COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Ethnobotany 101 course is our course on learning the uses of wild plants. We will teach you how to harvest plants for edible, medicinal and utilitarian uses and then what you need to do to prepare them for their appropriate use. This course is designed to narrow the list of tens of thousands of plants into a handful that are most useful in a survival situation. The plants learned will be highly variable based on location and time of year.

Wild plants are an extremely important subject because without the availability of modern remedies, a good outdoorsman can substitute these remedies with nature’s medicine or tools. Nature provides a plethora of resources, one only has to learn how to identify said resources and know how to properly process them to maximize their uses. Being able to identify wild plants and use them for food, medicine and tools can literally save your life. Increasing your knowledge on plants will only increase your comfort in the wilderness and allow you to succeed in many tasks, where your average outdoor enthusiast would fail.

​In this course, we will teach you the basics of plant identification and what resources are best to use in your area to learn what grows around you. We will then move on into advanced subjects and show you how to actually use the plants that you identify. Once you learn your plants you will be able to more freely scavenge for food and medicine in your own back yard or anywhere you choose to go in the world.

In the first part of the course we will take you on a wild plant walk and help you learn how to identify plants and then we will harvest these plants to use for either eating, making medicine or tools.

​Plants can be categorized as utilitarian, edible, medicinal, poisonous or a combination of all four. Some of the most useful plants to learn are typically the ones that combine all three positive features. With so many plant species growing in so many different environments during different times of year, it would take a person several lifetimes to learn them all.

Edible Plants – There are edible wild plants all around us. One just has to learn about them and have the confidence to know they are identifying them correctly.

​Medicinal Plants – Just about every plant has some medicinal property to them. You can find plants that have skin healing properties, to plants that will stop bleeding, even plants that will stimulate your liver or stop you from having an asthma attack. We will show you these plants and how to effectively use them.

​Utilitarian Plants – Besides food and medicine, plants have a plethora of tool based uses.

​Poisonous Plants – Alongside the useful plants, grow the poisonous ones that will make your life not so pleasant. We will show you all the ones to stay away from!

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

• Identifying useful plants for tinder, kindling, and sustaining fuel
• Best plant choices for friction fire sets
• Plants that are useful for shelter construction and insulation
• Plants that make strong natural cordage
• How to identify and create improvised containers from plants
• Identifying easily recognizable edible plants
• Medicinal and First Aid uses of plants
• Best plants for personal hygiene
• Poisonous Plant Identification
• Once we show you all the skills you need to know to identify plants and process them, then you can take that knowledge home and start using plants from your local area.

LENGTH

3 days/2 nights

FOOD AND WATER REQUIRED

Water will be provided but students will need to bring their own food. We recommend quick field expedient meals such as freeze dried hiking meals or MRE’s. They can quickly be made at our primitive camps and won’t slow down the learning process. However, students may bring any food that they wish to cook over the campfire or on their own personal camp stove.

Food can be purchased locally at nearby facilities. Walmart and several local eateries are within a reasonable driving distance.

SUGGESTED GEAR LIST

We do not provide students with gear unless they have purchased it from us ahead of time. Not much gear is needed for our courses, though good equipment does speed the learning process up greatly! Gear does not have to be purchased from our store to attend the course, but we recommend survival gear of equivalent quality.

• Fixed blade knife (Preferably a full tang bushcraft style knife WITHOUT a serrated edge)
• Foraging pouch
• Poncho or Rain Gear
• Outdoor Clothing and appropriate footwear
• Overnight Camping Gear: Tent, sleeping bag, ground pad, etc
• Headlamp
• Cooking pot and eating utensils
• Single walled metal canteen
• Notepad and pencil
• Sunscreen and sunglasses
• Camp Chair
• Small Backpack

CLOTHING REQUIRED

Warm outdoor clothing, warm gloves and hat, outdoor boots and wool socks. Cotton clothing is highly discouraged in the mountains! Wool will keep you warm even when wet and synthetics will dry faster. Layers are important in Colorado. You will want a water wicking base layer, an insulating mid layer, and a waterproof breathable outer shell. Check out our Clothes Layering Basics if you are unsure of what to wear.

Check Recommended Items List for more details!

If it is still not clear what gear is needed for our survival courses, then we have assembled a complete kit that is still high quality but for a budget friendly price. All the items in this kit were hand selected by our instructors to be the best bushcraft tools on a budget. This survival kit is a useful starter kit that can be used in all of our courses. These are must have tools at a good price. It’s a great survival kit, bug out kit, go bag, or use it as a solid foundation to build a kit that perfectly fits your needs. With this kit and our training anybody can survive like a king in almost any environment!

NOTE

Due to the different levels of prior experience and knowledge among students in each class, individual outcomes may vary. Weather conditions can also be a factor in changing class content slightly. Nonetheless, our instructors will always endeavor to be as accommodating and consistent as circumstances will allow to ensure students get the best training experience and value for money.