Oregon Mike's common mans water bottle with holder

A common man's piece of home made gear along side a high quality commercial bottle holder. Both work great! You can also think of the home made one as a light weight temporary unit. Visit EK USA's website if you are interested in their quality bottle holders.

Pocket knife retention & lid grabber

Just some ideas for not losing your pocket knife when outdoors & one option to get that hot pot lid off.

A second look at the possible bear scrape in HD

Here is a second look at the possible bear scrape for my friend Scott. This time a closer view in HD. Still not the highest setting my new camera can do as I'm still learning to use it. Scott had some thoughts after seeing this video and found the video below, which is interesting and entertaining.

Here are Scott's comments; "I've seen squirrels strip cedar bark off trees for nests "hence the pile on the bottom" look up in the tree for the nest or follow the tiny pieces they will come back and strip from the same spot...I'm pretty sure (99%) that's it and is the right time of the year for this, no bear, and if it was a person gathering bark they cut down to the wood, but they do walk backwards ripping it up the tree for bent bark baskets"

Bear scrape?

I found this large scrape off a rarely used hiking trail. My first instinct is a bear, but I am not sure. It did not have deep claw marks like I would think a bear would do but after speaking with an experienced bear hunter he said it sounded like a bear. He even asked about the smaller marks around the tree before I had a chance to tell him about them. What do you guys think?

Whispering Falls

Also on my birthday weekend we visit Whispering falls. It took a few minutes to find the actual waterfall, there were no signs and the trail was not clear with the snow covering the ground. It was a winter wonderland out there. Best of all, we were the only humans there! Come summertime that will not be the case.

Suspention Bridge Hunt, Dec. 2010

We spent my birthday weekend at a lodge in the Detroit Lake area. We searched for a suspension bridge using only a near useless map on the back of a brochure. We found it even though the map on the back was completely wrong.

SRI Contest 1 Entry

Here is my entry into Self Reliance Illustrated's 1st Contest. I make fire using natural material using fire steel, boil water then make charcloth in the same container. Then at a different location I fire and use rocks to strike a spark into the charcloth that I made using the first fire. Everything out there was soaked, check out the pic of my gloves at the end of the video.