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Woodcraft: A Guide to Camping and Survival
Legendary canoeing guide, conservationist in the 1800s, and one of the first proponents of the hyper popular “ultra-light” camping style, George Washington “Nessmuk” Sears was a true American mountain man. Using a 9-foot-long, 10 and a half pound canoe he successfully completed a 266-mile journey through the central Adirondacks. His classic treatise on American camping, Woodcraft , is definitive proof that he was the most capable and intelligent woodsman of his time.First published in 1884, and continuously in print ever since then, this is the ultimate book for hikers, campers, fishers, canoers, and anyone else who feels the call of the wild. With information on what to bring, how to build fires, how to fish with and without flies, and how to cook, this book is still totally relevant in our modern society. For anyone with even a passing interest in getting closer to nature this is required reading. The forerunner of the ultra-light camping movement and the precursor to all other books on camping and traveling through the wilderness, Woodcraft belongs on the bookshelf of every aspiring mountain person.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
- GenresNatureHistoryNonfiction
113 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2008
49 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 17, 2024
I’ve lived an interesting life. As an adult, I cut my teeth in the city. Having lived in Paris, Prague, Seattle & San Francisco, I navigate the urban with ease. Even so, it’s interesting how the symbols we select to create an identity can just as soon become trinkets of conceit. There’s an art to recognizing that and letting go of the pageantry for a genuine aesthetic that, when you’re ready, holds the space open as an invitation to experience a rare sense of stillness. For me, when that happens, what’s revealed is a radical sense of integration and a honest connection to the parts of me that get covered up in the crashing tide of the day-to-day.
It’s simple: my heart belongs to the country.
Woodcraft By George Washington Sears, whose pen name is Nessmuk, is a book I have turned to again and again. It was written in the mid 1800s and is still relevant today. This is a classic piece of camp-writing and is elemental to modern bushcrafters. Many outdoor enthusiasts and instructors continue to give well-deserved homage to the contributions within this volume, even if some of it has been antiquated. I listen to the LibriVox recording on Youtube. It’s read by a gentleman named Phil Schempf whose baritone is masculine and compelling; I have listened to this recording many times.
Around 2016 I got interested in mushroom hunting. As often as I could, I got myself out into the woods on the crisp and damp mornings of fall in the Pacific Northwest; all around the foothills of Mt. Rainier the forests are lush and brimming with life. It stuck! I am still hunting mushrooms all these years later and have harvested over 25 varieties of edible mushrooms, not to mention all the medicine I have made with plants.
Progressing with mushrooms, I became interested in Bushcrafting, or as Nessmuk called it, Woodcraft. At first, I taught myself via Youtube. Following this or that person lead me to GWS. He is just one of many in a long line of woodsmen who’s wisdom and traditions have been passed down from Native Americans and Mountain Men to modern campers who desire going to the woods “not to ruff it, but to smooth it.” Notably, Dave Canterbury, founder of the Pathfinder school, invented the 10c’s of survival based on deep studies of Nessmuk’s outdoor philosophy of light-pack camping. I won’t bore you with a list but it’s worth looking up if you are outdoors bound and don’t know where to start.
There is something intrinsic that comes alive in me when I am in the woods; something deeply personal and spiritual. But moreover, the woods have become a refuge and a teacher for me over the years. Sometimes the lessons are humbling and show you how diminutive you are in the scheme of things; I have had encounters with a mama black bear and cub. I actually had to punch a cougar on my front porch, it was trying to eat my cat (cat is ok). Where I live, in North Idaho, it’s a daily experience to encounter moose, elk, deer, turkey, fox, mountain goats, eagles and all manner of smaller game. When you are intentional, you can get lost in the movement of the wind, the subtle poetic energy of the earth that embraces you in cleansing rejuvenation. Leaving the city was a conscientious choice and I have no plans to go back to that pace of life. Life is good here.
In his 50+ years as a woodsman, one of the lessons Nessmuk conveyed is that the more experience you get the less gear you need. He teaches what competency looks like, not just in skills and preparedness (both are essential), but in connecting to the land and to yourself in simplicity. Nature is wondrous, and it is also indifferent to your comfort. A wilderness is a wilderness is a wilderness. Knowing how to work with the land and her resources builds an enduring respect in the astonishing abundance and secrets just waiting to reveal themselves. Not mastery but cooperation. A willingness to be present and absorb the language of the forest, for me, opens up an awareness on a different plane of existence. Tapping into that is not something I have the language for.
Experientially, what I mean is, learning things like... the deep citrus pucker in the taste of tamarack needles in early spring. The pungent smell of dirt, moss, bark, boughs and fog that permeate your hair and body when the ground is wet and you are lingering in the duff with a basket full of chanterelles and no one is around for miles. The color of blue between the trees and the silence just as dawn is opening for the diurnal birds and other things looking for food. The sound of the wind in a storm whistling through the trees, making them creek and sway. A fire you made yourself with nothing but a knife and a ferrocerium rod and the right combination of tree bark, heart-wood and sticks you knew how to collect and arrange. The sound of fat hissing in the fire as it drips from your meat and eating it with your bare, dirty hands, sipping coffee from a cup you carved from cedar. Knowing how to choose tools for multi-functionality and to keep your pack light. Making cordage out of roots to lash your oilskin tarp between trees for shelter. Having the knowledge to stay warm and dry during the night, even in winter, without blankets and minimal gear. Knowing how to gather and purify water safely and identify plants that can be used as food or medicine in all seasons well enough to have a rotating seasonal apothecary.
What you really learn in this book, is that it isn’t a book that gives you the ability, but the direction. This book may just be a curiosity of a bygone time and will never return. But the voice within is alive and well with people like me who are passionate about learning the language of the forests and mountains and humbly sharing those connections to my children.
I don’t normally share my writing, but this is a brief snippet I am combing from a couple of poems I wrote recently, siting at the fire. Being myself. Seems fitting.
I change my perspective at will
but the spoon does not bend.
There is no spoon.
Just a bell
ringing across a lake
and the smell of a childhood memory.
I appeared
in the dreams
of an enemy.
Fingering the dark
as a black dog with no tail
as an axe disguised as a feather in the hen house
as an alpenglow cradling the inviolate breath of the rocks
inflicting silence on the noise.
May you continue to sleep
in your cocoon
of insipid novelties
The pastures are full
and cushioned
even when the plate is empty
and the table remains unset for guests.
I rise at dawn
with axe at my side.
I cut trees just to smell the blood of the wood.
The fire is its own reward,
maintaining my gaze for hours.
Covered in pitch and the clean smell of smoke
my life, evocative in the flames,
is not a derivative but a source.
My presence is my absence,
a parting gift in the present tense.
The storyteller sits facing west
trapping reflections as a fowler might.
Bending them into shadows
that float beyond the eye—
with an heirloom quality of taking up space in silence.
Like an image caught between two mirrors.
The possibilities are endless,
embroidered
in the immaterial flicker of magic
stored in the lucid silos of the utterer.
In this circle I am whole.
A change of fragrance suffuses the hay-shouldering farmlands.
Bread weaves the moistened wheat into supper—
proving the dead can dance.
In the lineage of maps
a seed strays from its pod
quenched in the kingdom of thirst.
Even so, the seasons change.
Some stories are only told in winter.
I bide my time and listen,
looking out the drenched window.
The drops blur distinctions into mere essence,
lingering to be apprenticed
in the spectral well of periodic elements.
This wheel is the movement of a writhing animal.
Maybe living; maybe dying.
Pounding an anvil with the hammer of Rimbaud’s amputated leg,
the poetry scatters imitable sparks the color of blood.
Gorgeous in the realness of the moment,
but somehow sanguine does not seem fitting.
When a cycle closes it grows again.
A moth reads the light as an hourglass reads the sand.
The light reads the moth as a wolf reads the woods.
A wood reads its yoke like roots read the water.
The water reads the source like a shark reads a heartbeat.
A heartbeat contains the figment of time
which reads the youth…
like a thief reads the jewel.
It’s simple: my heart belongs to the country.
Woodcraft By George Washington Sears, whose pen name is Nessmuk, is a book I have turned to again and again. It was written in the mid 1800s and is still relevant today. This is a classic piece of camp-writing and is elemental to modern bushcrafters. Many outdoor enthusiasts and instructors continue to give well-deserved homage to the contributions within this volume, even if some of it has been antiquated. I listen to the LibriVox recording on Youtube. It’s read by a gentleman named Phil Schempf whose baritone is masculine and compelling; I have listened to this recording many times.
Around 2016 I got interested in mushroom hunting. As often as I could, I got myself out into the woods on the crisp and damp mornings of fall in the Pacific Northwest; all around the foothills of Mt. Rainier the forests are lush and brimming with life. It stuck! I am still hunting mushrooms all these years later and have harvested over 25 varieties of edible mushrooms, not to mention all the medicine I have made with plants.
Progressing with mushrooms, I became interested in Bushcrafting, or as Nessmuk called it, Woodcraft. At first, I taught myself via Youtube. Following this or that person lead me to GWS. He is just one of many in a long line of woodsmen who’s wisdom and traditions have been passed down from Native Americans and Mountain Men to modern campers who desire going to the woods “not to ruff it, but to smooth it.” Notably, Dave Canterbury, founder of the Pathfinder school, invented the 10c’s of survival based on deep studies of Nessmuk’s outdoor philosophy of light-pack camping. I won’t bore you with a list but it’s worth looking up if you are outdoors bound and don’t know where to start.
There is something intrinsic that comes alive in me when I am in the woods; something deeply personal and spiritual. But moreover, the woods have become a refuge and a teacher for me over the years. Sometimes the lessons are humbling and show you how diminutive you are in the scheme of things; I have had encounters with a mama black bear and cub. I actually had to punch a cougar on my front porch, it was trying to eat my cat (cat is ok). Where I live, in North Idaho, it’s a daily experience to encounter moose, elk, deer, turkey, fox, mountain goats, eagles and all manner of smaller game. When you are intentional, you can get lost in the movement of the wind, the subtle poetic energy of the earth that embraces you in cleansing rejuvenation. Leaving the city was a conscientious choice and I have no plans to go back to that pace of life. Life is good here.
In his 50+ years as a woodsman, one of the lessons Nessmuk conveyed is that the more experience you get the less gear you need. He teaches what competency looks like, not just in skills and preparedness (both are essential), but in connecting to the land and to yourself in simplicity. Nature is wondrous, and it is also indifferent to your comfort. A wilderness is a wilderness is a wilderness. Knowing how to work with the land and her resources builds an enduring respect in the astonishing abundance and secrets just waiting to reveal themselves. Not mastery but cooperation. A willingness to be present and absorb the language of the forest, for me, opens up an awareness on a different plane of existence. Tapping into that is not something I have the language for.
Experientially, what I mean is, learning things like... the deep citrus pucker in the taste of tamarack needles in early spring. The pungent smell of dirt, moss, bark, boughs and fog that permeate your hair and body when the ground is wet and you are lingering in the duff with a basket full of chanterelles and no one is around for miles. The color of blue between the trees and the silence just as dawn is opening for the diurnal birds and other things looking for food. The sound of the wind in a storm whistling through the trees, making them creek and sway. A fire you made yourself with nothing but a knife and a ferrocerium rod and the right combination of tree bark, heart-wood and sticks you knew how to collect and arrange. The sound of fat hissing in the fire as it drips from your meat and eating it with your bare, dirty hands, sipping coffee from a cup you carved from cedar. Knowing how to choose tools for multi-functionality and to keep your pack light. Making cordage out of roots to lash your oilskin tarp between trees for shelter. Having the knowledge to stay warm and dry during the night, even in winter, without blankets and minimal gear. Knowing how to gather and purify water safely and identify plants that can be used as food or medicine in all seasons well enough to have a rotating seasonal apothecary.
What you really learn in this book, is that it isn’t a book that gives you the ability, but the direction. This book may just be a curiosity of a bygone time and will never return. But the voice within is alive and well with people like me who are passionate about learning the language of the forests and mountains and humbly sharing those connections to my children.
I don’t normally share my writing, but this is a brief snippet I am combing from a couple of poems I wrote recently, siting at the fire. Being myself. Seems fitting.
I change my perspective at will
but the spoon does not bend.
There is no spoon.
Just a bell
ringing across a lake
and the smell of a childhood memory.
I appeared
in the dreams
of an enemy.
Fingering the dark
as a black dog with no tail
as an axe disguised as a feather in the hen house
as an alpenglow cradling the inviolate breath of the rocks
inflicting silence on the noise.
May you continue to sleep
in your cocoon
of insipid novelties
The pastures are full
and cushioned
even when the plate is empty
and the table remains unset for guests.
I rise at dawn
with axe at my side.
I cut trees just to smell the blood of the wood.
The fire is its own reward,
maintaining my gaze for hours.
Covered in pitch and the clean smell of smoke
my life, evocative in the flames,
is not a derivative but a source.
My presence is my absence,
a parting gift in the present tense.
The storyteller sits facing west
trapping reflections as a fowler might.
Bending them into shadows
that float beyond the eye—
with an heirloom quality of taking up space in silence.
Like an image caught between two mirrors.
The possibilities are endless,
embroidered
in the immaterial flicker of magic
stored in the lucid silos of the utterer.
In this circle I am whole.
A change of fragrance suffuses the hay-shouldering farmlands.
Bread weaves the moistened wheat into supper—
proving the dead can dance.
In the lineage of maps
a seed strays from its pod
quenched in the kingdom of thirst.
Even so, the seasons change.
Some stories are only told in winter.
I bide my time and listen,
looking out the drenched window.
The drops blur distinctions into mere essence,
lingering to be apprenticed
in the spectral well of periodic elements.
This wheel is the movement of a writhing animal.
Maybe living; maybe dying.
Pounding an anvil with the hammer of Rimbaud’s amputated leg,
the poetry scatters imitable sparks the color of blood.
Gorgeous in the realness of the moment,
but somehow sanguine does not seem fitting.
When a cycle closes it grows again.
A moth reads the light as an hourglass reads the sand.
The light reads the moth as a wolf reads the woods.
A wood reads its yoke like roots read the water.
The water reads the source like a shark reads a heartbeat.
A heartbeat contains the figment of time
which reads the youth…
like a thief reads the jewel.
July 2, 2013
Absolutely delightful. By far the best descriptions of how to build shelter and fire I have ever seen. Nessmuk (Sears) made those topics and much more so simple, understandable, and useable. His avowed purpose is to change "roughing it" to "smoothing it." He succeeds. This book should be a gift to anyone who wants to spend more than an afternoon in the woods.
October 28, 2012
I had meant to wait until I got my hands on a hard copy - it seemed like the sort of book that ought to be read in person - but then I was fifty pages into the Project Gutenberg's single webpage version, and I couldn't set it aside now. It's a nice handbook, with useful instruction, good anecdotes, wrong and right pursuits, and the author is so good-natured and companionable, with a fine sense of humor. It's about how to build fires, how to pack for an excursion into the woods, but also insects, cooking, sleeping.
"When the winter winds are drifting the bitter sleet and snow; when winter rains are making out-of-door life unendurable; when season, weather and law combine to make it "close time" for beast, bird and man, it is well that a few congenial spirits should, at some favorite trysting place, gather around the glowing stove and exchange yarns, opinions and experiences. Perhaps no two will exactly agree on the best ground for an outing, on the flies, rods, reels, guns, etc., or half a dozen other points that may be discussed. But one thing all admit. Each and every one has gone to his chosen ground with too much impedimenta, too much duffle; and nearly all have used boats at least twice as heavy as they need to have been. The temptation to buy this or that bit of indispensable camp-kit has been too strong, and we have gone to the blessed woods, handicapped with a load fit for a pack-mule. This is not how to do it.
"Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment."
He likes to sit by the fire, holding down his favorite log, and "reduce a bit of navy plug to its lowest denomination."
"When the winter winds are drifting the bitter sleet and snow; when winter rains are making out-of-door life unendurable; when season, weather and law combine to make it "close time" for beast, bird and man, it is well that a few congenial spirits should, at some favorite trysting place, gather around the glowing stove and exchange yarns, opinions and experiences. Perhaps no two will exactly agree on the best ground for an outing, on the flies, rods, reels, guns, etc., or half a dozen other points that may be discussed. But one thing all admit. Each and every one has gone to his chosen ground with too much impedimenta, too much duffle; and nearly all have used boats at least twice as heavy as they need to have been. The temptation to buy this or that bit of indispensable camp-kit has been too strong, and we have gone to the blessed woods, handicapped with a load fit for a pack-mule. This is not how to do it.
"Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment."
He likes to sit by the fire, holding down his favorite log, and "reduce a bit of navy plug to its lowest denomination."
September 30, 2012
This was an interesting read. George Washington Sears, "Nessmuk", is a local celebrity in Wellsboro, PA. As part of my effort to learn the local history of the area I just moved into, I picked up this book at the local library. The Tioga County Historical Society, of which I volunteer, has many of Nessmuk's old belongings. These include many of the implements that he took on his outdoor camping expeditions, which is what this book is about. The most interesting part of the book is reading about how outdoor camping was viewed at that time and how they actually carried it out. Sears's views on conservation is also very interesting considering our present struggles with that issue.
June 10, 2024
This is a book about woodcraft speaking of what to do out in the wilderness by an expert who used to write for Field and Steam. He outlines what has worked for him and although dated gives a lot of great information. If you are interested in learning more about the outdoors you could go wrong by not reading and learning from these old grey beards. Enjoy this one and learn more about how to be safe in the wilderness.
Joseph McKnight
http://www.josephmcknight.com
Joseph McKnight
http://www.josephmcknight.com
March 23, 2019
Ciekawa i lekko napisana książka. Trochę praktycznych informacji, trochę opowieści i przygód autora. Zachęta raczej do spróbowania i zdobycia szerszej wiedzy o leśnym życiu.
To co martwi to fakt, że współczesny świat na wiele z proponowanych tu rozwiązań nie pozwala.
To co martwi to fakt, że współczesny świat na wiele z proponowanych tu rozwiązań nie pozwala.
February 28, 2018
Very cool read regarding rustic outdoorsperson skills. Written in the mid to late 1800's, the language and terms are engaging and the authors simplicity of living is pretty great!
September 9, 2018
A wonderful read by a man that truly wanted more people to enjoy the "out of doors"
October 26, 2023
Good Book
October 30, 2014
Listened to the Librivox recording -- reader had a nice gruff voice to go along with the book. Enjoyed it.
April 5, 2015
Fun little book, interesting writing style. Camping tips are very much those of the past century. If I camped like that today I would find myself in trouble with the law in short order!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews