Like the Essential Abo, the Provident Primitive has been a regular offering at our school for nearly two decades and continues your evolution into exploring sustainable, indigenous living skills that were used by native peoples for thousands of years. After short-term core needs have been met, such as those covered in the Essential course, wilderness needs quickly shift to procuring food. Along with advanced fire making and containers, the Provident course focuses heavily on how to catch and gather the elusive "calorie" in the back-country. Advance your long-term wilderness skills and mind-set to a new level of self-sufficiency and freedom!

Advanced Fire from Sticks: create a functional hand-drill fire making set from a wilderness environment, more uses for fire as a tool, fire carriers, fire safety and extinguishing.

Dead-fall Traps and Snares: creating sticks and strings that feed you in town or in the outdoors, recognizing wildlife sign, de-scenting and camouflage, dealing with animal diseases and the legal ramifications of trapping.

Ancient Hunting Tools: learn to identify, choose, craft and use a hard wood throwing stick, (the ancestor to the boomerang) the world's most effective hunting tool for small game.

Advanced Containers: make a gourd canteen wrapped within a Tarahumara Indian style netted bag, learn about growing gourds, harvesting them, cutting them and creating a field worthy water carrier that dates back thousands of years.

Wild Edible Plants: eating your lawn and loving it, the truth about wild plants as food for short-term survival or long-term living in the bush, pre-historic hunter-gatherers vs. planting societies, basal metabolic rate requirements for men and women, how to identify, harvest, process and eat wild edible plants.

Immerse yourself into what Mother Nature has to offer. You'll never look at the outdoors the same way again! (minimal hiking required)