The Discovery of Turtle Island Preserve

Being passionate about the environment has been a good description of me since I was a very small child. Raised on 1200 acres until I was 7, I learned early on to have a reverence and responsible attitude for the natural resources around me as well as a healthy respect for all life. It was ingrained in me that I am a part of nature, not apart from nature, and I can look throughout my 4+ decades of living and reflect on how that attitude has always guided my choices on every level.

Entering in the family focus, the home school focus, and the sustainable future focus, an observer can easily find the love of nature in how all my children have been raised and taught. While their own interests are varied from my own and each other (of course!), they too have developed an understanding and respect for the natural world around them.

When @aurynthenorse decided to join cub scouts and then boy scouts, it was exciting to add the prospect of a year-round social activity that included respect for the natural environment, and included an annual trip to summer camp with his peers into his education. As of 2019, he has now attended one year of camp as a cub scout and 2 years of camp as a boy scout, and he is already formulating plans to ultimately be a camp counselor during his high school years. Look for me to post more about my son's scouting adventures and how they enrich home schooling soon!

When @cassidydawn, who is just a year younger than her brother, reached the age to begin more of an outreach to find social activities with like-minded peers, we found a much more difficult journey. The local girl scout groups didn’t seem very exciting or participative in activities that were on Cassidy’s level of knowledge, attitude, and understanding. Living in a fairly rural area in the southern Appalachian mountains means that most of the small towns around us are filled with folks who have….let’s just say largely different perspectives on life! Imagine my frustration as I hit dead end after dead end, with a daughter who was getting successively more impatient on finding her own “people”.

After TWO years of research, I enveloped my absolute glee when I finally found a girl’s summer camp that fit all the criteria for Cassidy’s needs! This discovery, combined with her own development of co-founding an environmental youth group here in our area called Kids With Pinecones (@kwp has been created & will be up and running soon on here too!), has created a new and ginormous (very, very large) multi-faceted focus in my daughter as well as myself.

Imagine my delight after sorting through literally dozens of girl’s summer camps over many months to discover a camp that seemed customized just for my daughter! I was super excited and immediately presented it to my daughter as a potential. She agreed that it sounded like a camp she would be interested in, and as she was filling out her part of the application she became extremely hopeful that she would be able to work on blacksmithing.

Cassidy’s blacksmithing time is only the beginning of what she got to experience at her week of camp. Since this post isn’t actually about summer camp, I will conclude here that Cassidy’s adventures at summer camp have resulted in her planning for 2 weeks at camp next year, visits back to Turtle Island throughout the school year, and participation in as many events at Turtle Island as possible for her. If you would like to know more about summer camp at Turtle Island from a participant, maybe you can help talk @cassidydawn into writing about her summer camp experiences ~ just tag her in the comments with a little encouragement!

There's quite a few photos of her camp located here:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/TurtleIslandPreserve/photos/?tab=album&album_id=10157408747368545&ref=page_internal

I didn't take this photo but I wanted one for the post; it's taken from the link above and is indeed my own @cassidydawn during her blacksmithing at camp:

This post is actually about Turtle Island itself, because through Cassidy’s summer camp adventures I have discovered a deep desire to be involved with the preserve, and I am now volunteering several hours per week of my time to work on developing several projects with them. Let’s continue our journey into the woods together ~~

Turtle Island Preserve is located just outside Boone, North Carolina in the Appalachian mountains. This 1,000 acre preserve was founded by Eustace Conway. For those readers who have access to American television shows, you can watch him on a reality show called Mountain Men ~ but it’s only a “Hollywood” take to who he is and what he represents, though it is certainly filmed onsite at Turtle Island. Eustace’s vision and dedication over the last decades has created a space for education, demonstration, and much more concerning natural building, homesteading, wildcrafting, forestry, blacksmithing, equestrian knowledge, hunting, and so very much more. They have events throughout the year for individuals, scouts, families, school kids, college/university students, and so very much more. There are workshops, boys and girls summer camps, a variety of other campouts, and sometimes offsite presentations as well. Here’s a link to their website for you to get a better idea of the place:

http://www.turtleislandpreserve.org/

I could go on and on with an introduction into the land, but I tend to think that many of you readers are a bit motivated to learn more on your own time and I still have a lot to say in my post, so I highly recommend checking it out once you are done reading here! From what I am learning about my fellow “steemers”, many of you might be interested in doing a lot more than just reading about Turtle Island.

In just a few short weeks the preserve will be closed to visitors for the season. During the short days and long nights of winter, Eustace responsibly harvests animals such as deer (using every part of the animals he hunts) as well as the footage being filmed for Mountain Men. I can close my eyes and envision the preserve with a sacred solitude that can be found with a quiet snow falling in the depths of winter, the breath of nature between busy seasons of life.

Before that happens, they have planned for a final event weekend that is going to be super amazing. There are 3 multi-day workshops with a limited seating of 8 people per class, and an evening with an all-natural gourmet meal, live bluegrass music, and most importantly an extremely limited-seating evening with Eustace around the fire as he speaks from his heart and answers questions about natural living. I know that my readers are literally around the globe, but any of you who are interested in or are living the dream of homesteading would find any one of these workshops to be priceless to add to your knowledge base. Since Turtle Island really does most of their “advertising” through word of mouth, one of my new projects is helping to get the word out to those who would want to know!

All three of the workshops will be presented by masters of their fields. This is what they say about the “All-Star Weekend” on their website:

“We wanted to wrap up the 2019 camp season with a bang! Before the weather gets too cold, before rifle season opens up, and before a certain wiley film crew shows back up for a possible 9th season of winter fun we've crafted a really great weekend for our visitors! “An Evening with Eustace Conway” – came about when we realized we already had three well-known tv personalities teaching on-site the first weekend in November. With Robby from Forged in Fire teaching knife-making, Luke from Naked and Afraid leading hide-tanning, and Spencer from Hillbilly Blood teaching fire-craft…we thought: This is too dang special of an occasion not to celebrate! At the same time some wonderful musicians came along and asked if they could share their live music that weekend too! By that point we figured we’d make a big deal out of the whole thing! This ALL-STAR Weekend is just the way to wrap up a great year.”

Here are links to those workshops individually, and the weekend’s event (where I got the blurb from), if you would like to know more. Boone is located about 90 minutes drive from Asheville, NC and about 3 hours from Charlotte, NC. Please feel free to ask me questions in the comments ~ I am very passionate about Turtle Island so also expect more posts in the future from me about them as my journeys working with this amazing nonprofit continue to develop!

http://www.turtleislandpreserve.org/content/fire-friction-class

http://www.turtleislandpreserve.org/content/hide-tanning-workshop-0

http://www.turtleislandpreserve.org/content/knife-making-weekend

http://www.turtleislandpreserve.org/blog/09/2019/all-star-weekend-2019

Thanks for reading!