Leon Pantenburg

As a newspaperman and journalist for three decades, covering search and rescue, sheriff’s departments, floods, forest fires and other natural disasters and outdoor emergencies, Leon learned many people died unnecessarily or escaped miraculously from outdoor emergency situations when simple, common sense might have changed the outcome.

Leon now teaches common sense techniques to the average person in order to avert potential disasters. His emphasis is on tried and tested, simple techniques of wilderness survival. Every technique, piece of equipment or skill recommended on this website has been thoroughly tested and researched.

After graduating from Iowa State University, Leon completed a six-month, 2,552-mile solo Mississippi River canoe trip from the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minn., to the Gulf of Mexico.

His wilderness backpacking experience includes extended solos through Yellowstone’s backcountry; hiking the John

A much younger Leon at a silver mine in the Beartooths.

Muir Trail in California, and numerous shorter trips along the Pacific Crest Trail. Other mountain backpacking trips include hikes through the Uintas in Utah; the Beartooths in Montana;  the Sawtooths in Idaho; the Pryors, the Wind River Range, Tetons and Bighorns in Wyoming; Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, the Catskills in New York and  Death Valley National Monument in southern California.

Some of Leon’s canoe trips include sojourns through the Okefenokee Swamp and National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia, the Big Black River swamp in Mississippi and the Boundary Waters canoe area in northern Minnesota and numerous small river trips in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. Leon is also an avid fisherman and an elk, deer, upland game and waterfowl hunter.

Leon and hiking partner John Nerness pitched their tarp in this Death Valley "forest" during Christmas of 1977.

Since 1991, Leon has been an assistant scoutmaster with Boy Scout Troop 18 in Bend, and is the scoutmaster wilderness skills  coordinator/trainer for the Boy Scouts’ Fremont  District.

Leon earned a second degree black belt in Taekwondo, and competed in his last tournament (sparring and form) at age 49. He is an enthusiastic Bluegrass mandolin picker and fiddler, two-time finalist in the International Dutch Oven Society’s World Championships, and a freelance writer/photographer for the Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Or.

One way to tell about a person is by looking at what they read! Here are some of Leon’s Favorite Books, in no particular order of importance.

Contact Leon at: survivalsenselp@gmail.com

A more recent snapshot along the Deschutes River running through Bend, Oregon