Description
“Outdoor Survival Skills” by Larry Dean Olsen 7th edition now available.
Foreword and Photos by Christopher Nyerges
Many of you know Larry Dean Olsen, who was teaching extreme wilderness training for Brigham Young University back in the 1960s. He was the original survival skills instructor, and the one who started the Rabbit Stick Rendezvous. His students started Boulder Outdoor Survival School. He’s a giant among the primitive skills technicians, and most of us trace some lineage back to Olsen.
In my 20s, I learned from an early edition of Larry Dean Olsen’s “Outdoor Survival Skills” book, and treasured the lessons buried in that book. We corresponded when I was the editor of Wilderness Way magazine.
Olsen died in 2019, and the publisher asked me to edit the book, and provide new color photos. I was honored to be a part of the Larry Dean Olsen lineage. This Seventh Edition of his classic book is now available. I provided a new foreword, and lightly edited Olsen’s content, adding clarifications and charts in some cases, but very much trying to keep it all in Olsen’s voice. I provided all-new color photos to illustrate the skills, from a period spanning about 20 years, with men, women, children, and people of all walks of life learning about the skills that Larry Dean Olsen taught. The original line drawings are retained.
A wonderful book to add to your library!
“Background: WHY I WROTE MY BOOKS
“Outdoor Survival Skills” by Larry Dean Olsen 7th edition now available.
Foreword and Photos by Christopher Nyerges
The Legacy and Lineage of Larry Dean Olsen
Anyone who has been teaching outdoor survival skills for any length of time has undoubtedly heard of Larry Dean Olsen. He was born in 1939 near Jerome, Idaho. After Olsen graduated from Brigham Young University, he began teaching survival field trips through the college’s Continuing Education Division in 1968, sharing his love for the outdoors, and his intense interest in the skills of the local indigenous peoples.
At the time, there were scant few others teaching the skills that sustained indigenous peoples for millenia. As a Mormon, Olsen was devoted to always being ready, including being able to survive in a harsh wilderness. In addition, there were very few native peoples teaching the old ways of plant uses, flint knapping, trapping, and fire-making because most were too occupied just trying to stay alive in the modern world.
As part of his outdoor training, he would take students into the desert of the Great Basin area and live off the land for a week or longer. They had to learn how to eat wild plants, trap small game, make fire with local materials, build a shelter, weave sandals, find water, and more. It was a grueling adventure.
He wrote “Outdoor Survival Skills,” first published in 1967, which described all the survival skills he’d been teaching. His book has long been considered the definitive classic book on the subject. The book has been updated every few years and remained in print all these years.
Larry was the originator of the Rabbit Stick Rendezvous, a gathering for a week where people could camp out and learn the skills in a more leisurely manner. The event – and various knock-offs — continues to this day, continued by students of his. His students began the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, and Larry continued to work at the Anasazi organization, which he co-founded, which gave guidance to youth in the wilderness.
Larry was perhaps the most visible person teaching and sharing the extreme art of living off the land. It is not an overstatement to say that everyone today teaching these skills has some lineage, direct or indirect, that leads back to Larry Dean Olsen.
I remember when I first found a copy of the original edition in my older brother’s things. He was a camp counselor and thought the information would help him. I took the book and studied it, and it became a part of my life as I pursued learning outdoor survival skills and the uses of the many plants that the indigenous peoples used.
Olsen’s book became my “bible” of a sort – the key to the actual application of every skill needed to stay alive without the assistance of civilization. I was amazed that such a compact resource even existed. I began to practice making fire with the bow and drill because of this book, and I learned the process of weaving sandals from cattail leaves. I also started making primitive weapons and traps, and I began the dangerous path of flint-knapping, which is the art of flaking a piece of obsidian or other hard material to produce razor-sharp arrow heads and spear points. It’s dangerous because if you don’t do it right, you take off pieces of skin, as I did too many times.
My school friend Nathaniel and I often practiced the skills together. We had heard about the budding Rabbit Stick Rendezvous, and wanted to attend a session in Utah. But for us, in high school at the time, getting the money together and traveling there was insurmountable for us. As I recall, the cost for the week was something like $70, but it might as well have been a million dollars for us.
Still, Larry was like an idol to us, you could say he was our cult leader in our secret wilderness sect. We worshipped him from afar. No, we had no golden idol, but we invoked his name at nearly every occasion.
Over the years, I would quote Larry in the many books and newspaper articles I wrote. Eventually, around 2004, I became the editor of the Wilderness Way magazine, and called upon Larry for some advice, and to write for us. We talked on the phone, and shared e-mails. I never got him to write for us, but I did get lots of good advice. I never managed to get to the gathering that he started either, though I followed many of his journeys and adventures from afar by reading reports from other students.
I was saddened when I heard that this gentle giant died in 2019. I had always wanted to meet him, and to learn at his feet.
At about that time, I was asked if I could update Larry’s classic book! What an honor it was to be a part of the Olsen lineage. I spent many months lightly editing the text, and adding some charts and short paragraphs where I felt it would enhance what Larry wanted to say.
The hard part of the revision was to provide all new color photos for all the skills listed in the book, including new photos for the various wild plants described for food, medicine, and other uses. Though I have been teaching for over 40 years, I was only able to draw upon my last nearly 20 years of photography with a digital camera. Whereas the original black and white photos had the feeling of going on one long trip with Larry, my pictures were picked from many classes over a long period of time, with men, women, children, and people of all walks of life. In many cased, we had to go into the field to take brand new photos of certain skills or crafts.
The result is the 7th edition of “Outdoor Survival Skills,” a book I am proud to be a part of. I hope that the memory of Larry Dean Olsen lives on, and that the introduction of new photos in a revised book will continue to inspire a whole new generation to learn these most fundamental skills.
MORE ON LARRY
Larry Dean Olsen was born in 1939 near Jerome, Idaho. His unquenchable curiosity in Native American cultures lured him to the great desert wastelands of the Western United States and their ancient inhabitants. As a boy, Larry trekked into remote canyon areas and became adept at living off the land.
Larry’s training came as he experienced survival at its most primitive level. He emulated the Anasazi or “Ancient Ones” and carefully replicated the lifestyle of the Primitive Paiutes of the Great Basin Plateau areas of the western United States. Using tools and weapons of stone and bone, digging roots and trapping game, suffering cold nights without bedding, and hot days without water or even shoes, Larry gained a unique understanding of man in harmony with nature.
In the 1960’s, Larry began teaching classes in outdoor survival in the Division of Continuing Education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, sponsored by the Department of Youth Leadership. His approach to survival, based on the idea that survival training is best achieved by learning to live off the land without previously manufactured gear, won wide approval.
Over the next several years, thousands of university students field-tested Larry’s concepts. In addition to learning survival skills, Larry’s courses proved to be a vehicle for helping young men and women establish lasting values, exercise courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and above all, develop a compassionate respect for human life and its relationship to nature. While at BYU, Larry developed a primitive living course for adjudicated youth from the courts in Utah County. In 1969, he and his staff won a national award for “Youth Rehabilitation Though Outdoor Survival.”
Larry wrote the first edition of Outdoor Survival Skills for his students. The book created an enthusiasm for outdoor education. Outdoor Survival Skills is also well known to the National Parks Service and is sold in the U.S., England, Canada, and Italy. After reading Larry’s book, Robert Redford invited Larry to serve as the technical director for his movie “Jeremiah Johnson.”
[Nyerges has been an author and teacher of ethnobotany and survival skills since 1974. This new book is available at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]
“Guide to Wild Foods” is published by the same publisher as “Outdoor Survival Skills,” often sold as a companion to the Larry Dean Olsen book.
