42

I’ve interviewed a few different survival experts overthe last few years and I can understand why someonewho has never personally met a survival expert beforewould assume that they’re pretty much all the same, butI can tell you from my personal experiences that nothingcould be further from the truth. Although they might allagree with each other regarding what the basic survivalprinciples are and on other survival related theories,they’re all different & unique in their own way andCreek Stewart is no exception.

In my opinion, Creek is a legitimate survival expert.He’s the owner and main instructor for the WillowHaven Outdoor School, and is the host of The WeatherChannel’s popular survival themed show “Fat Guys InThe Woods”. But his resume isn’t quite done; he’s alsowritten several books, owns two survival-oriented busi-nesses, and has worked with different corporations andthe U.S. government on survival and disaster prepared-ness. Even with all of those accomplishments, Creekdoesn’t consider himself a survival expert “That term ingeneral makes me very uncomfortable because I learnsurvival skills and tips from my students every time Iteach a course. One of the most important things thatanyone should be looking for when pursuing a survivalinstructor is to look for a teacher who is also a student.

I’ll forever be a student of survival and will never pre-tend to know everything there is about survival”.

Creek’s humble approach to life is hard not to noticeonce you’re around him. A couple of months ago, I trav-eled to Indiana to interview him and to take a look at hisschool, which was ranked by MSN Travel as one of thetop ten survival schools in the world.

Willow Haven Outdoor School is in Anderson, Indi-ana, which is about an hour north of Indianapolis. It sitson twenty-one acres filled with meadows, ravines, forest,and lowland swamps. It’s the type of terrain that pro-vides a great setting for a survival school.

Early in his childhood he was nicknamed Creek byhis grandfather because he was always playing in thecreek that was located behind his grandfather’s house.The name ended up sticking, and I have to say it’s an ex-cellent name for someone who chose an outdoor relatedcareer.

Creek is currently shooting the second season of histelevision show in various spots around the country. Assoon as he is finished with the filming in March, he’ll beright back in Anderson preparing for the opening of hisschool, which operates April until October. If you signup for a class at Willow Haven, you will get Creek asyour instructor because he teaches every class. Occa-

Photo provided by The Weather Channel

43

sionally, he does bring in a special guest to teach a spe-cific skill such as fire starting or shelter building.

After making the trip from my home in New Mexicoto Indianapolis, it was just a short drive to Anderson.After becoming briefly lost, I finally arrived at WillowHaven on a very bitter & cold December day. Ideally, Iwould have much preferred to see this impressive pieceof property on a warm & sunny summer day, but beggarscan’t be choosers, right? As I drove through the school’sentrance toward the massive 10,000 square foot lodge, Itook a glance at the surroundings and it was obvious thatthe land was in dormant mode and hunkered down forthe winter. Creek quickly came out of the lodge to greetme. One of the first things he said to me was “Man, thisplace looks a lot different in the summer”. I tried to vi-sualize green grass and everything in bloom, but I wasunsuccessful at tricking my mind and body into thinkingit was spring or summer so we decided to head inside thelodge. It’s sitting empty for the winter waiting for whenit will be filled with all types of enthusiastic and eagerpeople attending classes that are held all over the prop-erty.

At the front of the lodge is the storefront for Creek’ssurvival store called the Not If But When Survival Store,which is open during the school’s season for studentsonly. It is however, open for business online at notifbut-whensurvivalstore.com selling all kinds of survival gear,gadgets, etc. Being the owner of a business (BackwoodsMercantile) that also sells survival merchandise, I could-n’t help myself from checking out all of his products. Itwas easy to tell that Creek was a fan of all types of sur-vival gear and products. “I love all types of survivaltools, knives, and gadgets so I decided to open an on-linestore with some of the products that I like” Creek said.He developed a motto early in his career that he repeats

often on his show and ends his messages with “Remem-ber, it’s not If but When”. It’s a very attention-gettingstatement that truthfully represents the importance foreveryone to learn survival skills. It also makes for a greatname for a survival themed store. Creek’s mom & dadrun the store and he begins to tell me how much he en-joys working with his parents, “They’re retired and verymuch involved with my business. I wouldn’t’ be heretoday if it wasn’t for them for a variety of reasons. It’sanother way to spend time with them and I love my par-ents very much. It’s a good time”.

The enormous Willow Haven Lodge is equippedwith a dining hall, a lounge area, and several rooms thatcontain cots. A camp attendee can either choose to campoutside or stay inside one of the rooms. You could tellthat this building had been here for a while, and it turnsout that the previous owners was General Motors. It wasused as an executive retreat and was abandoned severalyears ago once General Motors began decreasing factoryproduction.

Creek found the property after a long, exhaustingsearch of the entire state of Indiana for a place for hisschool. It was a foreclosed property and Creek knewright away that he had a major restoration project on hishands, “When I first bought this place, the building wasdilapidated and squatters had been living here. It lookedlike a total battle zone. Wild animals would frequentlyroam inside the building and the land had not been caredfor in quite awhile. I put a ton of work into this placebut it all paid off in the end and buying this property wasdefinitely a game changer for me,” says Creek. We thensat down close to the huge fireplace that had a nice, rag-ing fire going and began to discuss how he has gotten tothis point in his life.

Creek’s Not If But When Survival Store.Photo by Creek Stewart

The dining hall at Willow Haven Outdoor School.Photo by Creek Stewart

Creek grew up in Milan, Indiana, a very small, ruraltown located in the Southeastern part of the state. Thetown is famous for winning the 1954 boys basketballstate championship against the much larger Muncie Cen-tral High. At that time, they were the smallest town everin the U.S. to win a state championship and the 1986classic movie “Hoosiers” was based on the story of thatteam. It was a fitting storyline and place for him to growup considering that he has never given up on his dreamsdespite being told that his odds of making it were veryslim. After deciding against a career as a Pharmacist, hehas been able to carve out a very successful career in theself- reliance and survival industry. An accomplishmentthat is not easy at all.

Growing up on a farm and spending most of his child-hood outside and in thewoods fueled his passionfor the outdoors, but it washis time spent with the BoyScouts that really sparkedhis interest in learning self-reliant skills. At the age offourteen, Creek achievedthe highest ranking that isattainable in the Boy Scout-ing program by becomingan Eagle Scout. The BoyScout’s motto is “Be Pre-pared”, and this sayingwould hold true for Creekmore ways than one. Hisexperiences in the scoutswere just the beginning of what was to come for him inthe future.

It was while attending college and studying to be apharmacist at Butler University that Creek realized whathe wanted to do with his life. He decided to switch gearsand pursue his dream of teaching survival skills, and it’snot like there’s a manual on how to achieve that. Creekspent a good part of his sophomore year of college writ-ing his first survival manual, a ninety page self-publishedbook that was photocopied at Kinkos. The book wasabout building shelters, survival fishing, tracking, hunt-ing, etc.

Looking back now, Creek does admit that at the timehe probably wasn’t qualified to write a survival book, “Iguess it was me being sort of naïve. Hindsight is 20/20and when I look back at some of the stuff that I wasdoing early in my career, I realized how little I knew.There is only one way to really pick up knowledge in thesurvival industry and that is to go out and do it. I com-pare learning survival skills to playing a musical instru-

ment. You can read all the books, watch all the videos,learn from the best instructors, but until you pick up thatinstrument and start playing, you’ll never learn how toplay that instrument. It’s the same way with learning sur-vival skills and I learned that lesson early in my career”.

He was now an official author of a survival book, butthe next challenge was to sell them. It doesn’t appearthat Creek created a formula for how his career wasgoing to take shape, he knew deep inside that he wantedto work with people and teach survival skills. Maybe itwas a hunch that he had in his mind that writing a sur-vival book would build momentum toward teaching sur-vival skills and ultimately owning and operating his ownsurvival school. But first he had a huge pile of books tosell so he decided to invest a few hundred dollars in an

ad in the back of Boy’s LifeMagazine, a magazine forthe Boy Scouts. He onlycharged $1.00 for postage& handling and even gaveaway a free compass withevery order. Creek cameup with a marketing strat-egy; he offered a free sur-vival booklet that wasdesigned as a teaser toorder his book for $15.00.The orders didn’t come in,so it was time for anotherplan that also involved theBoy Scouts. He called oneof the local troops and of-

fered his services for free by giving survival demonstra-tions and at the end of them he would sell his books.Creek ended up traveling from troop to troop selling hisbook and performing survival demonstrations with somesuccess, but wasn’t fond of all the traveling that he hadto do in order to sell his books. He wanted the customersto come to him and out of this wish came the birth of hissurvival-teaching career.

The decision was made by Creek to host a survivalcourse for free with the intention of selling his books.He approached his parents about allowing him to teachhis first class on their farm in the woods behind theirhouse. With his parents still in a state of confusion overhis decision to not be a Pharmacy major, this would takesome major convincing from Creek. He eventuallywould persuade them to say yes and at the young age oftwenty-one years old, Creek’s dream of teaching survivalskills was about to become a reality. Around fifteen peo-ple showed up for his first course that day and a lot ofthem ended up buying a book. He learned some very

44

Creek in full camouflage.Photo by Creek Stewart

45

important lessons that first day. Creek realized that heneeded to spend hours and hours outside practicing andperfecting these skills in order to teach these skills. Healso discovered that he really enjoyed doing this.

It was obvious to Creek that he had found his truecalling in life, but it also was the beginning of manyyears of struggling to make ends meet working variouspart-time jobs. He understood that you have to makesacrifices in order to reach your dreams, and that nothingcomes easy in life.

Back at the lodge, my interview with Creek is goingpretty smooth until a truck pulling into his parking lotinterrupts us. With the school being officially closed,Creek was curious as to why this person is outside thelodge. After going outside to talk to this person, hecomes back inside and tells me that this man wanted toknow if he could cut down all of the beautiful Oak treesthat are lined-up along the road from the front entranceto the lodge. Of course he turned down the offer and weboth had a laugh about it. We also both imagined howdevastating it would look to have all of his Oak treeschopped down to nothing but a stump. This was perfectSegway to a part of Creek’s career that has become animportant focal point of his school and that is disasterpreparedness.

Even though wilderness survival is Creek’s first loveand is also what has fed his desire to get into the survivalindustry in the first place, disaster preparedness has be-come almost as equally important in his development asa survival instructor. The threat of a natural disaster or aterrorist attack is an unfortunate reality in our society

these days, and Creek has emerged as one of this coun-try’s leading experts on these subjects. He has consis-tently appeared on the Weather Channel and othertelevision networks calmly discussing these topics. Thisis very interesting to me because Creek definitely doesnot come off as a doomsayer or apocalyptic at all, eventhough he owns a subscription based survival box com-pany that is called the APOCABOX that I had the op-portunity to review in our March/April 2015 issue of TheBackwoodsman (please check out Creek’s inside coverad of the APOCABOX in this issue). He approaches thesubject in the same manner he does wilderness survival,with a practical approach that does not cause night-mares.

We decided to take a walk around the school’s prop-erty and we come to an abandoned building that was leftbehind by the previous owners. The inside of it lookslike something you would see in a war zone. Creek saysthis building looks the same as it did when he first boughtthe land and he has turned into a training ground for hisurban survival training that is offered at Willow Haven.

This type of survival training is not exactly what a lotof people what to think about or prepare for. I askedCreek how he convinces a person to prepare for this typeof survival scenario, “You obviously can’t force some-one to do it. The biggest injustice and the biggest flawin the thought process of survival and disaster prepared-ness is simply the mentality that it will never happen tome. It doesn’t happen to you until it actually does.Everyone who has ever suffered from the horrors of anatural disaster will tell you that they thought it wouldnever happen to them”.

Creek believes that when it comes to disaster prep-ping, the main thing that everyone should prepare for issome version of a natural disaster. “None of us are ex-empt from Mother Nature. She does not discriminate;she does not care about what we drive, what color weare, what faith we are, where we live, or what we’rewearing. When she strikes, it could be within a momentsnotice of anywhere in the world. Statically, disasters arelarger, more frequent, and more deadly than any othertime in the history of our country. That’s a statisticaltruth and a scary truth. I’m not a negative thinker by anystretch of the imagination, but I am very aware of howMother Nature works.”

After spending some time with Creek, I can definitelysee why his survival school classes are consistentlybooked full. There is definitely a smooth quality to theway he gives explanations along with a certain level ofconfidence that does not come off as being arrogant orthat he knows everything there is to know about survival.This aspect of his personality is clearly evident even

Photo by RIVR Media

46

when he writes about survival. For example,a few years ago he was asked to write an arti-cle for a website called the artofmanliness.comon how to build a bug out bag. A person thatwas working for book publishing company,Living Ready, noticed the article and was soimpressed with it that they asked Creek towrite an entire book on the subject. Heagreed to the offer and “How To Build A BugOut Bag” has become the signature book onhow to build one.

As we continue toward the end of our in-terview we begin to discuss Creek’s televi-sion show “Fat Guys In The Woods”, whichis set to premier it’s second season on TheWeather Channel sometime in June. Eachepisode, a different group of out of shapeguys head out with Creek into the wildernessto learn survival skills in hope that the expe-rience has a positive and life-changing impact on theirlives.

Creek is gearing up to shoot several episodes over thenext few months and the amount of preparation that goesinto filming a survival themed television show can bevery exhausting, but he appears to be up for the chal-lenge. He enthusiastically finishes up the interview byexplaining to me one of the reasons why he decided tohost this show. “It’s not like most other survival shows,which I love all of those shows. If it’s survival relatedthen I’ll most likely watch and enjoy it. I have a tremen-dous amount of respect for the men and women in those

shows, but unlike most other shows, this one is not aboutthe expert doing the skills. If you watch the show it’s notme out there starting those fires. I help, encourage, andmotivate but it’s the average Joe off of the couch and intothe weather making those fires and building those shel-ters. That’s different, it makes people envision them-selves doing this. It also makes survival skills relatable,which is what I love because I want everybody to learnbasic survival skills. A lot of people are scared of them.They watch a television show and they think to them-selves that they can’t do that. They think that theycouldn’t start a fire from nothing, but actually they can.”

Creek inside the abandoned building that is used for urban survival training.Photo by Charlie Richie Jr.