GB2 Instructor team
Joshua Enyart
Operations and Lead Instructor
Joshua Enyart is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret turned Wilderness Skills Instructor. He teaches Wilderness Skills, Bushcraft, Preparedness, Wilderness Medical, and Tactical Skills across the United States to civilians, military, and law enforcement.
Joshua Enyart is the Founder and Lead Instructor for the Gray Bearded Green Beret LLC and Gray Beard Media. He is also the author of Surviving the Wild, his debut book that focuses on foundational Wilderness Skills. He is featured in several films including Into the Woods, Wilderness Medical, Into the Ozarks, Green Berets No Nonsense Bug Out, and Into the Winter.
He has completed several military schools including Ranger, SERE Level-C (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape), Special Forces Qualification Course (Weapons), Special Forces Sniper Course, and trained as a Combat Hunter (Tracker).
Joshua completed a total of 12 Combat Tours in Iraq and in Afghanistan (as both Active Duty and as a Private Contractor) where he was awarded several medals including the Bronze Star. He has also been to the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama (Central America) three times.
Joshua is a seasoned instructor that has completed both the Army Instructor Training Course and the Air Force Basic Instructor Course. He served as a senior Pre-Ranger Instructor for the 101st Airborne Division, Weapons and Tactics Instructor for the Air Force Special Operations Command, and a Sniper Trainer and Ground Warfare Instructor for the Marine Special Operations Command.
David Wescott
Special Guest Instructor
David Wescott is an outdoor educator who uses skill sets based in primitive technology, survival, and traditional camping as well as a variety of contemporary activities. He has been active in these fields through their teaching and application for over 5 decades.
Although recently retiring from the academic field, David was employed as a department chairman, outdoor program coordinator, and leader of 3-5 week field-based skills classes at 3 different universities. Living and teaching mainly in Idaho, he was required to register as an Idaho Guide. Tiring of the paper chase – keeping up with expiring certifications – he dropped out of the high-tech approach to outdoor living for a while and plunged full-time into primitive skills by becoming the owner of Boulder Outdoor Survival School. In an effort to assemble the best teachers and practitioners in the field, in 1988 he resurrected the Rabbit Stick Rendezvous, originally created by his long-time mentor Larry Olsen. At the time, BOSS became a highly respected outdoor school, and Rabbitstick continues, after 34 years, to provide a model for over three-dozen other events located around the world.
In 1989, Dave was fortunate to have been involved as a founding board member of the Society of Primitive Technology. In 1991, the Bulletin of Primitive Technology, the organizations member journal began publication. After sharing the editorial job for the first 2 issues, he became the full-time editor of this small specialty journal that published for 25 years. Two bulletin compilations resulted, with David editing Primitive Technology I and II – A Book of Earth Skills (1999) and Ancestral Skills (2001). He also edited his friend Steve Watts’ book, Practicing Primitive in 2004.
Risking the slings and arrows of their critics for always finding a way to make a living from teaching “old stuff”, Dave and Steve partnered in an effort to preserve the skills that came from the days of the American frontier, originally called Woodcraft. These skills, along with primitive and contemporary survival skills, are the roots of the modern Bushcraft movement. Camping In The Old Style (2000) was a first attempt to define the field of classic/traditional camping and was updated and expanded with a new edition in 2015.
His work has taken him far above the arctic circle and south to the desert beaches along the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, bringing him in contact with the amazing people who live and teach the skills he loves. Through his association with BOSS and the SPT, he has been able to rub shoulders with the best and brightest in his field. Although not actively teaching, Dave currently writes, speaks, teaches the occasional contract course and pursues an endless list of projects that have piled up over the years.
Dave Holladay
Special Guest Instructor
Widely regarded as one of the country’s foremost educators in Stone Age living skills, David is a frequent lecturer, author, and consultant on primitive technologies, edible/medicinal plants, and pre-Columbian culture. He served for 18 years as head instructor at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School and was education director of Anasazi, a wilderness program for teens. David has served as a consultant for products such as Cast Away, Survivorman, Man vs. Wild, Road Rules, and numerous others, and was most recently featured on No Man’s Land, a History Channel production.
David has worked (and continues to with some organizations) with many of the wilderness survival programs in the country, including Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS), Rabbit Stick and Winter Count (bi-annual primitive skills training events), Reevis Mountain, California Survival School, Pollen Circles, and Preppercon. He teaches on Native paints, ground stone tools, water procurement, desert navigation, stone age options vs. modern, desert food collection and preparation, shelter-building, fire-making and so much more.
David is famous for his delicate arrowheads, beautiful stone pendants and bears and more recently paintings. David lovingly and mindfully works his craft and you know that whatever you might possess that David has created is imbued with his deeply spiritual love and respect for nature.
David has been guiding people into the wilderness for decades, teaching them how to live and even thrive in the only seemingly desolate land of the SouthWest. He has worked with many struggling teens and their families with the Anasazi Foundation, and Aspen Achievement Academy, led the foundational Passages To Recovery group (an adult wilderness recovery program), was a senior instructor with BOSS for many many years, and leads groups into Mexico’s very rural Copper Canyon to experience the Tarahumara, a very reclusive culture.
Jason Smith
Lead Primitive Skills Instructor
Jason is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret. He served alongside Joshua Enyart in the Ranger Regiment, and they were on the same ODA in Special Forces where Jason served as the Senior Special Forces Medical Sergeant. Jason retired from Active Duty after 21 years of service.
He is currently still serving, but in the civilian capacity, as a Survival Instructor at the Special Forces Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape Course (SERE Level C) located in North Carolina. Jason teaches all aspects of survival and bushcraft from modern to primitive, but certainly specializes in and excels at primitive skills. Jason is also an accomplished blacksmith. He owns HoboForge, where he specializes in repurposing steel and giving it new life as a highly customized knife for his clients.
He is an avid outdoorsman and hunter, typically hunting with primitive weapons and tools that he made with his own hands. His skills were showcased recently as a participant on the first season of Alone: The Beast on the History Channel, where he was dropped into the wilderness with two other team members. They had to survive with nothing but the clothing on their backs and one large animal that needed to be processed, cooked, and preserved with tools made only from the landscape.
Kirsten Rechnitz
Lead Desert Skills Instructor
Kirsten Rechnitz holds B.A. degrees from Vanderbilt University in Political Science and Cognitive Anthropology, and has been studying wilderness living and outdoor survival for the last decade. Her expertise lies in the arid Southwest, where the environment can change substantially within a day’s trek; from high desert terrain and imposing slick-rock canyons to mountainous ridge tops with bounteous ponderosa pines, and the speckling of precious lakes, creeks and springs.
Kirsten worked as a Senior Instructor for the Boulder Outdoor Survival School where she instructed 7-, 14-, and 28-day survival expeditions. She draws her inspiration from the beauty of the elements and their powerful ways. In addition, she was a founding member of the Flint & Steel Critical Skills Group collaborative project alongside Joshua Enyart (Gray Bearded Green Beret).
Kirsten has showcased her immense level of skill in a DVD Series entitled Survival HD which is available on the GB2 website and is highly recommended. Some excerpts from that film have been featured on the GB2 YouTube Channel.
Angelika Underwood
Lead Wilderness Medical Instructor
Angelika has been an Emergency Medicine Physician Assistant in a rural ER in upstate NY for 15 years.
She has earned a Certificate of Added Quality in Emergency Medicine. She has been a member of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) over 10 years and just completed her Fellowship in the Academy of Wilderness Medicine (FAWM) through the WMS.
She also just completed a Masters in Disaster Medicine through the EMDM in Novara, Italy. She is a National registered EMT-B. She has a background as a part time paid and volunteer firefighter in PA and was a member of the technical rescue team. She was also a non- suppression fire instructor teaching rope rescue. She worked as an EMT in PA.
She was a staff member for The Extreme Team, a wilderness therapy with drug and alcohol addicted youth. In her free time, she has a hobby farm, has hiked three 14ers in Colorado, loves to travel internationally, spend time with her 2 boys, and is passionate about the outdoors.
Bartle
Instructor
Bartle is an extremely well-seasoned and weathered Wilderness Athlete that continually studies foot travel across various landscapes. She routinely sets out for walks and runs across the West and Southwest regions of the United States that last from 3-6 months at a time.
Her trips include walking from Southern Arizona into Wyoming along a 2,000 mile route that she planned herself; an 80-day survival trip in Southern Utah where she lived in a primitive shelter (wikiup) that she built and running a 40-trap primitive trapline through the winter months; spent 24 days walking in Hells Canyon, Oregon eating only wild foods; and has completed several adventure runs traveling across various mountains ranges. Over the past few years, she has successfully walked thousands upon thousands of miles in the wilderness.
She is a modern dancer that carries grace with her strength while relating with nature. Whether she is running a 30 mile day, going out with only a wool blanket and a knife, or building a rock wall for a wind barrier, she is always in her body making sure to activate whatever connections need to be made to get the job done.
Bartle holds a deep relationship with various hand crafts: hide tanning, basketry, wet-felting, spinning and knitting, leather craft and clothing making to name a few. She studied hide tanning with Red Louvish, spent a 6-month period learning tanning and buckskin sewing from Katie Russell, and was mentored through the art of weaving baskets by Margaret Mathewson.
She works seasonally as a skinner and meat cutter at a local game processor. This allows her to collect all the hides, bones, scrap meat, and fat that is discarded from the shop to put away for her years worth of materials. She has always been an advocate of scavenging what is often thrown away to breathe life back into it. She has led dozens of ethical animal slaughters guiding her students safely through the animal kill and teaching them how to use every part including the blood, internal organs, cleaned intestines, skin, fur, and meat.
Joel Graves
Instructor
Joel Graves brings an extremely extensive military and tactical background. Completing 355 missions as Naval Special Warfare EOD on Seal Team 2 & 4, which is arguably one of the most elite and highly trained bomb squads in the world. He has served tours in Iraq, Bahrain and Afghanistan, personally disarmed improvised explosive devices with minimal tools in some of the most austere environments in the world. He has provided secret service protection in multiple countries for President Bush, President Obama and VP Biden. Today, Joel leverages his tactical and combat experience to prepare civilians, military personnel and organizations for international and domestic threats. Training and consulting opportunities with Joel include: international traveler, SERE, active shooter preparedness, self defense and organizational security.
Joel’s bushcraft and survival skill set is as equally impressive. Following his retirement from special operations, Joel spent six months in a long-term survival program where he slept in the field for 5 months, living off the land and honing his craft.. Since a very young age, Joel has been hunting and fishing all over the country. He currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida and spends much of his time fishing on the coastal waters, gator hunting, building bows, and keeping his self reliance skills sharp. He also put up fierce competition in Discovery Channel’s Bushcraft Build-off and truly has a great love for teaching people of all ages the skills they need to survive.
Kelly "Kayenta" Magleby
Instructor
Kelly is a highly skilled practitioner of primitive and desert skills with a heavy focus and specialization in primitive pottery. She has been practicing and teaching primitive pottery for 11 years with a focus on the ancient southwest styles. Kelly uses harvested wild clay, organic plant based or mineral paints and pit fires with wood in an Anasazi style trench kiln.
Her inspiration comes from the landscape that the materials come from and continue to be part of… as well as the ancient people that were connected to the land and knew it intimately. She believes that when the pots are made with a focus on this connection the vessels become an echo of the landscape as well as a creative expression of the potter who shapes it.
Sharing this knowledge and helping people interact with their environment in a healthy and natural way is one of her main goals. Kelly lives in Orem Utah with her two daughters. She travels and teaches at various earth skills gatherings and private classes in the west. She sells her pottery through her website: Www.anasazipottery.net
Alan Kay
Instructor
Joe Price
International Instructor
Joe is an experienced outdoor instructor, product developer, and has been a full time outdoors professional for over a decade. His passion for the outdoors means he both lives and works in nature. This blend allows him to test, develop, and teach about all aspects of outdoor living.
He works alongside some of the biggest brands in the outdoor industry on various projects and is a published columnist and writer, having regularly published articles for outdoor magazines in the civilian and military spaces.
Joe has been passing on the knowledge that he has gained from his experience as an aspiring student and later, teacher. He haas taught courses to students around the world on subjects ranging from fire craft to navigation and everything in between. He uses this practical knowledge to compliment the aims of I SKOG OCH MARK (“In Forests and Lands”), based in Sweden: to be one of the most all inclusive content creation and education companies in the outdoors.
Ida Olsson
International Instructor
Ida is the founder of I SKOG OCH MARK (“In Forests and Lands”), an outdoor-based education and marketing company based in Sweden. She works full time within the outdoor industry with a focus on promoting all the benefits of a life outdoors. She is a brand builder, content creator, photographer, illustrator, and sales agent for a few of her favorite outdoor brands.
Although based in Sweden, she works internationally and is a published author and magazine photographer. Her work can be found across social media with her personal portfolio @iskogochmark on Intstagram.
Her core values have always been sustainability as well as inspiring people to go out and explore the natural world. She has been working as a photographer and content creator for many multi-national outdoor companies where her work has been used in product catalogs, websites, social media channels, vehicle fleets, and promotional materials at fairs and trade shows worldwide.
