The Essential Abo
Ancient Skills Used World-Wide to Live With LessClass limited to 12 students
June 7-8, 2025
Tuition: $765
Instructors: Cody Lundin and Mark Dorsten
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Click here for wait list options if course is labeled "full"
If you were to walk "naked into the wilderness," what skills would you need to know first? Come and find out! Introduce yourself to living comfortably in the outdoors without relying on modern technology. For 33 years, the Essential Abo adventure has been a foundational class at our school and remains a must have experience for those who walk upright. Learn and experience the very skills that were used by indigenous peoples the world over to shape the beginning of civilization itself! (Note: The Essential Abo and Provident Primitive courses are offered on back-to-back weekends allowing you to enroll in both while exploring Arizona, like the Grand Canyon, during the week.)
Fire from Sticks: create a functional bow-drill fire making set from a wilderness environment, learn about the all powerful tinder bundle, the fire triangle, nature’s fire starters, using fire as a tool, and how to safely extinguish a fire using no water.
Primitive Shelter: building quickie homes from leaves and limbs, where to build, why and how using the five laws of how the human body loses and gains heat to the environment.
Stone Tools: creating simple discoidal and bi-polar stone knives and hand-axes and how to use them for anything from making a shelter, notching a fire-by-friction board or cleaning a fish.
Natural Cordage: create string and rope from dogbane, yucca and deer sinew, learn how to identify and prepare the fiber, do reverse wrap cordage, splice and braid.
Wooden Containers: use fire you’ve made with sticks to create cottonwood eating bowls and bark spoons using the same method indigenous peoples used to make dug-out canoes.
The Essential Abo trains you in the priorities of long-term living in the bush. These same priorities can be used to help you more effectively plan, pack and prepare for a 21st century modern back packing adventure. Create and take home lots of handmade primitive gear that has kept people alive in the wilderness for thousands of years! (some cross country hiking required)
"The benefits from the class were so much more than I expected. What ALSS provided was an experience that gave me the self-confidence to face anything in my life that may challenge me. Sure, "the more you know, the less you need", but in that knowledge, there is a security that you will be able to meet your own basic needs, no matter what. With that intrinsic knowledge, you are better prepared to make life choices from a place of power and confidence!"
Erika Hergenreder, CA., “Essential Abo” alum, 2014.