Scoutmaster Podcast 182

And now the old Scoutmaster. This is no joke, okay, This is true.

Years ago, I taught Principal for Navigation for the Department of National Resources for the Hunter Education class, because we were picking up a lot of lost hunters every year, And so they developed this questionnaire where they would ask these lost hunters a battery of different questions, And one of the questions they asked them was: do you carry a compass? And most of them did.

And so then the next question was: well, you know, why didn't you use the compass to, you know, find your way out of the woods? And the answer was: well, you know, I tried, but I don't know how.

And then the next question was: well, if you don't know how, then why do you carry a compass? And the answer- believe it or not- was: everyone should carry a compass in case they get lost. I don't know if that's a joke or not, but it's a true story. And this is podcast number 182.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green.

If you're listening to the podcast in the week that is published, right around mid-August in 2013,, I am paddling my way through the wilds of Algonquin Provincial Park up in Ontario, Canada, with our Scouts And I wanted to get a podcast scheduled to go out on the Monday. I'm Away in my absence And we are going to listen to one of my favorite interviews. That goes way, way back to podcast number 54. And that's with a distinguished Eagle Scout author and canoe guru, Cliff Jacobson.

Cliff would be well known to a lot of us through his articles in Boys Life and some of the books that he wrote, And we'll be talking about all that when I interview Cliff And that's going to take up the remainder of this podcast. But before we go to the interview, have a few things from the mailbag to share over on iTunes. We're catching up on a couple of comments that were left.

Jim Crutch said Clark is serving us all well by advocating for the scouting program in a simplified and funny way that makes it easy to understand. If you're an adult involved with the troop level in Boy Scouts you should be listening to this podcast, Jim. Thanks for your kind comments there. Also from Mike Stock, who is a Scoutmaster with Troop 620 on iTunes. He says I've been listening to Clark's podcast since my son crossed over four years ago. Since then my son became the SPL and I've become the Scoutmaster.

Clark's information inside of made me a better leader and given me extremely positive effect on how our troop operates. I can't overstate just how great a resource this is. We're better scouters and a better troop because of this podcast. If you want a great source of information on scouting is how scouting is supposed to be done, then look no further. Thanks, Mike. Wow, I've got a lot to live up to now.

Also heard from Ben Davidson, and Ben is with the Goodwick Sea Scout group in Wales in the United Kingdom. He wrote in to say this: I found your website a couple of months ago and what a great resource it is. Although your concentration is on American scouting, it's amazing how good things and hard things that occur with your scout organization are the same as we experience here in the UK. Keep up the good work and the enthusiasm for scouting that you very clearly have. From a scouting fan in the UK, kind regards.

Thanks so much. It's my honor to have a number of listeners in the UK and in Canada and in Australia as well as in the United States, And you are. You hit the nail on the head. We all basically experience the same things. We may have some differences in the way our organization's work and administrative things, But scouting, it's a worldwide movement And anywhere, in any language, in just about any culture, most scout leaders are going to be encountering the exact same things that other scout leaders all over the world are encountering, whether it be good or difficult or challenging or rewarding.

You know, it's just wonderful And that's part of the genius of scouting and why it's so great to be involved. Thanks again, Ben. As I promised, we're going to replay the interview I did back in podcast number 54 with Cliff Jacobson.

I think you'll really enjoy it. So let's get started, shall we?

Today I'm speaking with Wilderness guide Cliff Jacobson, who's the author of over a dozen top selling books on camping and canoeing. Cliff's an environmental science teacher who retired after 34 years of teaching, And he's the 2003 recipient of the Legends of Paddling Award from the American Canoe Association. As a distinguished Eagle Scout, Cliff continues to contribute to scouting through his articles in scouting magazine And, as a matter of fact, if you look in the most current edition, that's the January- February 2011 edition, you're going to find an article by Cliff about building fires in the rain, And Cliff joins me today from his home in River Falls, Wisconsin.

Cliff, how are you doing? Hey, yeah, listen, man, listen, I'm doing great here. Listen, I appreciate the nice intro, but I just got to say something about thank you for mentioning the latest issue of scouting magazine.

But for your listeners, I think that particular article is a very interesting and unusual one, And why? Because if you look at the picture in there and you read it, it talks about an axe.

You know how traditionally the Scouts have felt about axes, And it took a lot of convincing for me to get the boys down in Texas to agree that it was important to be able to build a fire, to be able to use an axe in that matter, And so I think that's a real plus. I think so too, And I think Scouts, as you embrace that method, will find that it's perfectly safe and you'll always be able to get a fire going for your boys.

Well, you know, a lot of times people look at a teenage boy and an axe and they put those two things together and it spells catastrophe. But that ain't necessarily so. We both know that, Yeah, but anyway, I just thought I would mention it. But, thank you, I'm really curious about your time in scouting. Tell me a little bit about where you were scouting and where you grew up.

Well, actually, I grew up and I was born in Chicago- Oh no, kidding, Yeah- and I lived in right in the heart of Chicago in a third-story apartment building and I hated every minute of it. As long as I can remember, I had in my blood this idea that I wanted to go camping, that I wanted to be outside, and I wanted to be outdoors camping. And Chicago didn't have it. And the thing that did was the Boy Scouts.

And so I embraced the Boy Scouts with full gusto and I belonged to one of those troops, troop 21.. I still remember troop 21 and we went camping once a month, rain or shine, And that was absolutely the highlight of my life, Greatest compliment that anybody ever gave me with. A Scoutmaster once said to me: Cliff, he says I've read your books. He said- and I don't know who you think you're kidding- He says all you've done is taken all that old Boy Scout stuff and modernized it. And I said she promised me you won't tell a soul. Yeah, I owe a lot to scouting.

What do you think kept you involved and interested in scouts as much as you were? Oh, it was the camping period. It was totally the camping.

And you know, we used to have a saying and I think most scouts still remember: you take the outing out of scouting, you take the scouting out of the boy. Is that still a thing? Yeah, it's still out there. Yeah, that to me is the major thing. I mean because you don't face it, nobody is taking kids in the outdoors today. Just think about that.

Scouting is literally the last place on earth that takes kids out camping. I mean, sure, there's some summer camps, but that's a once a year shot for a week or so and then you're done with scouting. It's a lifestyle.

So you know, don't minimize it. I would say to scout leaders: Boy, don't minimize the importance of taking kids on camping trips. I would say that's the most important thing you can do is take them out on camping trips.

So when you were a scout, I mean you didn't go and scale mountains or run rivers or anything like that, You just went out camping. Yeah, we went out camping. We would just go out in the woods. That we used to have in those days.

Now this would be considered blasphemy today, but it was so fun when I was a kid. Now, imagine a group of 14-year-olds, 13-14-year-olds, going on a rifle hike.

We would take our 22 rifles and we'd go in the woods with our leaders and we'd just shoot at the top, We'd just plank, you know, and we would have a couple of rifle hikes a year. And there's no way you could do anything like that today. I'm afraid not. But I have vivid memories of the rifle hike.

You weren't too worried about where you went, You weren't too worried about some kind of, you know, excellent program or diversion or something like that. Right, What you wanted to do was get out and sleep in a tent. Yeah, that's exactly it. And I mean people talk about going light today.

Are you kidding me? I mean we went light When we went.

We would hike, We'd do 20-mile hikes when I was like 13 years old And I think my pack- I think if my pack- weighed 15 pounds, that was probably a lot And it did everything I needed. You know it had my sleeping bag, my poncho, a little cook hit thing and a knife, And I had a little hatchet done, Right, And I think, you know, maybe I had a sweater or something like that. That was pretty much it.

You know, you built a fire, You put up your poncho And if it rained. Well, you just learned how to rig a tarp so that you didn't get wet.

And if you did get wet, well, it was part of the game. Then you know, we had a lot of fun, though, And that's why boys joined scouting, because that's what they want to do Exactly.

So you went on to become an Eagle Scout. Yeah, Did I have the date, the year, right: 1956?

Yeah, that's right, 1956, yeah, And what do you remember about that whole process? Putting that all together, Man, you know, I was actually thinking about that.

I remember, of course it was 21,. Merrick Badges, Is it still 21? It's 21,. Yeah, Still 21.. I vividly remember flunking life-saving three times. Three times.

That was a summer camp, And so it took me two years to get it. To get life-saving, You had to have a life-saving. There was no way getting out of swimming and life-saving- If you couldn't swim, you couldn't get your Eagle.

In those days, You had to have optional badges, And I think it's good now that we do for people who can't. I don't remember a service project- Now, maybe I did one, I don't remember it. I don't remember in 1956 if we had one or not. There's a lot of guys who would know who will. Let me know who are listening to this. Yeah, that would be interesting.

You know, maybe I had one, but it was so long ago And I also remember boys were generally older when they got their Eagles in. There were very few Eagles before 15.. I was 16.. That was a pretty average age then. That's still my experience today. 16 actually is a little young, At least in my experience.

They end up dragging their feet until they're 17 and a half. Well, that's okay too, because I think you get a lot more experiences as you get older. But yeah, it was definitely the camping that drew me to Scouting. In the summer I went to summer camp every summer And that's how I got into the canoeing. It was in summer camp. Yeah, you talk about that a little bit in your introduction in one of your books, Expedition Canoing.

I guess your first experiences were in one of the great old wood canvas canoes. Oh, yeah, sure, I put a lot of miles on those babies- Woodward Thompson's in Townsend, Old Towns, Shell Lakes.

So that's where I learned how to paddle. Everything I learned in the outdoors I basically learned in two ways: One from the Boy Scouts and two from reading all the books in print on the subject. I just went out and did it.

Do you remember what camp it was? Evanston Council's, Camp Wabaningo, I remember that.

And the Chicago Council was a waspy And there was three camps. But I went to Camp West. I still remember And the Chicago Council camp was more rugged. Then the Evanston Council camp was more frilly, nicer, mess hall, You stayed in a cabin, type things. But in the Chicago camp you were intense the whole time. I really liked the Chicago Council camp better.

It was more rugged. Making things more modern and making things easier is not the answer. It's not, really not what kids want. They don't want to. Adults may want to sleep in a cabin. Kids don't want to sleep in a cabin.

They may tell you, yeah, I want to sleep in a cabin, But they really don't. They want to be outside. We found the same thing when we took kids on canoe trips in the boundary waters in Ontario. We give them a real rough trip. They're complaining like man when they're out there canoeing in the rain and hooping all that gear over those portage trails. But, boy, with the end of the trip you just listen to them talk.

Oh, this was so cool man. So at the outset, if you ask these kids, they're going to tell you they want the easy way, But deep down they don't. They want the challenges, No matter when it was in the 50s or even right now. Today, they rise to that challenge when they're given the latitude to be able to take it on. And I tell you, it's not just boys either, It's girls too.

So I think one of the smartest things that the Scouts did was include the Venture Program and get girls involved, because they want to do the same thing. You did go on. After you became an Eagle Scout, You went on to become a teacher.

Well, actually I was a forester first. I graduated in forestry and then I worked as a forester for the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon.

And then after that I went in the Army And when I was in the Army I did actually quite a bit of teaching military subjects And I said, gee, this teaching is kind of fun. So then I went back to school, got a certificate to teach biology and taught that for a number of years and then came to Minnesota and taught environmental science for the rest of the time. You were teaching in Minnesota for all those 34 years. No, I taught in Indiana.

For what was that? I think it was five years in Indiana. I came to Minnesota and I taught 29 years in Minnesota. The trend was moving closer and closer to good canoe places.

It sounds like You know you hit it on the head. That is exactly what happened, because at the end of my 50-year teaching in Indiana, I wanted to come to Minnesota. I wanted to see this place called the Boundary Water Center.

It was so magical. I took a canoe trip up here and I just fell in love with the area. I said I've got to get closer north, I've got to get further north.

So I get there. I'm moving to Minnesota.

I sent out 350 job applications And then I got two job offers, One in Hastings, Minnesota, and one in Portage, Wisconsin. And so the rest is history. You became an author.

How did that come about? Well, becoming a writer was really accidental. I picked up a magazine and had an article in it called Canoing with Rob Roy. It was terrible. I said this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

So my wife said, well, if you can do better, go ahead. So I sat down and I wrote the definitive guide to Canoing. It was about 5,000 words And I sent it to Harry Roberts, who had a magazine then called Will and the Scamping, And Harry published it.

The next thing that happened was I was teaching school and the Department of Natural Resources had a bunch of activities for teachers, one of which was called Fire Building. Well, in this particular activity there's you go out and just collect a variety of woods and things and see what burns best. And I complained about it. I said this is terrible advice. DNR.

People said, well, why don't you rewrite it for us? I said okay, I will And I rewrote it.

And then they called me and they said: see, this is really good. We didn't have to do anything to it.

You want to do more work for us? I said yeah, And so that's kind of like how it started And it just sort of mushroomed into that.

How long have you been writing for Scouting Magazine, Do you figure? Well, I've been wrote for Boys' Life for a while.

Scouting is relatively new, I think just the last couple of years. But you know, I'm really thrilled to write for Scouting Magazine and Boys' Life. First of all, it's an honor, It really is. Of all the audiences that I work with, Scouters are the most fun. Scouters are looking for knowledge. Scouters are one of the few groups on the planet that understand that skills are more important than things.

You don't need a lot of expensive stuff if you know what you're doing, They're not looking to go out and buy something new to solve their problems. Yeah, I really enjoy writing for the Scouting Magazine and sharing stuff like that for that reason. And you also contributed a section to one of the field books too- right, Yeah, the canoeing part. I've got two of your books that I keep within arms reach and handy. One of them is Expedition Canoing.

Well, that was my Bible. That's my all-time favorite book.

You first published it in 1984 and now it's in its fourth, 20th anniversary edition. While you do talk about gear and the choice of gear and things like that, you're not overly fascinated with it and you really encourage people to build a set of skills. There are two things that keep you alive in the outdoors: Skills and judgment.

If you have few skills and a lot of judgment, you can survive, And if you have lots and lots of skills and not so good at judging, the skills might get you by. There's a book called Deep Survival which I would recommend your listeners to read. It's basically.

The premise of the book is: how is it that under severe conditions, some people survive and others perish? And one example in there that he tells, which I think sort of tells it all: 20 years ago or sometime ago, there was a huge storm in one of the western rivers. If you rafted the river at reasonable water levels, it was fun. If you got too high and terribly dangerous.

And there were a number of groups on the river that day. They were all professionally guided groups of rafters and there was this one guy from someplace out east- I can't remember, he was a pastor, I can't remember what else about him- And they were halfway down the river and they were camped out and that night it rained and rained, and rained, and rained, and rained. And they woke up the following morning and the professional rafters looked at the river.

The professional guys looked at the river 15 feet and said, well, we've never run at this high, but it should be fun, Okay. The pastor looked at the river and he said, whoa, this does not look safe to me. We're not going anywhere, boys, We're staying put. He stayed put and all of his people in his charge were fine and virtually every one of those raft trips had multiple cap sizes and drownings.

And so the question is: how is it that these experienced rafters that had been down this river hundreds or thousands of times chose to run at that day, and this pastor, who was a pretty decent rafter but had nowhere near that experience, chose to stay put, And that's one of the key things to survival. When I was a forester out in Oregon, I was a dumb kid, just 21 years old, and this is Western Oregon, And if you step off the path in Western Oregon you're in road of dendron and Douglas fir trees and I mean they turn you around. You'll never find your way out. I was putting in a timber sale or changing a timber sale, and you were supposed to change it by ribbiting in. You would walk in and you had this yellow flagging that you would put on the trees that would show where the boundaries of the timber sale is.

But anyway, most normal people would start at the beginning and that they would walk to the end and then they would turn around and they would take off ribbons as they came back. Right, I didn't do that. I started at the beginning, started pulling off ribbons And pretty soon I was in there for about- oh, I guess about an hour and all of a sudden I realized I didn't know where I was, I didn't know what was going on, totally lost. And I had my silver compass and I had some water and a sandwich and I said I know the only way out of here is go due west, and I will eventually hit highway 101 in the ocean. And that's what I did. I walked for three days and on the third day morning or the third day, I came out to a little town called Remote Oregon, with the name of the town, and I was picked up by a trucker on a log truck who took me back to my car and I drove home and I never told the soul, because foresters don't get lost.

But the point is the way I survived, that was simply because: one, I had a compass. Two, I knew if I headed west I would hit the ocean. Three, I had what they call a survival PMA or positive mental attitude.

And another interesting point I want to make: When I started all this out, we didn't have satellite phones and GPS units And these wilderness trips were different. Then You had to be really careful. If you got lost, you were lost. I mean, you better be able to figure out where you were with a map and a compass, because you couldn't call anybody. Then they came out with the satellite phone, which has totally changed the nature of wilderness travel.

Now, in some respects it's made things safer and in other respects it's made it a way less safe. You can depend on your gear to a point, but if you don't have the skills and the judgment, the gear is just so much dead weight, isn't it? There's another factor we could add into this. I call this downplay your skills. I guess what I'm saying is my skills at paddling these rapids are way better than I'm willing to accept.

I may be a class 3, 4 whitewater capable paddler, but if it gets into low class 3, I want to either portage or line or find some safe way around it. So judgment is really important. It takes a long time to develop judgment. You're not going to do that in one or two seasons. I wish the BSA would publish like an annual safety report with all the personal information expunged but just as an analysis what happened, maybe some conclusions about things that could have been done differently or a different approach, or where things kind of went south on somebody. That's a good idea.

I'm very interested in becoming a good judge of what's smart and what's not, How to keep people safe and alive when you're out there, And that's one of the things I really value about your writing, too, is that's just in the background all the time. They do that for whitewater accidents, for what people are drowning and things like that in whitewater.

I think that would be a really good idea. You've led some pretty amazing expeditions up into Northern Canada.

Is there anyone that stands out as being the most memorable for you? Oh yeah, The Hood River, of course. That's where Susie and I got married. The Second Hood River. Tell me a little bit about that.

The wedding story is actually in expedition canoeing, but the Hood is a magical river because it combines muskox, caribou, grizzly bears with thundering falls, huge falls- I mean Wilberforce Falls, where we were married- drops 160 feet through a three-mile canyon. I mean US Niagara drops 167 feet, so you can see the magnitude and that's like the third highest falls in North America, I believe.

Well, that was a magical trip because Susie and I got married on it. The other trip that I was most memorable to me was the North Knife River in Manitoba, floating to Hudson Bay. I've actually done the North Knife three times or four times, I can't remember.

But on the last trip we were chased. We were chased down the river by a polar bear. A polar bear came on land after us. We had a fire, a shot below his nose. That was a pretty scary thing. One of the trips on the North Knife we saw 11 polar bears.

I would say those two, the Hood and the North Knife, are two of my most memorable rivers. But you know, every river is memorable. All of them are wonderful. I go to the Bounty Waters and I love that too. The Bounty Waters isn't as adventurous as Northern Canada but it's much more relaxing. I don't know.

They all begin to flow together after a while. The Hood River just kind of put a pin in the map on that for me.

You have to go first of all to the Northwest Territories of Canada and then you go to Yellow Knife, which would be the capital of the Northwest Territories, Almost to the North. Roughly you'll go to Bathurst Inlet on the Arctic Ocean and that's where the Hood River ends. It ends at Bathurst Inlet on the Arctic Ocean.

So you are out there. Yeah, you're above the Arctic Circle.

We did a river in the Yukon called the Snake. The Snake River is above the Arctic Circle too. That's even further north in the Hood. There's something about the province of Nunavut, Northwest Territories and the new province of Nunavut that I just love. The topography, I don't know why. The wildlife is incredible.

I mean tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of caribou, and when caribou decide they want to cross a body of water, the alpha male looks around, looks around, and when he decides to go he jumps in and then they just all blindly follow. So we're coming around a bend and we're sort of single-filing along the left edge because there's a rapid ahead. The caribou are on this hilltop right to our left, thousands of them. The alpha male comes over and he looks down into the water. He doesn't see the canoes because we're too close to the bank.

And then he jumps and when he jumps his hooves miss Susie's head by just a foot or so. I can feel the air, I mean the back. I can feel the wind from his body hitting me in the face. The other one of your books I keep close to hand and one of my favorite camping books is Camping's Top Secrets. I like that book too. That's a fun.

It's in its third edition now and you keep revising and going over stuff so it stays very relevant. You have a favorite tip or piece of advice from the book? Yeah, I guess I do, And it's one of those bits of advice. That is, it's a constant battle with people because they refuse to acknowledge it, And it's this business of always put a ground cloth- plastic ground cloth- inside your tent, not under the floor.

And so I do battle with people all the time over this. I like to tell those folks out there, like how floors got put into tents to begin with. Floors were not put into tents to keep stuff out of the tent, believe it or not. But setting a tent up without a floor, you've got to know what you're doing. Otherwise you keep moving stakes around because it's a rectangle and unsupported rectangle.

So somebody got the idea to put a floor in a tent. So we just literally set the floor pattern so you could get the tent up easier. That's why floors were put in tents. The problem with the floor is any water that gets in the tent through seams in the floor stays inside the tent.

So that's why you need a ground cloth inside the floor, not underneath it. But I would say that's the biggest, bestest tip that I can give anybody: Don't put a ground cloth underneath the floor of the tent. People think it protects the floor. Actually it doesn't. And I know all this sounds. This is all heresy I mean to a lot of people, And the way we discovered this was very interesting.

You know what a green stick break is, Where you take a green stick between your hands and you bend it until it breaks. Okay, The bottom compresses, The top elongates And then what happens is the top part snaps But the bottom doesn't.

So a green stick always breaks from the top when it's bent. Well, that's the same thing that happens for the floor of a tent. The coating is on the inside of the floor.

So when the stick starts poking up through the floor of the tent, what happens is the fabric stretches and the coating breaks at the top. If you put your ground cloth on the inside of the tent, it will prevent you from getting holes in the floor. And if you put holes in the floor and you have a ground cloth on the inside, it doesn't matter because you got a ground cloth on the inside. Exactly, If you put the ground cloth under the floor, then any water that gets trapped between the ground cloth and the floor gets pressurized.

So I'd say that's my favorite tip. I'm definitely with you on the ground cloth inside of the tent. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, my fallback, if you didn't have a favorite tip, was to ask you about that one, because that's my favorite one.

What I want you to do is you just tell your buddies once to do this and they won't do it. So what you do is, after you set up camp, that night, you go out on the little point out there, look towards the setting sun and you look up into the sky and say, oh God, please make it rain.

And then, if it rains that night and they get flooded out and they'll see that you're not- they won't say a word, They will not say anything to you at all. From that point on, they'll always put the ground cloth inside the tent. I mean, I'm almost on a crusade about that.

Well, you know, when I wrote that article about putting the ground cloth inside the tent, one of the editors from Scouting Magazine called me up and said: you know, don't you have this backwards clip? You know, is this an error?

I said no, it's not an error, But, to their credit, they're willing to embrace new ideas and I think that's great. I saw this book maybe five or six years ago and it said Camping's Top Secrets, and I think the subtitle is a lexicon of camping tips. Only the experts know, And I've been camping and going out for a number of years and I thought, yeah right, there's not going to be a whole lot in this, but I'll give the old guy a chance anyway. Oh, thanks, There was a lot I didn't know. Thank you.

So it's a worthy read. It's a fun book too.

Well, thank you. And then you can be converted to the sect of intent ground cloths and we'll trade stories back and forth, All right.

What authors influence your writing and the way that you approach the outdoors? Well, the number one total mentor was Calvin Rottstrom. His books are, by the way, are back in print through University of Minnesota Press and I would encourage folks to read them: North American canoe country, New Way to Wilderness, Wilderness Route Finder and Paradise Below Zero. He wrote a whole slew of them and I just loved the guy, and actually his first book called The Way of the Wilderness.

He was working for a Boy Scout camp, I think in Minnesota, and they asked him to write a pamphlet for the boys, and so he wrote this pamphlet thing called The Way of the Wilderness and it was so popular that it became he turned it into a book called The New Way of the Wilderness. Sig Olson, another very famous Minnesota writer. He was more of a descriptive writer. He would describe the shimmering fish in the moonlight. He would tell you what hook and line to use to catch them. I was really a Rottstrom fan and he was really number one for me, followed by a Horace Capehart who wrote Camping and Woodcraft in 1917.

It was kind of interesting. In 1917, Capehart had a little kit, his daily kit, that he went.

I think it was like something like nine pounds. That was his total kit. I'm going light today. Give me a break. One of the things that Capehart observed in 1917 was that insect headnets should be colored black, and the same thing on tents. Look out the screen of a tent with light colored netting and it reflects the lights right back into your eyes.

Again. With black colored netting you can see clearly. I tell people, just take a black magic marker and color the netting black. That's not a bad idea, That's a great idea, It works. Just color the eye panel black and all of a sudden you'll see clearly. Another one also was a guy, but his pen name was Nesmic.

It was George Washington Sears. He lived out in the Adirondacks and he wrote a book called Woodcraft and Camping in 1920. It was interesting. His Capehart book was Camping and Woodcraft and Nesmic was Woodcraft and Camping. I guess they didn't care too much about tales. Those were really the three guys that inspired me most.

What are you working on right now? Any new books in the works? I have Under Revision where we're revising the Bounty Waters book. It's going to be a huge, major revision Going the full color.

It'll be a very nice book, But it won't be out till next year, I think in the spring of 2012.. Basically, what I'm happy doing, I'm happy keeping my books in print. I really love writing for the Bladescouts, But I don't want to chain myself to a computer anymore.

I'm getting to the age now where I want to play. I don't want to look at a computer screen, But I still enjoy talking to groups and giving presentations and things like that. That's a lot of fun for me. You're headed off for the Rio Grande Yep in about a week here. That'll be great. Once again, I really appreciate your time.

Thanks for talking with us. Thanks, Clark.