 This week, we took a break from the trails in the rivers to go visit an old friend. Chris Riley, like many people in our region, owns bows and arrows. However, you might be surprised to find that his bows and arrows are not store bought and they don't feature any extensive pulley or cable systems. Chris' bows and arrows come straight out of the mountains. For me it started, I ordered a book series called The Bowyer's Bible. I started reading the first volume of that and just kind of got addicted to it and it snowballed from there. I do, it's called traditional bowiering, which means that I use only raw materials that I harvest myself, only hand tools to work those materials. So bows come from essentially logs. You split those logs out using iron wedges and a mallet, which gives you half logs. You split those half logs into quarter pieces and what you have is essentially, it's called your stave and that's just a long triangular shaped piece of wood and that's what you work into a bow eventually. All my animal hides, feathers, things like that, those are all things I find in nature. I practice what I call ethical hide working, which means that I don't kill animals specifically for their skins. So everything feathers, hides, skins, bones, stuff like that, those are all things that I find in nature or have been given to me. So when I'm working on a piece of wood, I'm only thinking about what I'm doing at that particular moment and when you have an idea in your head and you see that manifest in a physical form, that to me is the most rewarding part about it. What I think an artist's most valuable asset is, is your own creative integrity and your drive to create. And the reason I say that is because each person's creative intuition is something that is completely unique to them. So when you harness that, that gives you the ability to make and create things that nobody else can. And I think that's certainly something that shouldn't be overlooked. Along with making traditional style long bows, Chris makes his own arrows out of all natural materials as well. Okay, arrows are kind of a different beast altogether. Some things are similar to creating bows. There's two schools of thought with arrows. There's what you call natural shaft and what you call split shaft. Split shaft is when you get your arrow from a log the same way I do a bow and the process is the same. It starts with splitting the log up and getting a board from that, splitting that board into blanks. For a natural shaft arrow, which would be something like bamboo or river cane or, or wild rosewood, which is actually here behind me. The process, once again you have to, you have to cure whatever piece you get and that can take up six months to a year right off the bat. But with arrows, they don't need to be fully cured when you make them because they're not going to be bending like a bow. So on average, I'd say to make a set of six natural shaft arrows, I would say maybe about four to six months. Chris explains how he overcomes a struggle that every artist or craftsman may endure while working on their projects. A self-doubt, I feel like something is, it's something that probably every artist suffers from to some degree and I think that self-doubt can be a useful tool. It can cause you to kind of look at your work with a critical eye to see if you know something might need changed or altered or if the piece may just need to be scrapped altogether. But I think there's definitely a point where self-doubt can impede on your creative process and I think that every artist needs to be aware of where that line is and needs to be really careful not to let that happen. Self-taught and using only natural resources to create traditional bows and arrows, Chris Riley is the type of person that makes our region truly special. For EKB Evening News at 6, I'm Ronnie Hilton.