by Ericka Kastner
Crestone’s Earth Knack Stone Age Living Skills founder Robin Blankenship says by the time she graduated from college, she’d spent half of her life in the outdoors, a journey that was set in motion when she was a young girl attending a 63-acre campus in the Northern Illinois woodlands from first through eighth grades.
She describes listening to Hiawatha-esque rhyme and meter stories, learning to ride horses through the woods and canoeing the Illinois and Fox Rivers. “Because my family life was so difficult for me, that place was a fairy tale, a magical immersion in nature.”
Many years later, Robin found herself working as a camp counselor at Adventure Unlimited Ranches north of Buena Vista in 1978. “BV was hardly a sneeze on the road back then. It wasn’t the big community it is today.” She’d never been to the West and remembers being unable to sleep for a week when she arrived at her little cabin in the woods at the base of Mount Columbia.
After becoming head of the AU outdoors program, she went on to lead NOLS trips. She later worked with Larry Dean Olsen, teaching outdoor survival skills using the expertise she’d learned out of necessity, in order to have winter work.
She still remembers the first time she made a fire without matches or a lighter far into the heart of the Utah desert. Robin was leading a program in which at-risk youth would head into the wilderness for three months at a time, armed only with a green vinyl poncho, a pocket knife and a wool army surplus blanket. (She adds that excursions like this rarely happen anymore due to liability issues and guidelines related to outdoor education experiences.) Robin says she started the fire because she had to. “Now that’s real magic … I tapped into my ancestors’ physical motion of fire starting. There is a deep, genetic knowing that we have lost sight of.”
Four days into trips like this, participants would break down, emotionally and physically. At that point, Robin says, nature became the authority because one of the beauties of outdoor education is the opportunity to learn natural consequences.
While later attending school at CU Boulder, people began knocking on Robin’s door, seeking to learn primitive skills and making way for the birth of Earth Knack in 1990.
In 1994, Earth Knack ran an ad in Outside Magazine and received feedback from 6,000 readers. Ad staff from Outside later told Robin that was the biggest response to a print advertisement in the history of the magazine. In spite of the enthusiastic interest, the ad didn’t generate a lot of actual participants in the program. “People who inquired became overwhelmed because they misunderstood, thinking they had to become a modern day Jeremiah Johnson.”
She relocated the school to Crestone in 1995, and in 2013, Texas transplants (now Salida residents) Sam Liebl and Jillian Owens Liebl joined Robin’s efforts to help folks make a natural connection within their urban environment. The trio says Earth Knack is about thriving instead of surviving. Of the tools used to learn Stone Age skills, Robin says, “When people put their hands on that stuff, it’s a portal. I believe it is encoded in their DNA.”
According to Robin, we’ve come far from the essence of who we are as a species. She says researchers are now studying nature immersion as a science and are finding it lowers blood pressure and improves mental health. “There is evidence to show we need natural spaces and places … We crave a high tech/high touch balance.”
When newlyweds Sam and Jillian talk about Earth Knack, their eyes have a sparkle. Sam left an internship in the legal field to pursue his love of all things wild. Although Jillian never camped until age 20 and initially joined Earth Knack to support her husband, she’s since decided it would be hard to go back to being employed inside all day. Sam says working full time in the outdoors and connecting with his ecosystem is like seeing the world in high resolution. “Now I smell deer before I see them.”
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Earth Knack teachers lead classes across the U.S., on the Front Range, on their Cottonwood Creek site in Crestone, and beginning this past January, in Salida. Jillian says the goal is to get class participants to step out of their own comfort zone and if attendees simply enjoy being in the outdoors during the class, she and Sam have accomplished their goal. Course offerings include learning skills in knot tying, fire friction, building shelters, trapping, wild food gathering and cordage.
On June 6, Earth Knack will hold an open house at their Crestone location. The class schedule is available online at earthknack.com, and private camps and courses are available as well.
Salida logophile and wordsmith Ericka Kastner has chosen writing as her primary art form since she was stricken with a fondness for her first thesaurus at age 10. She’s most at home with a pack on her back and is jonesing to learn how to start friction fires while on the trail this summer. View her work at erickakastner.com.
