Donnie Dust and Derek Wolfe
Survival expert Donny Dust was born in Flint, Michigan, and after moving around as a kid, settled in with his family in Highlands Ranch, CO. He joined the Marine Corps and decided to return home to Colorado, where he has raised his two sons.
Donny runs private survivalist classes, adjusting the length of the course and the details of the skills and strategies he teaches based on his guests’ preferences. He offers high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech trips.
More often than not, those who choose to go no-tech quickly realize that a granola bar or non-primitive knife doesn’t fit into that category. Donny teaches folks how to construct their own boots for warmth, primitive tools, including knives, bows, and arrows, and more.
In the podcast video, viewers will see examples of the primitive tools and weapons that Donny crafts with his guests as he shares the products and methods he teaches others.
Donny Dust and the Marine Corps
Donny played defensive end/defensive tackle for one year in college, but was overall unhappy with school. When he was 19, he enlisted as a machine gunner in the Army. Prior to his combat deployments, he attended training in Southeast Asia, after which he was deployed to Iraq. He joined the counterintelligence and human intelligence division as an agent in the Marine Corps, where he learned languages, built his survival expertise, and operated in small teams.
In the human intelligence world, Donny trained to head into a local population and target specific individuals to determine whether they are suitable to meet a specific requirement as an asset.
Jump to Minute 35:00 to hear one story of how Donny fostered a relationship with one high-value asset to save a lot of lives.
Donny shares the dangers and difficulties of fighting in a non-traditional war, and the role that intelligence plays in keeping people safe day by day.
Strength and Stress: Leaving the Bubble of Comfort
When Donny left the Marine Corps, he became a highly sought-after trainer to share his knowledge and assets with soldiers. He quickly realized that he needed to make a change, moving back to Colorado where he launched his own survival training company, Paleo Tracks.
Derek and Donny discuss the role of physical training as an outlet for the need to take action and how specifically training to handle dangerous situations can result in fewer people actually getting hurt.
Derek shares that his focus lately has been on what to do with that energy and the mental battle of anxiety and depression that has come when football was no longer part of his daily grind.
When it comes to relating to your past, both Donny and Derek say the value is in learning from everything you’ve gone through, letting each experience make you stronger, more resilient, and more able to handle stress as an adult.
Hunting as Conservation and the Warrior as Hunter
Derek and Donny both hunt hard. They share that they would rather spend a hundred hours hunting without getting anything than never hunting at all; the grind, the commitment, and the challenge of bagging your own meat is something they can each relate to.
For Donny, primitive hunting provides an even greater challenge. He laughs at the geared-up hunters drinking Hazlenut coffee from Starbucks cups while he creeps up with his primitive bow and clothing.
It’s essential, especially in Colorado, to maintain hunters’ rights and their role in controlling animal populations in a sustainable way.
