Survival Training School of California

Thomas and his training are «LEGIT»! As an coach for the past two decades, I understand the importance of interesting and challenging course work to motivate. STSC offers excellent instruction and practical information to help all levels excel in the wilderness. Thomas’s character is both entertaining and engaging. Best of all he takes the time to patiently teach with «hands on» attention with all trainees. Kudos to you Thomas!
One note, if you are doing a multi day course, and have dietary concerns, you may want to come prepared with your own options. Although Thomas will tell you that aunts and aunt larvae are an excellent source of protein! LOL

Unforgettable weekend experience that will be with me forever! Thomas is the man to go to if you want in-​depth/​real life situation knowledge in how to survive in the wilderness or any kind of element really. His experience out in the field reassures me that I’m getting the tools and techniques that will be able to help me or others if I am in a bad situation. I’d highly recommend survival training school of california to anyone looking to gain survival knowledge or just wanted to learn something new.

I did the 4 day family survival course with my 10 year old son. Thomas and His assistant, Lisa, were fantastic. Both were great with kids and extremely patient. Thomas was knowledgable and skilled in everything he taught us from building shelters, identifying edible or poisonous plants, first aide, starting fires using the bow and drill method, making traps, to making and atlatl and dart, and much more. The weather was challenging but the class went on. Had a few bear encounters in which Thomas’ tent got destroyed but he didn’t lose a beat. Class went on! Thomas is legit. He had a stone knapper come in and do a class on how to makes spear tips for our darts. It was a great experience to have with my son. Something we won’t forget.
This class isn’t just for outdoor ‘types’ either. Trust me, I wasn’t, but now I feel I am.

Intelligent, knowledgable instructor Thomas made this course a must to for hikers and backpackers alike. Excellent two day course that covered a basic amount of information. Definitely looking back at the other courses. Even in just two days I feel I could manage myself if I ever found myself lost in the wilderness. Thanks for a great weekend!

Just got back from an awsome STSC weekend! Let me say that I am no survival expert but I clearly recognize when someone is truly invested in my success.
Thomas is in it to make sure if I ever find my self up a crap creek without a paddle I will not only be able to fashion a new paddle but I will be able to make shelter, eat, stay warm, care for injuries and be able to get clean drinking water out of said creek!
He not only gave verbal instructions and fashioned examples from whatever he found around us but he also came to sit down on the ground with us and helped to figure out what things were going wrong. He was right in there with me making sure I could execute the skills he had given me!
These are people that want you to succeed because your knowledge is a testament to their ability to teach and to teach well!
Lisa was Thomas’ #2 this weekend. She was very good encouragement as well as an awsome cheerleader!!!
I am impressed and will be going back for more.

Thomas was great. It was a very comprehensive beginner survival course and I would consider signing up for one of the more intense courses in the future.

From basic skills like fire, trap and shelter building to identifying edible plants to strategies for getting rescued, this course is packed with a staggering amount of useful information in a short three-​day format. This course does not pull punches. It makes you live the survival situation and experience the challenges first hand, but provides just enough guidance to help you learn from the experience. You will come out of this course smarter and more able to survive. I can’t say enough about how impressed I was with Thomas as the course instructor. He teaches from experience, not theory, and does so with humor, patience and a deep understanding how to approach a survival situation. I highly recommend this course for anyone who hikes, camps or simply wants to be better prepared to survive in the wilderness.

Won a trip from Regal Entertainment for seeing the movie After Earth. Had a hella good time and saw some awesome sights. Plus Thomas Coyne, the instructor knows his stuff. I could survive a zombie apocalypse now.

I attended the 2 day course with my buddy to see if it would be something I would want my 13 year old to experience. It was a great experience. I learned exactly what they said I would learn — I really did learn and make fire on my own. I left excited to take these new skills and practice them on future «camp outs». I was also thrilled to meet a 15 year old who showed me that with the right interest even our youth would enjoy and benefit from this training.
I would recommend that if you have never experienced being in the «outdoors» you may want to bone up on basic outdoor do’ and don’ts, what to wear, how to prepare for the elements etc. This is like a working dude ranch so be prepared to slow your pace down, be open to learning and enjoy the open night sky… it’s amazing!

I am only giving this school 5 stars because they won’t allow me to give them more.
First let me start with the Wilderness First Aid course — I have taken numerous first aid courses including a 4 day wilderness first aid course in the past. STSC’s Wilderness First Aid was, without question, the most comprehensive course on the subject I have ever taken.
Thomas Coyne not only knows the subject thoroughly, he is able to relay the information and find ways to make the subject matter stick. Classroom work and «hands on» drills in the field along with his desire to make sure the subject is understood makes this class unique. You can really feel his need to make sure his students don’t just earn a «Completion Card» but really understand and are able to execute the proper First Aid in a real world situation. He knows this really could mean the difference between Life and Death for someone.
Now on to the Survival Skills. Once again, Thomas knows these skills could actually mean the difference between Life and Death for someone. He is quite passionate about wilderness skills and the proper teaching of the subject matter. The skills he teaches are based upon real world experience — His experience! This is not someone that has gotten his knowledge from a book, T.V. or Youtube, his knowledge comes from experience — from actually using the skills he teaches, which puts him in a very small minority of survival skills instructors.
Make no mistake, you will work hard, you will sweat, get dirty, fatigued, cold and tired. What you will not get, is a false sense of security about wilderness survival. You will learn about some of the most common mistakes in the survival books, not because he tells you so but because he explains and demonstrates why and then lets you experience for yourself the proper approach.
If you really want to learn wilderness survival skills from someone that has the knowledge, experience and has «walked the walk», you owe it to yourself to attend an STSC course.

Thomas is amazing!!! I stopped by the Tehachapi location to profile the place for my show «Open Source» and both me and my cameraman are dying to sign up for his 7 day course. I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my life (A LOT), and this guy is legit.

Just finished the 7 Day Cross-​Climate. I dont have a spirit animal, I dont have beads in my hair, AND THATS OK! This is the best practical survival school I have found. Practical training, with application, in a safe a comfortable training area (the village). Loved the day hikes, and the skills training. Thomas and his team knows what they are doing. Best in the business. I am already planning my next trip out to do more advanced training as soon as I can.

I just completed STSC’s three-​day «Critical Skills Course»… and am really glad that I did. The founder of the company, Thomas Coyne, is an absolute badass who puts TV «survival experts» like Bear Grylls to shame.
During the first two days of training, Thomas taught us to make fire with sticks (this is intense, get ready to work), purify water with a Gatorade bottle, make traps from stone and sticks, and build shelter with only cord and found materials. On third day, we traveled to a local river and learned to identify helpful plants (whats edible, what can be used as medicine, etc) and once again practiced making fire, this time using only the materials that we picked ourselves.
Thomas is extremely knowledgeable, hands-​on, and really encouraging. No matter what your skill level is, you will leave this class with knowledge that could save your life… I’m already looking forward to my next class with STSC!

My wife and I have both taken up backpacking as a new hobby, and we decided that learning survival skills was absolutely necessary. We both participated in the «single day introduction to critical survival skills,» and we were both very pleased.
I was very impressed with Tom’s extensive knowledge in survival, and I thoroughly enjoyed the class. All students present were included in personal hands-​on instruction with critical skills; such as building a shelter, purifying water, signaling techniques, and starting a fire with friction. Tom is very patient and has a great sense of humor. It is very evident that he is passionate about teaching survival skills. I struggled with the bow-​drill fire technique, and Tom stayed after class to instruct me further. I did not feel rushed, and Tom seemed genuinely interested in my learning. I intend on taking more classes with Tom, and I highly recommend Survival Training School of California. Tom also had an assistant instructor (Alex) that was very knowledgeable and helpful. Thanks Tom and Alex for your patience and for your eagerness to share your survival skills.

I took the 2-​day field course with Tom and Alex two weeks ago. I’ve been to three other wilderness courses taught by other instructors across California, and this is by far the most in depth, realistic, and highly educating survival experience of all of them. This course is not for everyone — it’s not for people who want the softened or glamorized version of wilderness survival.
Tom is a wildland firefighter and has a slew of other *actual* credentials. All my previous instructors did «stuff» in the wilderness. It might sound like exaggeration, but seriously, take a look at most wilderness schools’ About Us sections and you’ll see that the common description is «the instructor is an avid outdoors enthusiast who camps a lot and has been instructing for 10 years and grew up on a farm». Yes there is experience in that, but there’s a false sense of security in taking comfort in these credentials.
Why that matters is that in the other schools, I learned techniques that I’ve since realized would get me killed by resulting in hypothermia. Really not cool, especially when I paid to learn false skills and planted flawed techniques in my head. Sort of negligent.
Please research the instructor of wilderness survival courses before you take a course… it should dictate most of what you need to know in deciding which school to pick.
As far as my actual experience on the course, it was fantastic. We carried nothing but a water bottle, a knife, a flashlight, and the clothes on our backs into the wilderness, and emerged 36 hours later worse for the wear but armed with techniques that would save us in real survival situations.
In most other wilderness courses I’ve been part of, everyone meets at a car camp, all the materials are pre-​gathered for you or a stone’s throw away, and you end up with this artificial sense that wilderness survival is rather convenient. High fives at the end. It frustrates me to pay good money for a wilderness course, and then learn how to do something — but not ACTUALLY do it. It drives me nuts because it just ends up being a load of useless knowledge until you can actually do it with your two hands and see that it works. And every wilderness course I have taken generally ends this way. Theory and only enough application to make you feel like a boss (throw some wood and leaves together to make a hut, take their preforaged sticks and make a fire).
This was the first school I’ve taken where I didn’t feel this way. In this course, we foraged our own material and made shelter, fire, cordage, deadfall traps, emergency signals, we ate edible plants, and we located purified and drank water. We learned to (however we did not actually) trap animals and hunt. We did not learn to identify edible plants, knap. All in all, we learned and did a heck of a lot for 36 hours. My brain was full by the end, and my body was saturated by the experience. Money well spent and more for both the knowledge gained and the experience had. Was it perfect? No. But it was leagues above any other course I’ve taken. Leagues.
Tom is an eloquent instructor, can explain both at an abstract level and in detail exactly what it is you should do in different aspects of survival: shelter, fire, water, food, and so on. The answers he gave correlated with answers other instructors have given me, but he also challenged some of the knowledge I had when it differed from his, and it’s in these moments I realized that this guy is the real deal. One example is that I’ve been taught by two of my previous instructors that the proper way to build an emergency shelter is to, in so many words, dump a crap ton of leaves and debris on top of a tent made out of branches and you’ll be good to go. Tom’s method is different. I challenged him on this, and Tom explained that the kind of shelter we were learning works in 40mph winds at freezing temperatures… he knows and can prove it, because that’s what actually happens in the winter months during the very course I was taking with him.
Have my previous instructors ever tried doing the same? I thought back to their explanations — Hm… no. They never had strong justifications aside from «this is how it’s done.» There was no «I hiked 100 miles with a pocket knife and no food and water through the Mojave desert and yeah, this is how I really did it.»
Got me thinking about how different it is to learn from someone who has an actual resume of things they can point to versus a wilderness enthusiast that can claim familiarity. Kind of scary.

We took the 2 day «Survival Skills Course» and learned way more than we thought we would! My husband and I have recently gotten into hiking and are working our way up towards backpacking so we figured that this class could teach us some useful skills (just in case anything ever went wrong). The instructors were wonderful, very hands on and very knowledgeable. This wasn’t just classroom learning, there were many opportunities to practice all of the skills yourself and they made you try until you succeeded (and everyone in our class succeeded!) Everything they teach has been tested (by them) in the field, so they are not just spewing out random facts that they learned on the internet. We learned so much, we will definitely be going back!

Thank you for the great time & experience, Survival Training School of CA! Thomas is an awesome instructor & leader. I’m emailing all my friends now to sign up for some classes — any of ‘em!

I just finished an entire month training with Thomas… here’s a portion of what I now feel very competent with after Thomas’ instruction:
1. Understanding my situational awareness/​Avoiding disaster synergy and Making a Plan
2. Camp/​gear safety & Gear Selection
3. Realistic fire-​starting and building techniques (NO ice-​magnifying glass or bags of urine refracting sunlight)
4. Shelter building – Lean-​to, A-​Frame with Pine needles, brush, tarps
5. Identifying Wild edible plants found easily all over the globe and their uses. (Edible, Medicinal, &/​or Utility
6. Signaling – Multiple ways to let rescue teams actually FIND you.
7. Orienteering with topographic map and compass
8. First Aid in the field with both items you (may have) brought and those you find around you.
9. River Crossing and Emergency River Techniques
10. Locating water and its contaminants – as well as how to purify it; Understanding why techniques work (or don’t), Clothing options and regulating heat, survival when caught in a wildfire… the list is too long for me to finish.

I was skeptical the first couple of hours being there but as the weekend progress it grew on me. Tom and Alex are patient instructors who guided me through the process of making fire, setting traps, setting up shelter etc. They were definitely survival specialist and knew their craft. I left Tehachapi feeling a lot more confident and in touch with mother nature. Thanks Tom and Alex you guys are amazing!

In a few months it will have been a YEAR since my bad encounter with this school, and it pains me that the poor quality merchandise issue has not been resolved. Thomas Coyne continues to send me regular hate mail although he forbids me to email him back. His behavior reminds me of my five year old nephew. It’s so ironic that «Red Leader» agreed with me about their poor quality and yet wrote a good review? I wonder how much they paid her? If anyone would like to see the comment she sent me, send me an email and I’d be glad to show you what she REALLY said behind the scene.
It would be more logical for Thomas Coyne to address the problem rather than continuing to drag this out. I’M not the reason his school is so bad. He did that to himself, so he should’t blame me.