About the Founder & Head Instructor
Thank you for checking out the Earthen Rangers Guild. My name is Ryan Taylor and I've spent my life studying, teaching, & exploring nature. All of the skills taught at Earthen Rangers, from survival, botany, to wildlife tracking, are taught with conservation & restoration as a central philosophy. We must be a part of nature if we are going to protect it.
My passion for the outdoors began as a small child, when my father introduced me to what would be a life-long passion, for fishing. At the age of twelve, I started spending summers with my grandfather, in Oregon. My grandfather spent many years learning from the Native American Nez Perce and was adopted into the Nez Perce Tribe, by Chief Horace Axtell. These sacred summers would introduce me to a world of sustainable-living off the land, deeply connecting with nature, and a powerful introduction to the ancient ways.
After graduating high school, I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to the study and preservation of nature. With survival-books, identification-guides, and time-in-nature, I began my journey. I quickly discovered amazing primitive-survival-schools, based on Native American knowledge, with conservation & restoration, at their core. I spent the next several years studying at several of these powerful schools. When my son, Arius, was born I decided to expand my knowledge with an environmental science degree from De Anza College's Kirsch Center for Environmental Studies. While attending college, I began teaching wildlife tracking courses for De Anza College's environmental department & quickly fell in love with merging & teaching environmental science with ancient survival-skills & an ancient nature-knowledge.
Throughout all my nature-adventures in life, teaching has always been my greatest passion. While teaching at De Anza College, I began teaching through my personal survival & nature-education school, Earthen Rangers. Since then, I have been lucky enough to teach at many wonderful places like McClellan Ranch Preserve, the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy, kid's summer camps at the California Native Garden Foundation, Grassroots Ecology, the Young Naturalists Program, and for the past seven years, as a Park Ranger for the City of Cupertino.
Teaching these sacred-skills & nature-education, over the past twelve years, has taught me the immense empowerment & health that nature-connection brings to the individual & the planet. Not only does nature-connection build self-confidence, self-reliance, & awareness, but it also builds stewards of the Earth... it builds Earthen Rangers!