About the Course
Join us for a 3-day immersive experience of shared learning in a safe and
enlivening context that is led by and specifically for Queer folks!
During our three days together, people of all skill levels will have the opportunity to deepen our competency, confidence, and literacy around fire, shelter, water, food, and first aid in a safe and enlivening affinity space.
As we ease into our time, we’ll meander and pivot our attention as needed and will likely explore a variety of subjects useful to everyone, whether you're at home in the woods or have spent most of your time elsewhere. Topics are likely to vary widely, from reading the landscape and plant identification to field expedient shelter design, critical knots, and best practices for starting fire in the rain. For more information, feel free to reach out through our contact form!
Location: Just south of Charlottesville, VA
With the exception of our expedition programs, most of our courses are hosted within a 30 mile radius of Charlottesville, VA. The diverse nature of our programs is best served by a constellation of sites that includes both public and private land. To protect the safety and privacy of our host site partners as well as the safety of our participants, we do not disclose the addresses or coordinates of our sites online. Upon registering for a course — or no later than 2 weeks prior to its start date — all participants will receive details and directions to the public, pre-course meetup location, from which we will caravan to the host site.
Instructor(s)
Trainer Bee (they/them) is a genial generalist who lives intentionally & ambivalently unsettled as a non-binary PGM (Person of the Global Majority) raised on occupied Omaha & Báxoje lands. In order to offer various colonially exploited skillsets in respectfully re-storied and more accessible ways to those who have been systematically obstacled from accessing this knowledge, Bee has endured various colonially-normative paramilitary training experiences and has also been fortunate to have had exceptional mentors in a variety of ancestral, land, and place-based lifeskillcrafts in-between. Bee has experience in community medicine ranging from wilderness first aid/responder, tactical 'survival' medicine, austere/disaster relief, encampment accompaniment, direct action protest campaigns, "street medic" ideology, search & rescue volunteering, integrative medicine, unhoused outreach, traditional practical herbalism, East Asian bioenergetic medicine, manual bodywork modalities, and practices with friends and family in a woo-not-woo fashion. Bee is a proponent of hardcopies of books, conscientious song-sharing, local & bioregional organizing, knots, wordplay of the neurospicy-unavoidable type, decolonial ‘scouting’, popular education, very long walks, folk horror, community-based safety, asymmetrical defense planning, and ethnobotanical pyrotechnology. Bee encourages the bolstering of a higher baseline level of life-saving and life-affirming skill proficiency for all members of our allied communities.
Trainer Bee
