As you prepare to venture outside this winter — be it snowshoeing, Nordic skiing, backcountry or any other adventure outdoors — “Mountain” Mel Deweese wants you to look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “What are you going to do if you get lost?”

Do you have the weapons to combat the seven enemies of survival? Do you have a survival kit? Do you have the knowledge to use it? Have you tested your knowledge and your survival kit? How confident are you that you’ve practiced your seven P.S.: proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance? If you aren’t confident in your answers, Deweese has a lifetime of knowledge that can help.

Based in Grand Junction, and with his vast, 40-acre tipi camp in nearby Unaweep Canyon, Dewees has dedicated himself to teaching others how to survive in the wilderness with his Nature Knowledge courses that can be personalized to desired skills. Can you build a fire using primitive methods? What is the best way to build a shelter during winter’s freezing temperatures? Do you know which plants are edible? What can you use to signal search and rescue? What is an empty soda can used for in a survival scenario? These are just a few of the many skills Deweese can teach in his hands-on courses. He emphasizes, however, that the main skill he teaches is confidence.

“You show a kid how to make a fire; you’ll see confidence,” he says. “You can see the smile on their face. They are going to walk away with life assurance. They have knowledge in their pocket, and they can say, ‘If I get lost, I know what to do.’ I love to see people get that kind of confidence.”

For more than 50 years, Deweese travelled the globe — from the Arctic Circle to the humid jungles of the Philippines — both honing and teaching his survival skills. As a military Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) instructor for the U.S. Navy, he developed survival training and courses for naval aviators, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency personnel and members of the U.S. Navy SEALs. He represented the United States at the first International Survival Instructor Conference held in Sweden in 1995. A few years later, he returned to Sweden to assist in training 17 countries in search and rescue survival.

While most of his training was geared towards members of the U.S. military and federal agencies, he shifted his focus to kids and the public after assisting in a search and rescue for 9-year-old Jimmy Beveridge, who was lost on Mount Palomar in Southern California in February of 1981.

“That’s when I got serious. Civilians need survival training, too,” he believes. Over time, he built programs and trainings geared toward civilians and kids. “I turn camping trips into learning, and I make it fun.”

In the late 1980s, at the suggestion of a friend, he found himself on the Western Slope and purchased land in Unaweep Canyon. Since then, he’s used his tipi camp as an outdoor classroom for those wanting to strengthen their confidence in outdoor survival. Depending on the skills people wish to learn, his courses can last anywhere from one hour to three days (he’s even shared lessons at kids’ birthday parties). Depending on a person’s knowledge of survival, the course will be tailored, likely starting with knowledge of the seven deadly enemies of survival.

Those deadly enemies may sound like mountain lions, bears and rattlesnakes, but make no mistake about them, the true enemies to survival are cold/heat, thirst, fatigue, hunger, pain/injury, fear/anxiety and boredom/loneliness. What can be used to combat those survival enemies?

“The only the items that are going to save your life are food, fire, water, shelter and signals,” he shares. “If you come up to my camp, we will make fire in the first 30 minutes, then move on to signals and then to traps. It’s really hands-on. There will be examples of survival kits. We practice using them. That’s the only way to learn

“Join me, and you will learn to return.”

For more information about Nature Knowledge, visit youwillsurvive.com. To schedule a course, call Deweese at 970.216.4178, or email him at colomtnmel@msn.com.

Originally published in the Winter 2022-23 issue of Spoke+Blossom.

Are You Confident In Your Wilderness Survival? Mountain Mel Can Help