Hi, I’m Darrik Walker, and I’d like tell you about my journey to brain tanning and bush craft! I’ve lived in northern Minnesota most of my life, except for working in Montana for 2-3 months a year through my early teens and 20’s. My parents and grandparents were loggers, farmers, and outdoors people. Today, we would call them homesteaders and bush crafters. I was homeschooled in the early 90’s, which wasn’t common then, but it allowed me to have many older friends, who grew up in the 20’s, 30’s, or 40’s. Most of them were trappers and hunters.

That being so, and having been raised in this environment, you may think, “Does this guy think he’s an expert?” Not hardly. Like my old boss would say, “an ex is a has been, and a xpert (spurt) is a drip under pressure.”

In my mid-twenties, I wanted to go deeper with primitive skills, so I attended the Tom Brown Jr. Tracker School. I went to the Basic class, followed by the Advanced Skills and Advanced Tracking classes.