I'm a wanabe mountain man.... all that's missing is the mountains.

As time goes by, and I get older and more crabby I'm leaning more and more to the primitive side of bushcraft and further and further away from modern man made kit.

The mountainman period of American history rings my bells and it is toward this period that I find myself drawn.

I used to be into medaeval living history (still am to some extent) but smoking wasn't invented in 1475 so doing eventsin that period meant I couldn't light up my pipe during the day.  I do like my pipe while I work at being creative.

So, with a view to actually enjoying faffing about in a historical period, I've been busy knocking up some mountain man gear.  Another advantage is I can use 99% of it at meets or moots and it probably won't raise an eyebrow among my peers.  Most of you know there's a certain harmless madness about me anyway.

The first thing was to modify my medaeval footwear.  Now they are hard soled moccasins.  I'll make a new pair when my three new buckskins arrive that I part swapped for the grizzly bear skin I had last year.  I was going to  keep the bear skin, but it was just decorative as I would never have cut it up, so swapping it for stuff I could use seemed to make sense.

I've now got myself a buckskin outfit(trousers and shirt) made by a Native American lady and that was also part of the swap.

I have a ton of canvas left over from the baker tent and while it was originally going to be made into a tipi I'm puting that on hold as transportation of 18ft poles might be problematic, so I'm making up a number of packs similar to Duluth packs.

I'll put photographs up as and when I can.

Eric