Biography - Outdoor skills Class Schedule

Bio

My love of the outdoor started in my youth. I was raised in a Belgian small country town, pretty much a farming community. My interest with plants (including wild food) started at an early age when I was around 14. I studied agriculture and botany for a little while but decided to pursue a career in graphic art instead.

Growing up in the country in the early 60s, in many ways I still experienced some of the lifestyle of the earlier generations. We had a sizable garden to meet most ot the family needs and raised rabbits for food. We were growing potatoes, green beans, leeks, carrots, sprouts, etc... pretty much all the basic vegetables for the family. Various methods of canning were used to preserve the food we grew, from pickling to water-bath and high pressure canning. A lot of my youth was spent outdoor, enabling me to connect with nature and learning from it.

In the early 90's, while living in Los Angeles, I decided to reconnect with the outdoor. Over the years I took many oudoor and wilderness survival skills classes ranging from tracking, desert survival, land navigation, trapping, water purification and much more... In the last three years, I've also taken additional wild food classes with Christopher Nyerges and others to learn more about local plants and continue to do so.

Presently, my interest is focused on adapting outdoor and wilderness skills to the urban environment and city preparedness. I've found that the best way to learn is to actually live it. To put some of the theories to test, I've been applying what I now call Urban Outdoor Skills in my day to day life. This includes using alternative sources of energy such as solar cooking, achieving a more natural self-reliance through growing food in an urban environment (garden and wild planting) as well as finding and foraging local wild food, canning and preserving food, making my own organic soaps using aromatic wild plants, emergency preparedness, etc... A lot of my diet now consist of home grown and wild food.

I've been teaching classes for the last 3 years in the Los Angeles area and have been featured in several publications such as the "Wilderness Way" magazine, Pasadena Weekly and more. As I love cooking, I also have an interest on creating gourmet dishes using wild food.

I consider myself a student first and continue learning every day from the world around me, people attending my classes and the wonderful people I seek expertise from whenever I don't have the answer.

Some additional interests includes outdoor photography, marksmanship (competed for many years), exploring the desert with my Jeep and hiking.