ABOUT US
Advanced Survival Training is an educational organization located in Virginia, USA.
We are dedicated to providing outdoor skills, self-reliance, heritage skills and survival training in a friendly, hands-on environment. Our courses take place at our private woodland camp near Hartwood, Virginia - and at Sky Meadows State Park near Deleplane, Virginia. It is our privilege to provide our students with an environment where they can learn some amazing new skills and meet like minded people along the way.
We make it easy and fun to get the skills and experience you’ve always wanted. With nearly 30 years of experience in teaching survival skills, school founder and head instructor Tim MacWelch will help you discover a whole new perspective on the outdoors and your home in it.
OUR Partners
Sky Meadows State Park — In 2019, staff from this Virginia State Park asked AST founder Tim MacWelch to provide a series of outdoor skills classes at their park. He did and we’re proud to continue the tradition.
TIGA Tactics — For those interested in martial arts, our friends at TIGA Tactics run classes throughout the country. They are AMAZING! We partnered with them to run a combined martial arts and survival weekend in 2022 and plan to run more collaborations in the future.
Fell & Fair — 2024 will be the third year we have partnered with Fell & Fair/ White Horse Productions to provide historically accurate training at their events. This October, we’ll be teaching an herbal medicine program at Weekend Warrior Experience.
OUR HISTORY
Advanced Survival Training has a humble origin story. Founder and director Tim MacWelch first starting sharing his passion for heritage skills with children in 1995, running his own educational programs for schools, churches and Scouts. In 1997, Tim began running classes for adults under the brand Earth Connection. Since those early days, Tim added the Advanced Survival Training brand, as well as many new classes. Today, Advanced Survival Training is known throughout the industry for providing hands-on training and real world self-reliance techniques.
Who’s Your INSTRUCTOR?
So who’s this Tim MacWelch guy the website keeps mentioning?
Since founding Earth Connection in 1997, Tim has taught outdoor and heritage skills to thousands of kids and adults. He has also been a featured survival expert for National Geographic, CNN, Good Morning America, Conde Nast Traveller, the Washington Post, Men's Journal, FOX 5 DC and several other organizations. Tim has been writing for Outdoor Life magazine since 2010, as well as other publications. He has also written thirteen books on outdoor skills and self-reliance, three of these being New York Times Bestsellers. If you have a survival library, there’s a sporting chance you already have a MacWelch book or two. Go check - we’ll wait…
The guy who wrote your book is the same guy running the school. Small world, huh?
Tim will be your instructor at most classes, but he is pleased to be joined by guest instructors like Paul Disney (for Bushcraft). Our site also hosts classes from other instructors, including Darryl Johnson (for Land Navigation) and Earl Roberts (for 1stAid).
School founder and head instructor - Tim MacWelch
(preparing a soup from wild edible plants during a foraging class)
why we’re Right for you
You’ve got internet. Look up “survival classes” and you’ll see that there are hundreds of organizations throughout the world, offering subjects that sound about the same as ours. We don’t claim to have the only foraging or blacksmithing classes on the planet. That’s silly. What we DO claim to be is different.
How so?
We are devoted to the subject matter and focused on you. At larger schools, you might be lost in the press of a huge class - a hundred or more people - unable to ask your important questions. At a smaller or newer school, the staff might not have the experience to provide the answer for your important questions.
Advanced Survival Training is in the “Goldilocks zone”, which is just right for most of our students. We’re small enough to remember your name, big enough that classes have a great synergy, with instructors old enough to have deep experience in the subject matter, and we provide new content that is keeping up with our student’s changing interests.
But don’t take a website’s word for it, come and see for yourself.
Still not sure?
It’s good to ask questions and it’s true that every person already has the instincts for survival - but it’s also true that when things get tough, your instincts just aren’t enough. You’ll need skills, knowledge and above all – you’ll need experience to back up your instincts.
Whether you are stuck in the wild or caught in a disaster, the only things that are guaranteed to be with you are your skills and experience.
Once you’ve gained the wilderness and disaster survival skills that we have to teach, this survival skill set will always be with you - wherever you go.
Don't you want to own the skills to truly and confidently survive - anywhere - anytime?