Instagram as the New Campfire: How We Share the Trail with 1 million!

IInstagram might not be the first place you think of when it comes to bushcraft or ancestral skills. But for us at Maine Primitive, it’s become something surprisingly powerful: a digital campfire. One where stories are passed, sparks are shared, and skills find new life in short reels and still images.

Take our recent video on mullein—a tall, torch-like plant used in traditional herbal practices. In less than a minute, viewers learned how to identify it and why it matters. That video alone reached over 1 million people. Another clip, highlighting the uses of broadleaf plantain as a natural laxative and poultice, reached 80,000+ views. These aren’t just numbers—they’re indicators of a growing hunger for real, practical, ancestral knowledge.

Our Instagram isn’t curated for clicks—it’s cultivated like a good wild garden. Each post offers a glimpse of what it means to live more connected, capable, and aware. Whether it’s a time-lapse of a winter shelter going up, a quiet close-up of a carved spoon, or a foraging tip from the trail, we treat our feed as an extension of the land-based learning we offer in person.

This isn’t content for content’s sake. It’s survival skills, nature skills, and primitive skills shared in ways that meet you where you are—whether that’s mid-commute, home by the woodstove, or scrolling between tasks at work. It's for those moments when you need a nudge to get outside, a reminder that your hands can make something useful, or the push to finally try starting that fire without matches.

More than anything, our Instagram is an invitation. To learn. To reconnect. To remember what’s possible when we root ourselves in resilience and choose to live more deliberately.

So if you haven’t already, come sit with us by this modern campfire. The stories are still ancient. The skills still matter. We’re just sharing them through a new kind of smoke signal.