Engage With Your Landscape.
Grow Your Wilderness Skills.
Craft A Handmade Life.
Welcome To ROOTS School
We offer wilderness skills and traditional handcraft classes to meet varied levels of skill and intensity, from youth to adult. We offer limited class sizes, hands on learning, and experienced instructors. At Roots you can build solid skills, enjoy time around a fire, make connections to the natural world, all while growing confidence and strength within. We hope to see you soon!
Bringing you the Stone Age since 2007.
Adult Programs
Roots offers classes year round in wilderness skills as well as traditional crafts and skills such as building bows and arrows, basketry, flint knapping(stone tools), fiber arts, and blacksmithing. We also offer naturalist programs such as Wildlife Tracking and Birding. We offer both short and long term programs. Find out more here!
Youth Programs
Roots has a variety of programs for children and teens year round. We have Summer Day Camps, a school year one day a week homeschool program, and weekend classes such as Children’s Bow Making. We also have family events that are all ages such as the Family Survival Weekend and the Roots Rendezvous. Learn more here!
New To Roots
A Handcrafted Life
A series of projects designed to get students working with a variety of tools and materials crafting objects to be used in your day-to-day life. Learn More…
Upcoming Classes
A Handcrafted Life
February 22-June 15th One weekend a month.
A series of projects designed to get students working with a variety of tools and materials crafting objects to be used in your day-to-day life. Learn More…
The Way of the Woods: Land Knowledge and Traditional Hand Crafts
March 22- September 14 One weekend a month.
Naturalist skills meets applied traditional crafts. Get hands on and learn to see through the wall of green! Learn More…
Fire Making: From One Match to Bow Drill
April 5, 2025
Build your fire skills with all-weather one-match fires and bow drill friction fires. Learn More…
Gatherer`s program for 2025 has one spot open.
This here is the spirit of the program, but with a northeast flavor. Weave baskets, forage foods, and make plant based medicine.
We`ve been able to stay with feiend here @caribbean_earth_skills where there are loads of weaving materials to be had and fruit to eat. With the wild cats claw and Puerto Rican basket vine I wove a basket to bring to the farmers market where I picked up malay apples, passion fruits, star fruit, bananas, mango, tamarind, and tomatoes (peak season right now). Only fruits missing are all the coconuts.
We`ll be saying goodbye and heading back to mud season, starting plants and awaiting the spring to leap forward into the green part of the year.
Sarah and Ronin catching a sunset on the West End.
It`s a rare thing when some one`s passion is matched by their ability to share as a teacher. Will Nissen (one half of @thebluecartcraft) brought both to the first day of the Handcrafted program as he guided folks in carving a wooden bowl. He shared his knowledge, good nature, tools and tool use and folks learned so much. The wood has been reduced close to their final form and will be finished in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to it!
I`m not always right? WTF? Knapping with stone, vs antler, vs copper, one what stone, when? Breaking rock is such a key skill that too few put the time into...they call it the stone age for a reason!
More on me hating on Micro Pressure Releases! This was a fun exchange where Matt and I share our thoughts and even some feelings about different aspects of Tracking....Full Episode Tracking Fact vs Fiction: https://youtu.be/d8LCKm26Mi0
We`re just a lonely little island...😭
Leave No Trace has a place, but that really only were human traffic is high like national and state parks, the rest of the wild lands can benefit from human interaction if people take the time to get to know it.
Know the tree.
Pound the wood.
Shape the splints.
Weave the basket.
There is more to this act. The tools, the nuance, the time and physicality, the understanding of function.
Come join Justin @back_to_the_earth_wilderness as he guides you through the steps to weave your own basket.
This is a part of the Handcrafted Life program. It starts in a couple of weeks! There are a few spots open and we would love for you to join up if interested.
Next Skillist Episode is out on our youtube channel. EP 9 Scout Skills- The What and the Why....
Check out the full episode here: https://youtu.be/SZLw3E8fBV0
EP 8 Wilderness Survival Fire Skills. In this Episode Matt and I talk all things fire, building them, using them, making them with bow drill and teaching them. Check the link in bio for our youtube or look for Skillist on you favorite podcast app.
Spoons and spatulas. They get used everyday. I have my favorites that delight me. I also have the first ones I carved that are awkward chunky straight sticks with a bowl that`s too big. Well, I`ve likely burned those by now but they have a place in the evolution of someone learning to make a lovely spoon. We want to help catapult you beyond that initial rough stage into making a utensil that is beautiful that you`ll cherish.
We are very excited to have @teeter.bradley come up to the school and teach the art of spoons and spatulas. (His work pictured here) Him and Will Nissen, who will be teaching bowl carving, have jointly created @thebluecartcraft
This is a part of the long term program; Handcrafted Life. Come elevate your carving game, understand wood in a new way, appreciate elegant transitions in a spoon and walk away confident in your ability to carve beautiful utensils.
📷 @teeter.bradley
Ep 7 Skillist Podcast- Arrow Making is up on You tube and your favorite podcast apps. In this one Matt and I get into the nitty gritty of making arrows, broadheads, blunts, nocks, shafting, fletching, and tons of other details!
Tools of daily use.
A broom.
Fashioned in both beauty and quality by your hands. With a thread and needle, broomcorn and a young sapling. Led by Hannah Mitchell @therowdysprout
Handcrafted Life program begins in one month.
This, and baskets, knives, spoons, bowls, blacksmithing, hat making and more. Jump on in!
Lovely pictures by @therowdysprout
Crafting takes courage. -Matisse
Get to know metal as a material as a part of the Handcrafted Life program and forge yourself a tool.
The Gatherer`s program.
This little skeleton resides as the program mascot, a wee memento mori as we hustle and bustle during the growing months. Summers here are fast and we only so many in our life to embrace. With winter here, I`m dreaming and planning this coming year`s Gatherer`s program. What to keep, to change, to compost, to bring forth. We do so much over the seven months, learn so many different skills so that folks have a really comfortable relationship with plants that they can go forth and expand from. We forage and prepare foods, make medicine from plants we gather, weave baskets from willow, black ash and willow bark, and learn so much from the skills and talents of others in the class. This is the biggest win of meeting up in person as there will be classmates that have talents beyond the scope of the program who are talented in fermentation, fizzy drinks, seeds, lotion bars etc. and we get to learn from everyone.
We love this. Maybe you do too.
The baskets are the same in form yet all different reflecting how each student executes the process and carries their personal touch.
Guided by @lazymillhillfarm
Picture by @sandra.kehoe.5
ROOTS Blog
Winter Tracking II – Gait Studies – Why and How
What are Gait Studies? Gait refers to the movement pattern the animal is using and the corresponding gait pattern is left for trackers to interpret. In human terms, walk, jog, run, sprint, sit, stand, kneel, etc, etc. Think of an action an animal can take and where...