Barefoot & fancy free
Survival guru Cody Lundin enjoys Prescott’s great outdoors By James Dungeon [Editor’s note: The following excerpts are from conversations with Cody Lundin, founder of Aboriginal Living Skills School, LLC, and of TV’s “Dual Survival.” Lundin is participating in the Prescott’s Great Outdoors Outdoor Recreation Festival & Expo on Saturday, Oct. 11. at Watson Lake Park with free presentations at 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. He is signing books at 11:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. His two-hour small group, hands-on workshop, “Modern Firemaking,” is at 1 p.m. and costs $75. Space is limited. Sign up at CityOfPrescott.Net.] What do you think about the Prescott’s Great Outdoors event and why did you get involved? It’s a great thing for our community. Yavapai County and Prescott is an awesome place to be outdoors. We’ve got thousands of square miles
of space from fir and spruce trees to high desert. I know the event is focused on Prescott , but you’ve got to remember this state is amenable to Sonoran desert and alpine tundra within an hour-and-a-half drive from here. For someone who enjoys the outdoors, it’s a real gem. And Arizona is mostly available for public use because of all the public lands, such as the Prescott National Forest, which surrounds Prescott. I’m super excited to be a part of this event. It helps us actively promote what all of us have known for a long time. I’m excited to see the city take the bull by the horns and actively promote the cool things people in town are doing outdoors. What’s your involvement, specifically? I’m doing two things for free. I’ve prepped two courses for an hour or an hour-and-a-half. One is about hypothermia and hyperthermia. Those
Highlands Center for Natural History’s
Flip otohP
... through different lenses. Arizona Grapes are a native riparian plant in the Central Arizona Highlands. In the fall juicy grapes ripen for our local wildlife. Use a magnifying glass next time you hike to open new lenses into the forest and see what you can discover.
6 • FEATURES • OCTOBER 2014 • 5ENSESMAG.COM
are the two most common ways to die outdoors, and you can do both equally well in Prescott with the seasonality we have here. The other one I’m still working on. There’s a paid course, too, and all the funds go to the city of Prescott. It’ll involve firemaking, essentially — modern firemaking, but there will also be some primitive elements in it. I’ll also be signing my books. I’ve sold them to the city at my cost and all proceeds will go to the city of Prescott, too. You cut your teeth in Laramie, Wyoming, and, since then, have traveled around the world. How did you end up in Prescott? I came here to go to college. My mom lived here before I came here, so she knew about it before me. When I came here, I fell in love with the area. So I attended one of the colleges here (Prescott College) and the rest is history. Wyoming’s a gorgeous place. Laramie’s beautiful, but here we have more geographic diversity. All across the country, you don’t get as much diversity as you get here in the shortest drive time. Maybe California has more, overall, but remember I said shortest drive time. I just worked with a program for Dateline NBC about the high mountains and turned around and worked with CBS on one about the desert. For someone like me, you really don’t get that experience anywhere else in North America. That’s how amazing our state is. That’s why I’m really excited to be promoting more outdoors activities in our community. We live in a kickass state. Arizona really is something special. You’ve worked with national and international media outlets. Why pitch for a city-based event? Because I live here. This is my community. I have people come from out of town to my school from places all over the world because I’m here and this is what I do. I’m a teacher and I want to give back to the community.
Cody Lundin. Photo by Christopher Marchetti.