As a child I grew up in the Midwest on a small farm and fell in love with the outdoors. In the fifth grade I routinely checked out old US Army Survival manuals and took them into woods on weekend camping trips to try out the techniques, shelters, traps, fires, etc.

I later went to college and then enlisted the USAF. In the USAF I became a Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) Instructor (class 97-02). As a SERE Instructor I was trained to survive in all types of environments: Temperate, Arctic, Desert, Rain Forest and Mountains. The basic instructor training course was 6 months long of fairly intensive training, followed up by an additional 6 months of OJT training before I was certified as a field instructor.

After about four years in Charlie Flight in the field training section (teaching exclusively combat wilderness survival and evasion) at the SERE School, I decided to retrain into another position with DoD and later left active duty. I am currently a civil servant employed by the Department of Defense. I consider myself a realist and while I enjoy primitive survival and bushcraft type living, hiking, camping, and hunting for short periods. I am very aware that living primitively is NOT fun or easy for long periods. In tough times even a little preparation and training goes a long way. Therefore, my lessons on this site will try to provide you with a healthy mix of practical and logical survival techniques mixed with a dose of real world experience that can be used to survive and thrive in the worst of circumstances.