Wilderness Way Magazine

Despite the current fascination with things native, it's surprisingly difficult to find a magazine like Wilderness Way. But for the last nine years, the quarterly has offered blueprints for the kinds of seminal skills our species has mostly forgotten. With our smarter-than-thou technologies, we surely don't need the means to identify lifesaving herbs or native plants that can stave off starvation, right? Hogwash.

Despite the current fascination with things native, it's surprisingly difficult to find a magazine like Wilderness Way. But for the last nine years, the quarterly has offered blueprints for the kinds of seminal skills our species has mostly forgotten. With our smarter-than-thou technologies, we surely don't need the means to identify lifesaving herbs or native plants that can stave off starvation, right? Hogwash.

On an overcast Saturday morning, Christopher Nyerges — the head of Eagle Rock's School of Self-Reliance — gingerly skirts a feral clump of bright green weeds. "Always watch where you're stepping 'cause you might be stepping on our lunch," he says to the 17 students following him. Resembling troops in an outdoorsy New Age army, the group wanders through Pasadena's Hahamongna Watershed Park, scouring the dirt hills, shallow valleys and parched riverbeds of the land for edible plants as part of a wild food outing that Nyerges regularly teaches.