Rangers Guild Awareness and Stealth Taster
Journey down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. Have you ever wanted to be able to vanish in the wilderness? Did becoming a ninja ever appeal to you? Is Jason Bourne one of your favorite movie characters?
Awareness and invisibility go hand in hand. You need to quiet your movements and thoughts in order to truly see the complexity of the world around you. Imagine the subtle calls of the birds telling you if a red fox is stealthily hunting through the woodland. Imagine being able to walk as quietly as that same fox.
Join the Rangers Guild for a class that will change the way you see and move through the world. We address invisibility and stealth as both a philosophy and a functional skill. Our program is a real world, feet on the ground practice in the arts of flow and invisibility through the wilds. You learn what it's like to see and experience the world from the eyes of a wild animal. We train the ability of the deer to forage while moving through the landscape, the quality of the cougar to flow through shadows and the power of the bear to show itself only when it wishes to be seen.
As we delve in silence and awareness, students learn how to sharpen and hone their senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. We work on improving reflex response and stillness control of our very own bodies. Finally, we address the inherent power in cultivating the path of least resistance.
The is a class about flow. This is a class about the Way of the Ranger.
Register for Awareness and Stealth Taster
A Taster of the Skills
Guild Taster Days are designed to be an introduction to a core Guild study. They are 4-hours long. Check out our other core programs for more in-depth courses...
• Awareness and Stealth Basics 2-day course
• Awareness and Stealth Instensive 4-day overnight
• Awareness and Stealth Immersion 1-weekend at month for 9-months
Through a mixture of hands-on activities and presentations, students develop a basic foundation of awareness, invisibility and stealth. Our goal is to have you complete the class and be well on your way to more advanced work.
A Good Fit
This is NOT a class for dudes interested in using these skills for tactical training, this is a class for everyone who intrinsically knows that silence and listening cultivates true art, creativity and genius. We address practical applications of awareness, invisibility and stealth for living as a hunter-gatherer also the larger value for common interactions in both work, family and our everyday life.
Caring for Urban Greenspaces
This taster serves as an opportunity to teach important and vital knowledge in an urban environment. In that vein, we deeply respect our urban greenspaces and utilize their limited ecosystems strictly for observation. We actively discourage all unauthorized harvest and inappropriate use of our greenspaces in order to protect these invaluable resources unique to the city of Portland. More advanced classes for restorative harvest and off-trail study occur on private land.
Instructors
David Jacobson and Tony Deis are core instructors for our awareness and stealth courses. See below for staff biographies.
Ages Adult Awareness and Stealth Taster includes
• Optimization of physical reaction time
• Silence and calm through real world crises
• Bad ass awareness skills
• The Way of the Ranger: Flow in wild foraging, survival, tracking and everyday life.
• The art of invisibility: stealth, camouflauge and silence
• Bird songs and calls as a tool to track movement in the forest and see more wildlife
• Hyper-adaptive learning
• How to move through both landscapes and systems virtually undetected
• Long term systems thinking; reviving and protecting the village now and 100 years into the future
• A fundamentally deeper awareness of the world around you
Our Instructors
Program staff for our core studies programs bring with them years of study in real world experience in the skills they teach. They are some of the best and the most innovative leaders in their field. We encourage you to personally connect with each one in the process of choosing to join our program.
David Jacobson, Core Instructor
David has held a passion for the art and science of tracking all his life. He has put in countless hours of study towards every aspect of tracking. Along with a degree in botanical studies as they relate to wildlife habitat, his own immersive "dirt time" includes track geography (often referred to as pressure releases and gait analysis), intensive substrate analysis for aging and structure, tactical tracking and search and rescue, wetland ecology, stealth and camouflage, sustenance hunting and perfecting the art of trailing.
One critical aspect of David's educational philosophy is his attentiveness to safety of students and the requirement that every lesson needs to functional. "I will never ask a student to do something that does not have a real purpose. We learn about tracking to actually find the animal, not simply as an academic study".
David sees every aspect of wilderness skills as being relevant to the whole. "While we teach a tracking class," he says, "We also delve into the reality of survival skills. Our own understanding of how we live in the wild, foraging for food, sustaining our livelihood, is what truly tells us about the lives of the animals we are learning to both track and trail."
Tony Deis, Core Instructor
Tony has lived and studied skills and concepts of sustainability his entire life. Even as a teenager he cultivated a 3/4 acre market garden based on principles of permaculture design and the study of ecology through tracking. The extensive Italian family Tony grew up with was one of the greatest influences on his core philosophy of the value of community and family.
His focus at the Evergreen State College was how humans connect to the land around them through participatory experiences. This, coupled with decades of work and cutting edge development as a contractor and consultant in the field of environmental education, lead him to found TrackersNW and the Trackers Family of programs. Based on his work, research and experience in survival, bushcraft, traditional skills and tracking, Tony also taught extensively for the graduate sustainability program at Portland State University, including founding their Naturalist Training Program.
Tony has facilitated wildlife tracking, outdoor entrepreneurial and adventure education workshops for the Forest Service, Audubon Society of Portland, countless parks and interpretation agencies, universities, colleges and much more. Currently, he is a lead Tracking facilitator for the TrackersTEAMS Immersion Program. Tony is also authoring a definitive guide and workbook on tracking and naturalist training.
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