Ashland Daily Tidings/ Medford Mail Tribune:
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Brian Dwyer, 44, along with his son Rory, examine the fine details of what happens when you walk on different types of surfaces, such as grass during the Tracking training at North Mountain Park, Sunday, March 28, 2010.Photos by Larry Stauth Jr.
April 01, 2010 By Daniel Newberry for the Mail Tribune:
Eleven people crouch with their faces close to the sandy ground, staring intently at footprints made less than a minute ago.
It's a windy, overcast Sunday morning in late March at the North Mountain Park playground in Ashland. They shift position often, regarding each footprint from multiple angles, taking in their surroundings using what group leader Joe Kreuzman calls "wide-angle vision."
"An elk can see 270 degrees, behind its head. Video games are focused and obsessive-compulsive. Our ancestors used wide-angle vision, it was survival: if you didn't see it first, the cougar might drop out of the tree, and that would be the end of you," Kreuzman says.
Kreuzman is introducing members of the newly formed Ashland Tracking Club to the ancient art of tracking, a skill that requires a relaxed but total concentration on one's surroundings, processing sensory cues from the peripheral vision - hence the name "wide-angle vision."
This tracking club is the latest endeavor of the Ashland-based Coyote Trails School of Nature, a nonprofit organization Kreuzman founded in 2003. The school moved to Ashland last year from Bend. Its mission is to teach earth-based primitive living skills in the natural environment to children, teens and adults.
In many cases, generations in the same family study skills together, such as fire making, building shelters, foraging, trapping and making primitive tools.
"This is something we can do together," says Brian Dwyer, who lives in the Colestin Valley.
Dwyer's 14-year-old son, Rory, attended a week-long introductory camp for teens last summer taught by Coyote School instructors at Earth Teach Forest Park on Dead Indian Memorial Road.
Rory has been practicing his skills ever since, and today is able to answer many of the questions Kreuzman poses to the group of primarily adults.
For the next exercise, half the people turn their backs while their partners walk across a grassy lawn, then they attempt to follow the tracks.
One secret to success in this and other tracking techniques, says Kreuzman, is to seek out the disturbance.
"Tracking is all about disturbance to baseline (conditions). Once we know the baseline, then we'll know the disturbance to that baseline," Kreuzman explains.
Now the group is ready to track animals in a wilder setting. Tracks abound in North Mountain Park. During their February meeting, club members identified tracks belonging to mink, bobcat, beaver, dusky-footed woodrat, spotted skunk, raccoon, harvest mouse and California vole.
A thick patch of standing dead grass is the location for a vole search. These tiny rodents create tunnels at ground level through waist-high grass that makes them invisible to casual observers and predators alike.
The trackers carefully part the grass and follow the tunnels made by the repeated trips of the voles. For the persistent tracker, the tunnels eventually lead to a burrow. The observant may find a mound of tiny vole scat. The lucky may even find a vole hair.
Serendipity plays a role along the way. Earthworm casings and the acidic scat of a junco are revealed.
Kreuzman and fellow Coyote Trails instructor Howard Holt point out these clues to the new trackers. They have studied tracking and wilderness skills at the nationally renowned Tom Brown Tracking School in New Jersey.
Interest in tracking began for Kreuzman at a young age.
"I was 2 years old walking through wet grass and stepped onto hot concrete and noticed my footprint for the first time," he recalls.
In addition to holding summer classes in tracking, the Coyote Trails School of Nature teaches a weekly class at the Willow Wind Community Learning Center and has worked with the Wilderness Charter School in Ashland.
Their goal for the local tracking club is to create a group of accomplished trackers who can help find lost pets and, ultimately, to assist search-and-rescue teams in finding lost humans.
Tracking, according to Kreuzman, is not about learning new skills, it's about relearning lost ones.
"Tracking is in our DNA," Kreuzman explains. "Today we're bringing it back into our awareness."
For more information on the Coyote Trails Nature School, visit our office .
Holy Grails of the Trails:
Tracking club will meet once a month at North Mountain Park
Joe Kreuzman looks for animal tracks in a dry creek bed in North Mountain Park. He is starting a club to help people learn how to track different animals and identify their tracks. Jim Craven / Daily TidingsJim Craven
Ashland Daily Tidings
February 26, 2010
For Joe Kreuzman, the forest floor is more than simply a place to put one hiking boot in front of the other. It's a book to read slowly and carefully, learning about the creatures that travel this way and that as they go about their lives beyond the regular limits of human awareness.
Kreuzman will attempt to raise that awareness through a new club he's starting in which people can learn and share animal tracking and identification skills.
"We learn how to read nature's manuscript," Kreuzman said.
The club, which will be named at the first meeting, is free and will meet on the last Sunday of every month at North Mountain Park. Kreuzman will show club members how to identify and analyze animal tracks, how to follow trails and how to put together all different aspects of the environment - weather, time of day, season, terrain - to help understand a trail left by an animal.
"It connects out to so much more than just what we're looking at," Kreuzman said.
Kreuzman moved to Ashland from Bend in May 2009, but for the past seven years he's taught each summer at Coyote Trails School of Nature at Earth Teach Forest Park on Dead Indian Memorial Road. At Coyote Trails, children, adults and families learn primitive skills, awareness, tracking and a philosophy of nature, Kreuzman said.
Coming from the Bend area, Kreuzman said he is looking forward to a new cross-section of animals and trails in the Ashland area. Near Bend, with its higher elevation and high-desert conditions, typical tracks included mule deer, marmots, badgers and different bird species. He expects to see a change in the ground squirrel species, from Eastern Oregon's golden mantled ground squirrel to the California ground squirrel common in Southern Oregon. And Kreuzman can spot the difference in the traces they leave.
In Southern Oregon's hills, Kreuzman looks forward to seeing traces of red fox, ringtail cat, different species of rabbits and even the elusive pine martin, which he recently caught a fleeting look at in the Crater Lake area.
"For me it's seeing the rare animals that are so secretive and sly that is the grand prize," he said. "To get a glimpse of even a track is so exciting. It's like the Holy Grail."
The club is open to people of all levels of tracking ability and experience, but Kreuzman said 5 is about the earliest age at which a youngster has the attention and focus required to begin learning about tracking.
Beginning trackers pick up a new way of looking at the world very quickly, but the finer points of the art develop at different rates for different people. This mostly depends on the amount of "dirt time" - time on the ground working on their skills - new trackers invest.
"Pretty much right away people will begin to see the ground in an enlightened way," Kreuzman said. "As they advance they pick up a really fine attention to detail."
The skills learned can open people's eyes to new ways to appreciate otherwise commonplace experiences, according to Kreuzman. That string of beautiful sunny days last week? Not just an early chance to break out the summer sandals. California ground squirrels, hibernating through most of the winter, came out in droves for the warm weather.
"For them to be out of their burrows is very unusual this early in the year," Kreuzman said.
As he brings people up to a higher level of tracking ability, Kreuzman hopes to develop a community resource of experience that city or law enforcement officials can call on to help identify signs of potentially dangerous wildlife that wanders into town.
"I'd love to have enough members of the tracker club qualified to a level where they can be called on to differentiate, 'That's not a mountain lion,' or 'It is, and it's a female weighing about so many pounds,' " he said.
The club's first meeting will be from 9 a.m. to noon this Sunday at North Mountain Park. For more information call Kreuzman at 541-482-0513
Myles Murphy is an editor and reporter with the Daily
Tidings.
July 27, 2008
Reconnecting with nature, on all fours
By JOHN DARLING for the Mail Tribune
It's night in the Cascade foothills and they're blindfolding me and telling me to walk a mile uphill through the woods, telling me to get to where I hear a drum beat once every 30 seconds.
It's a challenge to the self-confidence and a lot of other inner qualities, such as plain old courage.
Do I have any? We'll soon find out.
I stumble through the uneven grassland and then come to the bushes, trees and rock outcroppings. After giving up on the idea of being graceful or skillful, I drop to all fours and find it a lot easier traveling.
My ears become a lot more attuned. I hear others off on the right and left and they sound like a bunch of empty boxes being pushed up the hill. Before long, the humor of the situation surfaces - along with the realization of how they, the teachers of Coyote Trails School of Nature, are trying to get us to train and trust our intuition, increasing our awareness of the natural world.
Are there trees in front of me? Well, do I hear and feel leaves or needles on the ground? That would be a sure clue. When I pull on the branches, does the tree give? That would mean a small tree. Limbs that don't give mean a big tree. After a while I started to figure out how the forest works when you don't have that predominating sense - sight.
We didn't expect this exercise. We didn't expect any of them. They never tell you what's about to happen. Knowing makes you get in your head. You start strategizing.
Finally, I get to the drummer and they lead me to sit on the ground, still blindfolded and, to my surprise, I have all these feelings of having accomplished one of the weirdest and hardest things of my life.
I feel "¦ what? I feel proud and happy and like I can do anything! It's a crazy, good feeling.
It comes again later, learning how to make fire with bow and drill, making rope out of plant fibers, making a deadfall trap out of three simple sticks, learning to silently stalk and track (and notice when you are being stalked).
The feeling surfaces when you go to your special Sit Spot every dawn to journal, watch the sun steal over the meadows, open your senses to nature and realize what a vast, mysterious and beautiful temple this is.
As the days go by in this refuge up Dead Indian Memorial Road above Ashland, it's clear that we 50 people are going through something unusual, not just a summer camp or getaway. It may be disorienting and you may even lose sleep, says chief instructor Joe, because this might be the first time in your life you've ever been really relaxed.
I soon notice that we have established that elusive thing called community.
It feels like ancient echoes of tribal life, with everyone busy, smiling, content and leaving behind the stresses, agendas, fears, worries and ego trips of daily life.
It's remarkable - and, to me, the most amazing part of the weeklong experience - that a random group of people, given survival tasks to accomplish in a state of nature, get along marvelously and happily, "sinking down," as Joe calls it, out of the personal ego into a group identity where the needs of all are the same as the needs of the individual.
Out from under this phenomenon of tribe-in-nature creeps a beautiful sense of the sacred - all the animals and plants having their own ways, nature and purpose, which they carry out all around you as they get to know your ways, nature and purpose. And all of this without any instructors spelling it out for you.
Nature and tribe explain themselves, and with each day, you notice and understand them more.
Learning survival skills is a fun way of making you understand you evolved in and belong to nature. But the real schooling comes from learning that, away from phones, computers, TV, cars and civilization, there's a place where we belong and are, in ways we can never know in the city, at home.
John Darling is freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.
June 14, 2008:
No child left inside
Coyote Trails is a camp where adults can learn as much as
kids
By JOHN DARLING
for the Mail Tribune
Rozella and Thomas Apel explore the labyrinth at EarthTeach
Park in Ashland during last summer's Coyote Trails summer
camp.
Coyote Trails has all the arts, crafts, hikes and fun games you would expect from a summer camp, but it goes beyond that, into building self-confidence through learning primitive living and survival skills and reconnecting with the rhythms of nature.
Running six weekly sessions in the Cascade foothills above
Ashland starting Tuesday, the camp teaches kids and adults
how to make fire without matches, find drinking water in
leaves, build a cozy shelter out of sticks and brush - and
achieve its tongue-in-cheek goal of "no child left
inside."
About the camp
Coyote Trails, now in its fourth year, offers an Earth Art day camp Monday through Friday for kids 7 to 13, including lunch and snacks, at $300. The Coyote Trails School of Nature is seven days, residential, Sunday through Saturday, with organic meals provided, at $650. Scholarships are available. An advanced, three-week school follows. For more information call 541-617-0439 or go to www.coyotetrails.org.
"It was a time of connection with my sons that I know is not
possible in everyday life," says parent Jesse Biesanz of
Talent, who did the camp himself, occasionally sharing
adventures with his children. "It was a pretty intense
experience. I came away changed - more grounded, centered,
more confident about stepping outside the bounds of
civilization."
The camp, headquartered in Bend and operating each summer at
Earth Teach Forest Park on Dead Indian Memorial Road, teaches
students to slow down from from their fast-paced, hi-tech,
indoors lifestyles and open their awareness to the rhythms of
nature - and the fact that we have a natural place in it.
In learning the art of tracking, says instructor Rebecca
Moergen, "it's like putting on glasses that let you see
nature. You learn to walk quietly and use your peripheral
vision. You gather clues. You learn the different bird calls
so you know the cry of alarm of a stellar jay. You get to
know the natural world again."
The acid test of a summer camp, of course, is whether the
kids are happy - or sad - to go home. For Laura Roll of
Ashland, her son Shea "got a sense of community and
understanding of how to survive in nature "¦ and what
birds are saying to him. He also had fun and games - and he
didn't want to come home."
Students do storytelling, sculpture, painting, journaling
and silent movement. But above all, they shift out of
observer mode (as in television, game boys, computers) into a
deeper level of awareness and involvement that "brings you
back into balance, focusing on the positive, on community, on
the chickadee landing on the bill of your hat," says director
Joe Kreuzman. "Miraculous things happen. You come to see
survival in nature not as a struggle or anything to
fear,"
The program is aimed at curing the bad habits of civilized
life - such as knowing more about the animals of Africa (from
TV) than the ones living around us - and instilling a
positive belief in the beauty, wisdom and importance of
nature that will last a lifetime, Kreuzman says.
"It's a beautifully run program, family-oriented," says
Roll. "It's about finding your place in the web of nature,
not just having fun and games, although they do have those.
It's about interconnectedness with nature, and it's
profound."
John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail
him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Rouging It Feature: "Survival 101: Coyote Trails School
of Nature teaches kids primitive living skills"
By Julie French
In the hills of Earth Teach Forest Park is a bear den that will hold 19 campers and counselors sitting should to shoulder. After getting their faces painted with black stripes, they crawl in one at a time and form a ring around the fire pit. Instructor-in-training Amanda Smith leads them in a slow, chanting song, then asks, "Do you want to howl like a coyote" Let's howl like a coyote."
On the count of three the den erupts in howls, the hole in the ceiling fills with light, and the students reach a consensus that their howling woke up the sun.
This is the Coyote Trails School of Nature, a summer camp that teaches kids, their parents and grandparents skills for primitive forest living. Over the course of a week-long day camp, campers learn how to build a shelter similar to the bear den using no artificial materials, start a fire without the aid of a match, track animals and find safe drinking water and food. The most advanced campers spend a week in the woods with only a wool blanket and the meager supplies they make themselves - smoked salmon, a gourd canteen and a bag made from animal hide.
"At Coyote Trails, we don't teach that you have to conquer nature," said Director Joe Kreuzman. "It's very easy to live at one with our natural environment."
Kreuzman started the camp three years ago to give kids the contact with nature he longed for when he was growing up I Ohio. His teaching philosophy focuses on developing an awareness of self and surroundings and is largely experience-based.
To develop awareness, campers spend up to an hour a day in their "sit spot," observing how one are changes over time and developing a familiarity with the spot. The instructors ask more questions than they give answers to help kids "know what they already know," and give them skills that they can apply when they return home.
By mid-week, the campers have changed, moving at a slower pace, Kreuzman said.
After the visit to the bear den, he pointed out how quietly they walked up to the campfire, where they made ash cakes for a snack.
Instructor Alex Carney leads the kids through a litany of questions, asking how bread is made, where flour comes from, what else would be used in place of wheat. Then he demonstrates how to shape today's ask cakes - made from cornmeal amaranth, red clover flowers and berries - and set it on the coals to cook. "Why is it called ash cake?" he asked.
"Because it has a lot of ashes," came the chorus of replies.
One the cakes are finished cooking; the campers blow off the ashes, drizzle them in honey and start munching.
"These are definitely better than s'mores," said Karan, 8. "Or a marshmallow!" he added.
Karan said he definitely wanted to return to camp, and Kreuzman and the rest of his staff want kids like him to be able to return throughout the year. They are creating a nature curriculum in conjunction with Oregon's state mandated curriculum and host field trips during the school year.
Jennifer Wahpepah, a special education teacher at Ashland High School, took her class in the spring of 2006, and said the lessons her students learned out in the woods helped them back in the classroom.
"Anything that helps with their self esteem or problem solving,
overcoming obstacle, taking risks, all apply directly to city
life and also in the classroom," she said.
May 19, 2005
Learn to survive in the woods
By Robert Plain
Ashland Daily Tidings
Tom Brown is the world's foremost tracker. He has worked with all kinds of enforcement agencies in helping to find people who have been lost in the woods or hiding from the law. He runs the largest tracking school in the nation and has authored 16 books on the subject of wilderness survival and know-how.
He was taught these time-honored skills of paying close attention to the natural world in order to better understand what is happening in it by an Apache elder named Stalking Wolf.
Starting this summer, area children and teens will be able to join in this lineage that began with the ancient teachings of the Apache shamans, continued through Brown and will soon be taught in Ashland by some of Brown's ex-students.
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| Bow drills are a traditional way to start a fire without the aid of matches or a lighter. |
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Coyote Tracks West is a version - for children and young adults - of the Tracker School that Brown operates in New Jersey.
The program, which will be open to youths between the ages of 7 and 17 and begins June 19 at the Earth Teach Park on Dead Indian Memorial Road, will be run by two students of Brown himself.
The program "exposes children and teens to the wilderness through primitive living skills, tracking, awareness, nature study, storytelling and performance," reads the company's brochure.
"One of the primary goals of Coyote Tracks West is to rekindle kids' relationships with the Earth that many of us lose in our childhoods," Gordon Scott said. Scott, an Ashlander, is not only a former student of Brown's but has also used his tracking skills when he was a member of the Navy SEALS. "One of the things missing from our society is a right of passage. It used to be a teenager was given a Vision Quest. Imagine the confidence it instills in a kid knows they could survive in the woods. It's about passing on that vision, really."
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Photos by Orville Hector | Ashland Daily Tidings |
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Scott said there will be classes for all sorts of skill levels and ages. From a family class that some of the younger students could participate in with their parents, to a 21-day wilderness expedition in which some of the older students can really test their mettle.
"We don't like to teach directly," Scott said, as he explained how to create a fire with no match or lighter. "Rather than force feeding them what we want them to learn, we try to inspire them to want to learn. We're not teaching anybody anything. We're trying to make an area where people can teach themselves."
He said learning to create fire without modern man's advantages is just one of the many skills students will learn at Coyote Tracks West.
"When that first kid makes a fire this energy goes through them that is unmistakable," Scott said. "They immediately realize that connection that runs through all things. It's an instant reconnection with the natural world around them."
Scott said the instructors don't like to refer to the Coyote Tracks West Program as either camp or school. "It's an experience," he said.
There will be several programs offered this summer in Ashland through the Coyote Tracks West program. Programs for children 7 to 12 require a parent or guardian to be present. Teens do not require adult supervision. Programs will run throughout the summer. For more information, call (541) 617-0439 or look on the Web at www.coyotetrackswest.org.
Staff writer Robert Plain can be reached at 482-3456 x 3040 or bplain@dailytidings.com.
Coyote Trails School of Nature: dba Coyote Tracks West
