Happy 2009

Hello! Welcome to my Circle of the Seasons blog. I’m going to be spending an entire year at Hawk Circle and writing about my experiences, projects, adventures and what not. Hopefully this will give my family and friends a taste of what I am up to and also give prospective students an idea of what life is like here at camp.

My name is Connor, I grew up in Texas but spent the last 4 years studying Natural Resources and Rangeland Ecology at Colorado State University. I’ve been interested in primitive skills and nature since I was a little boy and I’ve taken several classes as an adult at Tom Brown’s Tracker School. I’ve also been working on the Kamana Naturalist Training Program. This is a home-study course that is broken up into 4 levels and takes several years to complete (I’m about to start the 4th level).

I chose to spend a year at Hawk Circle after I finished college for several reasons. I spent most of my time learning and practicing these skills alone and I always wanted to have a length of time to work in a community with other people that share my interests. I’ve also always wanted some long term and in depth instruction and mentoring. I had heard good things about Hawk Circle from friends and the logistics of their programs worked well for me so after a long process of emails and phone calls I committed to the Circle of the Seasons Program.

My time here began with the Winter Intensive class. This was a three week course that focused on winter survival and winter living. We practiced fires in the snow, sleet, and freezing rain with flint and steel, bow-drill and hand-drill. We also learned about and made winter shelters, made and set traps, dried meat, went tracking, worked with soapstone and several other projects fit for the winter time. All of this practice culminated in a 4 day survival trek where we slept out in a shelter, cooked over a fire and basically hung out for 4 days experiencing the winter life. It was a great class and an excellent way to start the year.

Now that class has ended and I have several weeks open to work on any projects I want. One major bonus to this year long program is that there is time between classes to really hone all the skills I learned during the class. Right now I am focusing on Kamana and trapping. I've also picked out a bowstave and will be working on that in the next few days.