John in Clay’s backyard shooting the Osage orange bow for the first time.
John Yost here. I’m a grateful to Clay for asking me to contribute to the blog on TwistedStave and look forward to writing for you. While I’ve built a dozen bows and hunted game with them, traditional archery is not my expertise.
My passion is primitive survival skills and I’m one of the top wilderness survival skills guys in the United States. I started practicing outdoor skills 30+ years ago when there were only two books on the subject, no internet, and no videos. I took those two books and practiced the outdoor skills in them until I could go out in the woods and leave almost everything man-made at home.
At age 19, I spent 44 days in the woods with just a knife, a blanket, a pan, and some parachute cord. Since then I’ve traveled to 15+ countries learning and practicing survival skills. While teaching high school science in Wausau, Wisconsin, I built small 12’x18′ foot log cabin with only hand tools. I lived there a bit over 12 years completely off-grid.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve finally come out of my shell and I’ve been teaching at primitive and outdoor survival skills gatherings. This has been a real honor.
And although I don’t get on it to post new stuff very often since I’m always out DOING stuff, I have a wilderness survival skills website at yostsurvivalskills.com
I’m proud to say that I have pictures of Clay on my site from when we went turkey hunting at his place a couple of years ago.
A few baskets John made on a 2 week canoe trip in Montana. Making baskets is a great way to observe wildlife when you aren’t hunting because you sit for hours at a time without moving much.