From plant medicine to building shelters to group living skills, these schools will teach you to survive and thrive in any situation.
Proper planning and preparation prevents poor performance, as the saying goes. Whether you purposely travel to remote regions with minimal gear or could swear you’ve just walked past the same juniper tree for the third time, survival knowledge and skills will be your best friend.
It’s always great to see your paramedic or paramedic Wilderness First Responders Certification, but even without that, the ability to rely less on gear is key when you get stuck.
These are five of the best survival schools that offer experience-based courses to improve bushcraft, survival skills, and urban readiness. For decades, survival schools have existed across the country in Arizona, Utah, and the Pacific Northwest, taking people on adventures of a day, days, weeks, or even months.
So even if you are sure you will never find yourself alone, naked and with nothing but one knife In the middle of the Peruvian jungle, the applicability of skills, the mental and physical resilience, and the creativity of survival these schools teach will surely be helpful in many other aspects of your life.
The 5 Best Survival Schools
Alderleaf Wilderness College
Located in the Pacific Northwest about an hour from Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Alderleaf offers courses such as wilderness survival, Wild Mushroom ID, Survival Stone Toolsand Home-scale permaculture. Although courses typically range from 5 to 21 days and last several months, only 1-day and 2-day courses are currently available in 2022 due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic.
Alderleaf also offers a 5 day tour for children Wilderness Skills Youth Camp in July.
Courses include skills such as flint beating (the art of making obsidian arrowheads), tracking and plant identification, water purification, bow drills, and trap setting. All courses except Summer Youth Camp are under $300.
Alderleaf also developed those Basic wilderness survival skills online course complete from the comfort of your own home. Consisting of seven modules, this course provides core knowledge including housing construction, water purification, fire skills, game edibles, preparation and prevention, and a final review and summary.
The course costs $297 with a 60-day guarantee.
Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS)
BOSS has been conducting survival programs near Boulder, Utah for over 60 years. His philosophy of “know more, take less” gives you the confidence to survive in the beautiful, remote areas of southern Utah with minimal equipment.
His field courses will take you across the Aquarius Plateau 7, 14or 28 days. A true test of physical, mental and emotional strength, these courses certainly require a degree of suffering. And while not all risks are eliminated, BOSS’ high security standards are there to protect you. You’ll go home after learning how to navigate and survive as a group, and most importantly, you’ll go home resilient.
BOSS skills courses tend to focus on specific hard skills (rather than additional gear). A 7 days or 14 days Primitive village experience teaches you to make fire, primitive pottery, tan leather, and set traps. Two navigator courses and a Wilderness First Responder course (and refresher) are also offered, as well as a 7-day Queer Affinity Course for LGBTQIA+ people, consisting of 11 students and three teachers.
Courses start at $1,895. The WFR Refresh costs $320. Student aid is available.
Cody Lundin’s Aboriginal Living Skills School (ALSS)
Since 1991, Cody Lundin has helmed the ALSS in Prescott, Arizona and remains an active teacher. As a former co-host of Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival and author of two books, Lundin remains an icon in the survivalist community.
ALSS will offer seven skill courses and three adventure courses in 2022. Many of the skill courses are 2 days long and focus on learning bush crafts such as fire making, natural cordage, stone tools and primitive shelter building.
Adventure courses tend to be longer and more focused on applying skills. Cut off from the world, you and your skills will be tested as you embrace a simpler way of life.
That Ultimate subscription Of course you’ll be feeding a hunter-gatherer tribe with primitive tools, and that desert drifter Journey, the hardest course from ALSS, will teach you to find water, make fire, and secure shelter and food in remote areas.
Lundin also offers personalized private lessons for those willing to pay for a tailor-made experience. Courses start at $695.
Sigma 3 Survival School
Three S’s for Scout, Survive and Sustain, Sigma 3 offers a wide variety of instructors and courses to learn from. Often set in Missouri, Sigma 3 teaches you to use less and trades your gear for the knowledge it provides so you too can “go into the wilderness with nothing but a knife and survive indefinitely.” .
Sigma 3 is known in part for the intensive instructor courses that have enabled it to train hundreds of people available for private or group hire. The two programs currently available are a 45-day Survival Instructor certification in Missouri and the 8-day Jungle Survival certification in Peru.
Sigma 3’s other programs include surviving and maintaining bushcraft skills. That Wild Craftsman is a 3-day course on eating and medicinal plants, and the Primitive Bowyers allows you to hunt game after crafting your own bow and arrows.
Sigma 3 also offers survival dodge resistance escape (SERE) Urban Tactical Survival and Weekend Courses focusing on topics such as shelter and water, fire making, primitive trapping and more.
Prices range from $100 to several thousand. Skills courses range from $375 to $695.
Wilderness Awareness School
The Wilderness Awareness School is also located in the Pacific Northwest and has been educating since 1983. It offers adult and youth programming and is 45 minutes outside of Seattle.
The Wilderness Awareness School connects people to nature and focuses on both hard skills and soft skills, such as: B. cultivating emotional intelligence, learning and practicing healthy group dynamics and self-regulation.
The courses include once a month Wild plant intensive programa 2 day Wild edible plants Course, Basics of wildlife tracking, Basics of survival in the springtime wilderness, as well as some others. It also offers a weekly online series called Wild colored women to create an affinity space to strengthen the connection to nature.
youth programs include day, overnight and school year programs. Its youth expedition programs are for children aged 14 to 18 and consist of 5 to 7 day adventures backpacking, fishingand track wolves as a group. School year programs are available on a monthly or weekly basis.
Prices vary widely from $125 and up.
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