Mar 9-12, 2006 (Thursday - Sunday)
Spend a fabulous extended weekend learning the art of tracking or improving your skills. This workshop was held two years ago and women are still singing its praises, so this is a command performance. Rowe is a great place for tracking, with diverse ecosystems that provide mixed hardwood forests where fisher, fox, and coyote roam, rocky ridges that are habitat for bobcat and porcupine, and wetlands that are home to mink, otter, and moose.
A dynamic all-female staff will lead you on an incredible journey into the lives of birds and animals by weaving track and sign interpretation into a broad understanding of the local ecology. Through journaling and awareness exercises you will learn to shift your visual and intellectual perspective and be able to see tracks in a whole new way. Together we will share our own experiences, including stories about tracking in other parts of the world. This workshop includes extensive field time and will cover basic track and sign identification, gait interpretation, pressure releases, spirit tracking, camouflage, the art of seeing, ecological tracking, and search and rescue tracking. This workshop starts Thursday evening and costs an additional $80. Women of all levels of experience are welcome.
Ruth Ann Colby Martin is a former Head Instructor for Tom Brown’s Tracker School. where she assisted over a thousand students in learning the basic arts of tracking, including how to read the life and spirit of the animal or person being tracked. Diane Gibbons is the author and illustrator of Mammal Tracks of the Northeast. Diane’s interests include the aesthetic, kinesthetic, and ecological aspects of tracking, as well as how tracking expands perception and awareness. Susan C. Morse has been tracking and interpreting wildlife uses of habitat for over thirty years, specializing in bear, cougar, lynx, and bobcat. In 1994 she founded Keeping Track®, where she is now Program and Research Director. Her work and photographs have been featured in Smithsonian, Audubon, Vermont Life, Wild Earth, Amicus Journal, and Nature Conservancy. Hannah Nyala’s acclaimed memoir, Point Last Seen, was made into a CBS movie of the week and chronicled her life as a battered and stalked woman who became a search-and-rescue tracker. Her first novel, Leave No Trace, is about a SAR tracker who finds herself stranded in central Australia’s Tanami Desert. Caitlin Williams, a naturalist and wildlife tracker, has made her living working with adults and children in nature for over ten years. Her passions also include bird language, camouflage, and helping people see beyond the limitations of their eyes. Lorene Wapotich is the Co-founder and Director of Earth-Based Skills for Women, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering women and girls by connecting them with nature, themselves, and a community of women mentors and role models. Lorene is the visionary behind this workshop, which is a fundraiser for the Earth-Based Skills for Women scholarship fund. Other guest instructors will be present over the weekend.