Profile of Dave Canterbury

I'm Dave Canterbury co-owner of self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school and I started out in the woods when I was a kid with my father and I was lucky enough to have two fathers from a very young age and one of them was kind of an adventure seeker and liked to go to the lake and flew hang gliders and things and was a diver and I had another father my stepfather who was more of a woodsman type individual who liked to hunt fish trap and things like that so I kind of got exposed to both of those worlds at a very young age spent lots of time in the woods spent lots of time at the lake spent lots of time on boats and spent lots of time sleeping on the ground and in tents so I got that exposure to the woodland environment and things from a very young age and I loved it all the way through life later on in life I joined the military like most guys do after they graduate high school and learned a lot of good skills learned discipline learned hard work and things like that although I was raised around a father who worked seven days a week so the work ethic was there ingrained in me before I ever went the military and after I got out of the military I kind of bounced around a little bit doing different things from doing private security work to working on a reptile farm to being an animal control officer and doing lots of things in the outdoors commercial fishing as a commercial diver on a net fishing boat I did that for several years as well and then I came back to my home where I came from in Indiana I moved back there from Florida and at that point I kind of started getting into more primitive skills based things like reenacting the 18th century and with reenacting the 18th century and getting into things like primitive archery really drew me in because I wanted simplicity again I thought everything is just too complicated it should be simpler than that and so I started studying primitive skills learning that you really don't need a lot of things when you go to the woods to be comfortable it's easier to smooth it if you're carrying less stuff on your back if you only carry the important things you only worry about the important skills everything else becomes easy and that led into teaching those skills that I learned from bow making to Flint I think two starting fires and making shelters sleeping outside navigation techniques that were beyond just map and compass and those things led me into starting my own school and I think that the skills of the frontier era are so important for us to not lose because history tends to repeat itself and sooner or later things are going to circle back around to that pre depression and depression environment and even possibly back to frontier era 18th century type environment where we don't have the availability or can't afford to have electricity even when it is available can't afford to buy food that's available or can't get to the food that is available and being able to live off the land create our own tools and build our own structures and work with wood and work with metal are very important skills and I think if we don't pass those skills on in this day and age where kids grow up in the environment of computers and internet and cell phones and texting and selfies and FaceTime and all of that garbage we're going to lose it and if we lose it and something does happen we have to revert back to those old-time skills no one's going to know them anymore and our civilization is going to be lost so it's a passion of mine to be able to pass on those primitive type skills like hunting fishing trapping woodworking metalworking and blacksmithing and basically just living off the land for a chosen amount of time it's easy to just walk out in the woods for me and stay as long as I want to stay and come back whenever I want to come back to a lot of people if they wander off the trail on a day hike twist an ankle and can't get out that night and have to wander back the next morning it becomes a survival situation to me that's inconvenient camping and that's the way I think everyone should look at a situation like that barring traumatic injury any emergency situation that you could encounter in a wilderness environment should really just be inconvenient camping if you've left a good game plan until someone comes to find you or you can effect self-rescue so those are the things that we teach here at the soft reliance Outfitters a path on your school we teach blacksmithing we teach woodworking we teach simple 72-hour scenario survival and we teach longer-term pioneering type skills like self mapping set him up setting up a permanent camp trapping tanning fur processing food for the fire preserving that food for a later time harvesting wild edibles off the landscape making medicinal concoctions and decoctions from medicinal plants and trees those skills to me are the most important and they can't be lost and so that's my passion here at the Pathfinder school and my passion for the future from not only the television shows that I've done to the magazine articles I've written to the books that I've written like bushcraft 101 and advance bushcraft in the book that I'm preparing to write now on bushcraft cooking and preserving food all of those things as well as my youtube channel are based on what I call passing on that tribal knowledge to the next generation you

Channel: PanteaoProductions

Views: 100,241

Keywords: Panteao Productions, Make Ready

Id: e6HB4d33IXA

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2016