Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living

The book Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living is a comprehensive guide on how to survive and thrive in the wild using only natural resources.

Original title: Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living: Surviving with Your Bare Hands and What You Find in the Woods
Written by: John McPherson, Geri McPherson
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Publish date: 05/28/2008
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN-10: 1569756503
John McPherson writes some of the best wilderness books out there. I appreciate the diagrams and pictures. They are detailed and well explained. I can’t wait to get back out in the field and try some of his projects! – Stephen, Goodreads.com

The back cover

“During my first years of learning surival I took a course in survival and primitive earth skills taught by John and Geri McPherson. I was excited by their unbelievable passion and their intrinsic understanding of survival. Their teachings took me from understanding basic skills to a full-blown love for the ancient technologies that humans developed to survive. John and Geri are the real deal. They don’t just teach this stuff, they live it. I loved the experience with them so much I came back a second time a few years later. Now that I have traveled the world as Survivorman – experiencing and filming survival in every ecosystem there is – I can sit back and watch my shows and see John and Geri’s teachings peek through in every situation. I have been able to understand survival because of John and Geri, and can highly recommend this book.”

– Les Stroud, AKA Survivorman

Packed with in-depth instruction and photos, Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living teaches you the skills needed to survive and live in the wild using only those things found in the woods. Learn how to:

  • Ignite a fire with two-stick hand drill
  • Erect temporary and semi-permanent shelters
  • Chip stones and bones into primitive tools
  • Trap animals and hunt with bow and arrow
  • Fire pots, weave baskets and tan buckskin
  • Prepare and cook wild foods

The book covers everything from basic skills to advanced techniques. It is suitable for anyone who wants to learn more about wilderness survival, primitive living, or outdoor adventure.


Review by Bushcraft.Nu

I read this book a few years ago and remember being somewhat surprised at the quality of the content. When I bought this book I had no idea who the authors where, I just took a chance when ordering the book. I was not disappointed

A lot of books in this genre are written by people who really doesn’t have too much of an authority when writing about survival and wilderness living. This is not the case with John and Geri McPherson’s Wilderness Living. Just by reading the book you can tell they speak (write) from experience. Add to that all the detailed images of their camp, tools, and constructions.

One specific thing that struck me when reading this book was the part on making primitive tools, more precisely the short instructions on how to make a “simple” bow with arrows. This is by no means an overnight endeavor, but takes weeks and it’s quite possible it will break in the final stages. I can only imagine the satisfaction of shooting that first arrow after weeks of preparing the bow!

This book really is exactly what it say it is in the title “Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living: Surviving with Your Bare Hands and What You Find in the Woods”. It’s not a book titled bushcraft or survival, but a book in which John and Geri shows us a few glimpses from their exciting lives living like our ancestors!

I highly recommend this book to those of you who, like me, want to learn more about the precise ways our ancestors actually survived, lived and thrived in a world without modern comforts.