YouTube honours city trio for series about bushcraft
Wilderness adventure clips that began on a lark earn Creator on the Rise title
YouTube was only ever meant to be a way for Matt Foreman, Bow Bamonte and Reuben Chapman to document their outdoor adventures, a sort of online diary they could look back on and laugh about how little they knew about bushcraft.
Those videos, however, are now racking up thousands of views, numbers that are only going to continue to increase for the Edmonton residents after the video-sharing website tapped them Wednesday to become Canada’s first Creator on the Rise.
Selected based on a variety of factors including views, time watched and subscriber growth, the new feature will put their videos front and centre to millions of eyeballs for one week. Any YouTube creator with more than 1,000 subscribers is eligible to be featured.
“It’s pretty awesome,” Foreman said. “I never thought anything like that would happen, to be honest. I don’t think any of us did.”
Self-taught from obsessively watching hundreds of hours of fellow bushcraft YouTubers like Survival Lilly and Joe Robinet and inspired by English bushcraft pioneer Ray Mears, the trio have produced close to 60 videos in two years on everything from foraging to fishing to bannock baking, starting fires in the winter snow and how to construct a winter camp for an overnight stay in northern Canada.
In fact, winter plays a pretty central role in their videos.
“There’s something about being out there in -30 C and having to make fire from scratch and staying warm,” Foreman said. “Then, to wake up in the middle of the forest with a white blanket over everything, there’s something really rewarding about it. It’s beautiful out there.”
As interesting as those early videos were, it was when they decided to build and document the construction of an elaborate tree house near Genesee on the North Saskatchewan River, a tiny town about 70 km southwest of Edmonton, they noticed the interest in their channel begin to climb.
Encouraged by an expanding viewer base, the team upped the production quality of each of the videos, which in turn began attracting more viewers smitten with the idea of going into the bush and building their own tree house.
“It resonates with people, it’s kind of a childhood dream of people to just go out into the woods and build a tree house with your buddies,” he said.
“I think that’s why it got so popular.”
It’s pretty awesome. I never thought anything like that would happen, to be honest.