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.

One of the most regularly recreated of the camp-crafts is the tent peg; whether to replace a lost one or to better suit the soft ground of the forest the wood peg is a simple tool which relies of a deft use of the knife.

In regularly assembling my gear into various configurations I’ve found there are a few key items which fulfil some critical functions across a broad span of disciplines and so come with me on most excursions, and so I’ve tried to bring together items which are small, durable and reliable to perform when I need them whilst being as packable as possible.

This Autumn during a Howl team training weekend I made Max and Craigy a pigeon stroganoff for one of the evening meals, and in fine bushcraft form we added to the ingredients I had brought with me with some freshly foraged Penny Bun mushrooms Boletus edulis to kick the meal into the stratosphere.