BRYANT POND — Dressed in black and sporting several stud earrings and a narrow, black-lace neck choker, 15-year-old Sage Webber looked like anything but a primitive Maine woodswoman Thursday morning at Split Rock Campsite atop Mount Christopher.

Until, that is, you looked down at the Cape Neddick girl’s feet and saw her black-polished toenails and skin covered in dirt as she sat with a few other teens on a split wood bench under a tarp canopy opposite a smoky, hand-drilled campfire.

Thursday was the last day that Webber, along with three other girls and three boys, ages 14 to 17, would live in their Earth-based community while practicing bushcraft at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Bryant Pond 4-H Camp.

On Friday, they journey to Eustis for a week-long canoe trip on Flagstaff Lake, where they will learn map-and-compass orienteering and triangulation skills, trip leading, how to hand-weave nets for primitive fishing and reeds to make pack baskets, and more.

On Thursday, the campers were at various stages of either carving cedar sticks into spindles to use to create fire using both hand- and bow-drill styles, or cutting and splitting cedar logs to then whittle a chunk to spindle size. Beside each were their hand-carved wooden spoons in various stages of development.

“Bushcraft is our one program that bridges the primitive skills with that of the Maine woodscraft or guiding skills,” Ron Fournier, conservation education director, said Thursday afternoon.

“These campers not only learn primitive and traditional skills, but they plan a canoe trip and learn the ways of the traditional Maine guide on a one-week expedition.”

The first week of the two-week Bushcraft Camp is spent learning how to live at a slower pace while attuning oneself to nature, counselors Laura Mangan and Reed Jenks said.

“It really is life-changing,” Mangan said.

“It’s really beautiful to see ‘the changing’ in them. This is a magical thing that gets the kids really involved. Making fire is one of my favorites. … You can see it in their eyes when they make fire for the first time. It’s a huge, huge, monumental moment.”

Jenks agreed.

“What I see is exhilaration and catharsis in them, so like it feels really good to them and that’s what we want,” he said.

For example, he and Mangan challenged the campers to try and stand on a log that was set up like a teeter-totter. They had to work as a team to balance it out so that both ends remained off the ground. “When they completed the challenge, we didn’t tell them and they kept on going and going and going, and when we took them off it, they were like, ‘That was pretty cool.'”

Primitive campers immerse themselves in the natural world by learning and practicing outdoor survival skills and earth-based living. Instead of relying on wristwatches, the campers are “tuned in to their surroundings and the pulse of the day,” Fournier said.

This is Webber’s third year attending Bryant Pond camps. She learned archery the first year, primitive skills the second, and now bushcraft. “Bushcraft gets you prepared for Junior Maine Guide,” she said. That is what many of her campmates are trying to achieve.

Webber said she is quite comfortable with the Earth-based lifestyle. “It’s more peaceful and I’m around more positive people. I like it here a lot.”

“Everyone has their peaceful place, but this is my happy place — camping out here,” Webber said. “Every year I come here, I always learn something new.”

Webber is the only bushcraft camper this summer to experience close encounters with local wildlife. Last year, she had a raccoon in her tarp tent that she watched eat her tentmate’s toothpaste.

Early Thursday morning, Webber said she met a porcupine face-to-face from two feet away, but it didn’t wake her tentmate, 17-year-old Federica Concu, of Cagliari, an Italian municipality on the island of Sardinia. 

“I was sleeping, and then I heard some pretty big footsteps outside of my tarp tent, and I was pretty surprised how loud they were, because (Federica) didn’t wake up,” Webber said. “I woke up, because I heard the footsteps, and I look in front of me and there’s this giant porcupine. It was probably like around 30 pounds.”

She fell back to sleep so as not to disturb it, then reawakened 10 minutes later to see it waddle off into the woods, then return, stop and stare at her. She ignored it and slept.

Concu said her uncle in Milwaukee got her interested in attending Bushcraft Camp. So far, she said, she has learned how to make fire and set up a shelter lean-to and tepee. “It’s cool. I like it. There are no camps like this in Italy.”

They also learn how to make debris shelters using woody debris and dead leaves — piles and piles of leaves that eventually decompose to dirt, spawning plant life, Mangan said.

Annie Citrine, 15, of Cape Elizabeth, said she was “so excited” to sleep in her debris shelter. “It was so comfy, I didn’t want to get out of it. It was so warm.”

To laughter from campers, counselor Reed Jenks summed up the whole Bushcraft Camp experience with two words: “More leaves.”

Rowan Connolly, 15, of Cape Elizabeth, referred to bushcraft as “untainted,” while Mangan summarized the experience as “primitive peeps.”

Bushcraft means learning wilderness cooking over an open fire while helping to cook one’s own meals, mastering fire building without matches, building different types of shelters and living in them, knot craft, axe and knife safety, learning how to treat and filter water, and mastering the art of camouflage while playing intense games of “capture the flag,” the counselors said.

“Making fire is comparable to giving birth,” Mangan added, prompting the boys to arch an eyebrow and stare at her; the girls simply erupted in laughter.

Tom Conlogue, 14, of Worcester, Vt., quickly mastered the art of handmade wooden utensils, much to the envy of Webber and Concu.

“I like doing outdoor stuff,” said Conlogue, who brought his own knife. He likened himself to a summer camp junkie by learning everything he can at different camps. He wants to try for his Junior Maine Guide license next year.

So, too, does Jill Conant, 16, of Canton, who is in her sixth year of attending Bryant Pond camps. This is her first year doing Bushcraft Camp on the Primitive Skills Path. She previously attended Bryant Pond survivor camps on the Maine Woods Adventure Path.

Mangan said those camps are for youth who want to learn how to survive in the woods using any means necessary.

“Our survivor-based programs focus on survival skills — both primitive and modern,” Director Ron Fournier said.

“These skills then are practiced in the way of team challenges to add in the fun and excitement. There’s a focus on team spirit or rivalry in survivor camps, unlike the non-competitive primitive camps.”

Conant said bushcraft teaches, “the proper way to do stuff instead of, like, being in a survivor situation; like the proper way to hold your fire and the proper way to make tarp shelters.

“And we never did axe and knife safety in survivor camp,” she said. “In survivor camp, they put you in a van, blindfold you and drive you somewhere, and they throw out all of your things everywhere and say, ‘Oh, you were just in a plane crash. Go find your stuff and everything you think you might need in a crisis like this.'”

She said the first group she was with kept moving their base camp daily at 5 a.m., so they ended up backpacking for five straight days trying to find their way back to the Bryant Pond camp.

“But the second year, we stayed put after they got us there,” she said.

Conant said she enjoys Bushcraft Camp, because unlike Survivor Camp, it’s “more predictable for what you are going to do that day. Like, one day was shelter and one day was water. It’s either wake-up time, breakfast time or lunch time.”

She’s enjoying the experiences, but the teen has her eye on her future.

“I want to like learn and remember the things I learn here,” Conant said. “And to be in the moment, and not, like, rush through it all. I want to get something out of it so I can teach someone else.”

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