Field Skills Weekend Intensive:
Tracking, Trapping & Fishing

October 11 and 12, 2025

 

Sharpen your wilderness awareness and build essential self-reliance skills in this hands-on weekend intensive. You'll learn to read the land through wildlife tracking and bird language, practice primitive hunting and trapping methods, and craft your own survival tools to take home. Whether you're deepening your skills or just beginning your journey, this course offers immersive, field-based learning rooted in time-tested practices and ecological awareness.

 

Saturday: Trailing, Tracking and Bird Language

  • Overview of wildlife trailing skills and their application to long-term survival situations

  • Trailing field practice, focusing on optimal conditions for tracking

  • Visit a site rich with tracks and signs of game species to learn about survival trap placement

  • Overview of bird language skills for survival

  • Observation of bird behaviors and vocalizations, focusing on increased activity towards dusk

  • Discussion on the five bird voices, alarm patterns for detecting hidden wildlife, and observation techniques for awareness and stealth

Sunday: Hunting, Trapping and Fishing

  • Overview of primitive survival techniques for hunting and trapping

  • Discussion on primitive projectile implements

  • Review of various traps and snares, including the figure four deadfall trap and the rolling snare

  • Make a survival trap and snare to take home (learn carving techniques and knots needed)

  • Survival fishing techniques

  • Construct a survival fish spear/frog gig to take home

  • Discussion on safety, ethics, and placement of survival traps and snares

  • Overview of steps for processing wild game

 

Class Details


Saturday, October 11, 9:00am–5:00pm
Sunday, October 12, 9:00am–5:00pm

Location:
TBA (Port Townsend outlying area)

Instructor:
Jason Knight

Tuition:
$295 + $35 materials fee

Ages:
16+ (minors must be accompanied by a registered adult)

 
 
 

Meet Your Instructor

 

Jason Knight

Jason is passionate about helping people learn wilderness survival skills. Since 1997 he's taught thousands of people, including training hundreds of adults to become survival instructors. He has consulted as a local wilderness skills expert for the Discovery Channel and has been featured on NPR. He is a co-founder and instructor at Alderleaf Wilderness College, where he has offered courses on wilderness survival to the general public and a broad range of clients including the US Forest Service, the Seattle Mountaineers, and the cast of the award-winning film Captain Fantastic.