MEET YOUR GUIDES
KEN JOHNSON
Ken has been teaching bushcraft and outdoor survival skills since 1973. Apart from his business career, he has worked as a commercial hunter, trapper, and outdoor guide. He is a BSA Wilderness Survival merit badge counselor, is certified in Wilderness First Aid, and has become a recognized expert on the wild edible plants of the Midwest.
Ken was raised with a love and appreciation for nature, wildlife, and the great outdoors. His mother hailed from the rugged Ozark mountains of Missouri where her family raised livestock and farmed. His father’s family were small time Illinois farmers.
Born on November 7, 1951 in Illinois, U.S.A. Raised in a blue collar family, Ken's stepfather was a factory worker whose family raised cotton and share-cropped in Alabama. Frequent visits to his Alabama farm-family provided a deep appreciation for rural living and simple, self-sufficiency.
Ken finished his formal education and began a business career in his hometown. However, along the way, he discovered that hunting for wild game, fishing, and gathering wild medicinal plants for market was quite lucrative…interests that formed the foundation for the bushcraft classes he teaches now.
Today, Ken conducts foraging classes and bushcraft seminars across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri.
DAVE LAWRENCE
Raised in a large family of outdoor sportsmen, Dave has always been an outdoorsman, hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and exploring the great outdoors since early childhood. This always provided the opportunity to learn, and practice, wilderness bushcraft and life skills such as foraging, tracking, trapping, orienteering and navigation, water sourcing and purification, shelter-building, and firecraft.
Dave has always been passionate about nature and wildlife. He has been a lifelong student of historical self sustaining primitive living skills, he spent many decades within the Society for Creative Anachronism, learning and teaching traditional old world living skills, and methods.
Dave was born in the Midwest and learned most of his knowledge, and developed his skills, in a moderate woodland or grassland environment across seasonal environmental changes. However, Dave also lived in Phoenix Arizona for eight years where he attended and led numerous expeditions across the region to remote locations including Skeleton Cave, The Painted Cliffs, Humphries Peak in Flagstaff, Payson, Munds Park, and the Sedona Desert region. In these often harsh environments, he learned, taught, and relied upon the more advanced survival skills required for extremely harsh conditions in the deep arid desert, and in high altitude frozen and snowbound environments.