forested to the same degree. Bush woodcrafting skills won't be of much use in the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors, most of the Lake District, etc.
I don't want to put you off learning skills, but don't expect to be able to tramp the UK and camp using them everywhere.
As I have already said in my original post, I'm not looking for a place to go in the UK, I'm looking where to go in the world, the first place I mentioned having looked at was Sweden.
You could try this.
http://www.channel5.com/shows/10000-bc/articles/seen-10000-bc-and-think-you-can-do-better
I think it was shot in Romania.
http://www.channel5.com/shows/10000-bc/articles/seen-10000-bc-and-think-you-can-do-better
I think it was shot in Romania.
I actually applied for Season 1, got a phone interview but then didn't hear anything back so I guess I'm not the sort of person they are looking for
