There’s a rare privilege in seeing the same landscape through the airs of two very different seasons. Northern Sweden with its frozen winter silence and again in its sunlit summer waterways is one of the most instructive places I’ve found to teach, learn, and lead others in bushcraft. Guiding groups on both Borealis Winterland and SummerLand trips has taught me a host of of lessons, all leaning towards a quiet revelation.

In the bushcraft world, there’s a difference between knowing a skill intellectually and knowing it with your hands, senses, and intuition. You can read about firecraft, water filtration, shelter building, or plant identification but until you’re marshalling those skills on a windswept shore with winter sleet biting at your face, the learning remains abstract.

This guide walks through the process of making a simple frame basket using hoops of rowan and the split roots of spruce. It is not only a set of instructions, but an invitation to notice the qualities of the plants themselves: the time of year when stems bend most easily, the way fresh roots peel clean after steaming, the rhythm of wrapping a God’s Eye weave to bind two hoops into a cross. Crafting with gathered materials asks us to slow down, to learn from the woods as much as from our own hands, and to carry forward traditions shaped by necessity, patience, and respect.

In February 2023 I was grateful to receive a WayFarer water filter from Icon Lifesaver to use on expeditions and courses here in the UK. It’s seen just over two years of use now, so I’d thought I’d share a few thoughts on how it’s performed.

The featherstick is a mainstay of many a backwoods traveller, being useful for wet weather or on popular campgrounds where fine kindling may be in short supply. Done badly, the nefarious “fuzz-stick” would swiftly rule out this methodology for firewood preparation. Done well though, and this simple product of 10 minutes work will strike a flaming spear into the harshest of weather conditions.

Join this photo guide to building your own simple random weave basket.

Often when adapting to life in the woods, our culinary skills are simplified to better suit the camp fire and the pots we have with us. We loose perhaps some options for cooking that we might find in a modern kitchen, but we also gain options too. Sometimes we choose to embrace the fire, and with it birth some Phoenix eggs!

One of my favourite ways to get connected with nature in the early spring, before even the sap is rising in the Birches, is to test my plant ID with the young new growth of woodland plants and make a soup from those plants I can identify 100%. In this way my ingredient list gets longer each year, and I’m noting which plants to come back to as the season progresses to see whether any plant which didn’t make the 100% mark can be correctly identified.

I thought I share a quick run down of my current collection of knives, their virtues and short comings, and my general opinion of them.