Preparation Weeks 3/4 of 4

Well, I sort of screwed the pooch on keeping my preparations documented here, but so it goes. I’ve been ridiculously busy wrapping up things with Rewild Portland to make us secure without my presence. As well as other random things. I feel pretty unprepared for the whole thing, but I know it will work out.

These last couple weeks I have felt super productive. My health is waxing and wanning and finally returning to near 100%. The tooth is taking (still crossing my fingers), the swollen lymph nodes are gone, but the dry cough is still around in the evening. As far as hides go, I now have three tanned & smoked hides, plus three that are softened and ready to be smoked, and two that are ready to be dressed. My plan is to dress and soften those two hides and smoke them all during the three days between the basket class and the start of the stone age immersion.

Today I am making a really strong batch of hemlock bark and hoping that’s the last strengthening I will need to do. I have moved all the hides into one bucket to consolidate all of my things to fit into my clown car. I hope that will be okay. I’m going to do a “snip” test this evening. This just means snipping a little bit off the neck with a pair of scissors and seeing if the tannins have leached all the way into the center of the hide yet. I’m hoping this will be the case. These hides aren’t terribly thick, but I won’t be surprised if they haven’t gotten there yet. If they have, I’ll probably leave them in there until those three days between classes in which I will rinse and soften them in preparation for making a vest!

I have so much seaweed it’s insane. I’m really banking on sharing this with people up there. I think it will be a real commodity. Salt is hard to find unless you are drinking blood and licking cave walls. This seaweed will be priceless. For more starchy foods I went down to the desert and dug some biscuitroot to pound into flour for calories. Not sure how much I got, but it looked like more when I dug it. After de-hydrating it and pounding the fiber out, it doesn’t look near as much as I thought.

I couldn’t find the right kind of buffalo hide, so I went with the alternative and bought 10lbs of sheeps wool to felt into a blanket.

I am showing up a little under prepared. But we’ll see what happens. Gotta run. Not much time for blogging right now.