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./p>
GORDON PRESLEY
Gordon grew up in the country where nature and the outdoors was a way of life. As a youth, he spent most of his weekends fishing and camping with his family, if he wasn’t adventuring with the Boy Scout troop. He would sometimes forage for things like sassafras root, berries and morel mushrooms as he spent many hours exploring the forests with a deep appreciation for the natural world.
Gordon’s mother and grandmothers all used traditional folk remedies far more often than the pharmaceutical approach that’s become commonplace today. They used herbs, “grandma secrets” and purchased supplements, often using plants as medicine.
The roots were set here…
Gordon always found the forest to be a place where he could think more clearly, especially when working in a digital world, knowing he belonged under a canopy of leaves. In 2023, he left corporate America and decided to start his own digital marketing agency after taking a year off to satisfy a non-compete clause. With nothing on his schedule, he spent large parts of his days wandering around the woods with his dog, Luna.
A series of unusual events that Gordon describes as universal guidance put him on a path which feels like fulfilling destiny. Just as he was gaining a deeper interest, he attended one of our foraging classes and gives us credit for sending him down a rabbit hole. For the past few years, he’s been researching and learning more about the natural abundance around us. Gordon soon became a regular at our classes, often speaking up with questions or comments and his passion for the topics quickly became evident.
We are glad to add Gordon to our team and he’s excited to begin teaching classes here at Panther Creek.