So many great things have happened at Earth Knack over the last year, with the promise of 2008 being just as expansive and inspiring!

Our most recent development for 2008 is a straw bale workshop that will be happening near Gardner, Colorado from August 16 - 22. Creating homes that use local and natural materials that are sustainable and help create efficient home systems is a skill base that dovetails well with the Earth Knack curriculm. Using appropriate modern technologies to provide home and food while keeping alive our ancestral knowledge base has always been a primary focus at Earth Knack.

Below are some photos of the many alternative home projects we have worked on over the years, here on the Earth Knack school site, in workshop formats across the country, and homes for others who have the vision to build sustainably. Our workshop home design, which we have been able to build from foundation to roof in an week with 12 to 15 participants, is a circular 20' interior space that, upon completion showcases the beauty, nuturing and fufillment that "home" can be.

If there is any way you can join us in August, you are in for a transforming education and a week of great comraderie.

Our Green River Canoe trip will run again this year offering one of the most enjoyable ways to see and experience the canyon country of Utah. If you've never made it on this trip in the past, now is the time. See the course listing for more details. Dance the Spine! is a new offering this year, a mountaineering trek along the ridgeline of the Sangre de Cristos Mountain Range, one of southern Colorado's most impressive wilderness areas. Most travel will be above tree line, and there will be frequent horse packed rerations to keep loads light. I have wanted to walk this remote spine ever since i first look toward the towering 14,000 foot summits of the Sangre's, and am so glad to see this dream coming to fruition.

Another long time dreamed and planned adventure comes true this year in October. We will join forces with George Michaud in Idaho for an intensive education in trapping and snaring. Big game procurement and weaponry use are important skills but keeping a constant supply of "meat in the pot" means getting good at traps and snares, too. George and i spent several weeks together trapping on the western edge of the Tetons one year and it is an education and experience i treasure.

I am recently home from teaching on the island of St. Croix! Earth Skills Rendesvous sponsored a "Bush Skills" program organized by Russell Cutts and Christina Gordon, hosted on the amazing sustainable farm property of Ben Jones. Ben's program, Virgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute, is inspiring and timely and well worth your effort to check into. Hopefully many more such programs through Earth Skills will be available in the future and you simply shouldn't miss it!!! And don't forget their River Cane program is coming up next month in Georgia!

Some of the major highlights of the past year include our International Learning Adventure in Poland that happened last August. Our focus was medicinal plants and traditional life skills...fortunately we were flexible enough to immmediately realize our curriculum needed a heavy dose of cheese and sausage sampling as well as exposure to the ancient arts of mead and beer making! Check out the pictures on the courses page available if you click in the description on the trip. Also the CD project, My Loin Cloth Has No Pockets!, was completed in July with the expert musical talents of Don Richmond, the wonderful addition of traditional and primitive sounds by Fuz Sanderson, and the encouragement and generosity of Laverne Loftus. Look at the Art-N-Facts page if you want to order your own copy and hear a sample song!

We hope to see you here for an Earth Knack program in 2008 or at any of the other events where I teach during the year. Come get inspired, tuned in, turned on and ready to be and effective activist! Let the ancestral skills knowledge you gain on a course fill you with capability, courage and connection. Let the introduction to sustainable building techniques, sustainable food growing and procurement and alternative energy options inspire you to choose daily fufillment in your life work. All the best!