Wolf Journey Adults in Olympia

Holding our Devil's Club Root and Tinctures

Another fun class together with the founding Olympia members! We began our sojourn toward discovering how to survive from wild edibles in northwest forests, but not before reviewing our study site experiences, and finishing the process of making Devil’s Club tincture from a recumbant stem that Kim and I had harvested while at Skeeter’s workshop (see blog entry from last week).

Dallen shared about watching a bald eagle hopping around the top of a fir tree, eagerly anticipating its chance to descend into a road when traffic abated, in order to pick up some roadkill. He also shared that his mom used to bring he and his siblings out to find plants needed to make recipes direcly from Euell Gibbons’ “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” when I brought out that book for everyone to see! Madeline brought some great insights including tips from a book-on-tape she’s listening to about intuition, which is key in nature and during study site experiences.

I introduced the wild edibles month with a summary of Wolf Journey – Trail of the Herbalist and we looked over the first few field exercises in order to set context for exploring campus with the goals of A) looking for a diverse site; perhaps an edge of field, water, deciduous forest, and conifer forest which would give the greatest number of plants and animals nearby, B) finding a spot that might have some invasive species or other problem that we could help correct as a service project, C) making it a place where we could consider it our class’ study site, similar to what we might each be doing at home with our own individual study sites, and D) setting a goal to work on some of the field exercises from Trail of the Herbalist in hopes of discovering whether we can survive off wild edibles in this edible (with or without going down to the shore for seafood:)

We fox-walked with wid-angle-vision across campus, and noticed that flowers were already in bloom! Even better, we may have found the perfect spot! Join us next week to explore our disovery:) – Chris

Check out our OLYMPIA WOLF JOURNEY CLASS page for a list of upcoming class dates there and in other locations throughout Western Washington.