Lisa's Portfolio Gallery
“I wanted nothing to do with the heroics of the 'solo expedition'. There was no mountain I wanted to 'conquer', no desert I wanted to be the 'first woman to cross'. I simply wanted to know something of the landscapes I visited, and wanted to do that by listening to what the knowers of those lands could tell me if I asked." Jay Griffiths, 2006
Bushcraft Instructor and survival expert Lisa Fenton has a passion for wilderness and exploration. Her first independent travel experience was an intrepid three-month journey through
the mountains of Northern India and the Himalayas, when she was nineteen. Since then, her wanderlust
and interest in the traditional survival skills of First Nation peoples has led her to spend months in arid desert landscapes; to hang up her hammock in a variety of remote jungles and to journey through winter landscapes and Arctic conditions. Lisa
began her formal bushcraft/survival training in 1998. The following
year she joined Ray Mears company 'Woodlore' as an assistant
instructor, where she and Ben worked for the following four years before going on to co-found Woodsmoke in 2002. Lisa Fenton has been involved with learning, assimilating, transferring and transforming bushcraft skill and knowledge for the past decade. She is an Expedition Leader , Summer Mountain Leader and an ethnobotanist. She has led scientific expeditions to monitor and track wolves, lynx and bear in the winter conditions of the Polish Carpathian Mountains; similarly tracking leopards and cheetah in the Kalahari, Desert of Namibia. She has Co-led and organised an intrepid adventure race deep in the Belizian jungle and winter expeditions in the arctic conditions of Northern Maine and more. In addition Lisa has undertaken many independent journeys to marginal regions. She has delivered lectures on 'bushcraft' to academic and international audiences as well as written articles or contributed expertise to popular magazine publications, such as 'Trail'. Currently combining Woodsmoke with study, Lisa has recently completed an Ethnobotany MSc within the Anthropology department at Canterbury and in conjunction with The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, where she gained a distinction for her final thesis concerning UK Wild Foods. Ethnobotany explores the relationship between people and their use of plants, often relating more specifically to traditional plant use for food, medicine, shelter, ritual and clothing. Lisa has now been awarded a fully funded PhD and will be undertaking her doctoral studies in Ethnobiology, a discipline of Anthropology concerning the scientific study of human interaction with biota and environments from the distant past to the present. Under the supervision of Prof.Roy Ellen, Lisa will be funded over the next three years to conduct scientific field research focused on 'indigenous' traditional knowledge transmissions and transferrals in remote areas of Australia, North America and Arctic Scandinavia. Skilled and capable, Lisa adds enthusiasm, knowledge and experience to the Woodsmoke team.