Wendell Tokarz taught the shelter and fire units in a community college outdoor program in Marquette, Michigan for 28 years. He writes the fire, cutting tool and edge material on this site.
Wendell Tokarz
Retired instructor · Marquette, Michigan
How did he get here?
He ran the same four-week unit every autumn from 1994 to 2022, and made every student keep a build log. He kept the logs.
That leaves an unusual pile of evidence: several hundred first attempts at shelter and fire, in the same forest, with the failures written down by the people who made them rather than by an instructor summarising afterwards. Patterns show up in a stack like that which no single practitioner would ever notice, because one person does not fail in enough different ways.
What he works on
- Fire in wood that does not want to burn: standing dead, fatwood, wet and frozen stock.
- Cutting tools: what a knife, an axe and a saw each earn in a pack, and when two of the three are dead weight.
- Edge geometry: bevel angle, thickness behind the edge, and how each behaves across a multi-night trip.
The thing students always got backwards
They built the roof first. The roof is the last problem, and building it first locks in every other mistake.
Across the logs the pattern is consistent: a good roof over a bad bed produces a bad night, and a mediocre roof over a good bed produces a survivable one. Roughly two thirds of first attempts started at the roof. Roughly the same fraction reported being cold from below.
Wendell writes alongside Maren Aho. How the two of us work is set out on the about page, and the record itself is on the overnights.