I have a friend that has opened up more than a few doors of opportunity for me, from well paying work, to learning some of the skills lost to our complacent society. And while I get to show him a thing or two, I truly believe I walk away a better person for each and every time we get together. I’m hoping I can use this post as a way to get him to contribute something here as well.

I’ve referred to “RidgeRunner” here several times, and he’s a regular commenter to this blog. He’s also the force behind Green Earth Survival School, and has allowed me to tag along on many of his classes, under the guise of “helping”, though I learn something from him at every class.

Today, I stopped by to swap some hardware and some information. I took the opportunity to take some pictures of his current free-time occupations. Here they are in the order we talked about them.

Tanning Rabbit Hides

Remember “One Bad Day“? One of the things I try to do to not belittle the animals life, is to try to utilize as much of the animal as possible. RidgeRunner has been taking the hides from them for several months now, and has been tanning them with an acid bath method. I got to see the end results of several of the finished hides, and they are wonderful. RidgeRunner stated that tanning them was extremely simple, with each hide requiring no more than ten minutes of interaction each, from start to finish. He has recently requested on with the head fully skinned out, in order to make a pouch out of it. The rest are destined to become a blanket, I believe.

Knapping Stone Tools

I’m pretty good at napping. RidgeRunner is VERY good at knapping. Knapping is turning glass-like stones (obsidian, chert, flint, etc) as well as glass into stone tools like axes, knives, arrowheads, and spear points. I’ve seen him take a Heineken beer bottle, bust it up, and take the bottom of the bottle and turn it into a lovely arrowhead in a very short time.

He has tried several times to teach me, but I have yet to develop the patience to sit still long enough to learn. He says that like most things, knapping isn’t difficult, you just need to start doing it in order to learn it. One day….

He handed over many tips, points, blades etc, none of them less than amazing. Beautiful in their construction as well as their functionality, his work offers a strong argument that I really do need to learn the basics, if nothing else.

Some of the knife blades were set into wood or antler handles, and were just as useable as my pocketknives. Only sharper! A stone blade has the potential to have an edge that is a single molecule wide, something impossible for even the highest quality steel knife. It is for this reason that some plastic surgeons use stone knives for surgery – thinner blades mean thinner scars!

He has a couple shelves stacked up with display-grade items he’s made from stone. Check it out:

Baskets

RidgeRunner and his wife both enjoy turning raw materials into containers of all sorts. Here are some of the baskets they’ve made recently:

Lovely work, all of them…

And finally,

Do you hear banjo music?

RidgeRunner recently crafted a banjo from base materials. He’s now teaching himself to play it. What get together of two mountain-grown, down home folks can’t use a banjo to make it more interesting?

The man has talent, no doubt in my mind. I’m hoping to pull some of that knowledge and skill out of his head and learn what he has to offer.

With friends like him, who needs a Foxfire book?

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