Living Wild (and Off the Grid) with Lynx Vilden

July 23rd, 2014 • BY Morgan Tilton

Could you leave modern conveniences behind to live in the wild? Lynx Vilden is one woman that’s adopted a hands-on, stone-age lifestyle—and she’s devoted her life to sharing those primitive survival skills with others.

Now, a new film by a National Geographic director documents Vilden’s Living Wild lifestyle and school.

Founder of the Living Wild School, Lynx Vilden started practicing and teaching primitive living skills throughout the U.S. and in Europe in 1991. Since then, she’s led workshops at Utah’s Boulder Outdoor Survival School, the Rabbitstick gathering in Idaho and Winter Count in Arizona.

Amongst the classes, workshops, and immersions offered at her school, Lynx also queened the “Four Seasons Prehistoric Projects” program for students to spend several months learning ancient survival skills—including tool-making, clothing and shelter construction, hunting, and gathering—and creating a set of hand-made Stone Age gear, to then be invited to spend a period of time living in the wild depending solely on those tools.

Documentary Film: Living Wild

To date, the longest period of time Lynx Vilden has spent living in the wild without support is 54 days. She shared details on that feat with the Mountainfilm at Telluride audience for Living Wild, a 52-minute documentary film piloted by National Geographic photographer and director Eric Valli. The film captures the prep and completion of Lynx’s 2011 Stone Age Living Project with students in Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains. The time it takes a group to prepare for living in the wild requires much more time than the actual period of living in the wild, Lynx explained.

Starting in mid-April 2013, the group spent close to four months preparing at the Living Wild School’s primitive camp, 12 miles outside of Twisp, WA. Amongst the students’ tasks, they created fire kits with stone tools; gathered and preserved roots, berries, and edible lichen; butchered a bison for food and tools; tanned hides into buckskin clothing; and created bows and arrows.

Students were gradually introduced to dietary restrictions so that they could transition into a complete wild foods diet. Then, the troop went to the White Cloud Mountains for three weeks of complete immersion with no modern items in tow.

“I loved my crew,” said Lynx about the filmers. “We only had two of them and they’re very professional—and they’re Frenchmen, which I have a penchant for, so that helped. One was a producer for the March of the Penguins. You get used to them being there, and if you get sick of it you go hunting for two days and they [can’t] follow you.”

Valli proposed the film project in 2010 after spending the summer photographing Lynx’s 2010 Sawtooth Ridge project in Washington for his book Rencontres hors du temps, which documents individuals that have chosen to leave the urban environments and hyper-consumption in order to live closer to nature and instill a more basic means of living.

“I agreed to have him join us, but said, ‘you can’t bring anything modern with you except for your camera. You have to live with us and like us,’” Lynx said about the initial photo project. “So, he had no extra frills—just a camera body and two lenses, and we became friends that summer and talked about the possibility of a film. Eight months later he called and said we have a backer.”

The turnaround for the filming opportunity was tight: Within six weeks Lynx found a group of students and property where they could live. One of the paradoxical challenges with Lynx’s teachings is to make sure no public policies are broken, such as various permits that are required for Forest Service land. She learned the hard way when a government member took one of her classes incognito and charged her for cutting down a freestanding dead tree, versus a fallen dead tree—she had to pay a fine, fulfill community service hours, and was banned from Eastern Washington’s national forests for one year.

Next Up: An entire Year in the Wild

Lynx’s ultimate goal is to spend an entire year living in the wild with a group by the time she turns 50 years old—and her middle-fork birthday is right around the corner.  

“It’s my dream to spend a whole year in the wild before I turn 50, and I turn 50 next year, so I’ll head out in September,” Lynx announced, and then explained that the nuts and bolts are still being laid into place. Ideally, the community will be a mixed-age group of individuals that have had previous experience living in the wild.

“I often have children and their parents in my classes, and it would be awesome to have elders, and a pregnant couple so that then can have a stone-age baby,” Lynx told the crowd. “I usually leave it up to universal spirit to provide the right people at the right time.”

Natural vs. Radical

Where did it all begin? After experiencing a sweat lodge ceremony in 1989, Lynx realized that she wanted to help reconnect humans with the earth—though many previous moments lay the roots for that epiphany

Born and raised in London, Lynx spent the summers throughout her youth with her grandparents in Sweden picking berries and mushrooms. At 16 years old, she moved to Amsterdam and spent several wild years experimenting with the rock-and-roll scene. Amongst her societal frustration, that environment never brought her inner-peace. Nature, on the other hand, filled her up.

“When I was a teenager and I was doing some activism I was angry and frustrated and it made me ineffectual, so I choose to surround myself with a more idealism and hope for the world,” Lynx shared at the Mountainfilm Coffee and Conversation session on “Wilderness and Radicalism.” Then she added, comically yet candidly:

“I looked up radical this morning—I didn’t even know what it meant. Am I a radical? Is it radical to want to live off of the land? And to eat what grows and comes from the land? I don’t think I’m a radical.”

Visit www.lynxvilden.com to check out the classes, immersion programs, and internships offered by the Living Wild School. The four-seasons project is currently looking for students to join.

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