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clipping willow while weaving baskets

Pack Baskets: A 4-Day Willow Intensive • September 24-27 in Paonia, CO

Price range: $600.00 through $975.00

Date: September 24, 2026, – September 27, 2026

Instructor: Jeff Wagner

Location: Paonia, CO (Old River Road Trading Post – See Map)

Level: Beginner (No experience needed) and intermediate

Join us for a 4-day willow intensive beginning with the foundations of willow basket weaving, culminating with weaving your own willow pack basket!

Through our four days together, you’ll complete 3 baskets that build in difficulty: a low oval tray, an oval shopping basket with a hoop handle, and a backpack basket with an oval base. We’ll move through a skills progression starting with simple weaves and culminating with advanced borders and decorative weaves. The class will especially focus on basket shaping, a key advanced skill for weaving a pack basket that fits well on your back and goes beyond a straight-sided cylinder.

Pack baskets are our most-requested class, but they require advanced skills gained through working on multiple baskets. This intensive is designed for beginners to build the skills necessary to weave a pack basket. Intermediate students should see this as an opportunity for expanding their repertoire and receiving hands-on instruction to hone and master more advanced basketry skills.

This intensive happens during Paonia’s Mountain Harvest Festival, with Saturday night offering an incredible free concert in our local town park!

Schedule: Class will run 9am to 4pm each day, with an hour for lunch. Lunch the final day will be a half hour and class will conclude at 2pm to allow participants coming from the Denver area more time to drive home.

  • Thursday: Basketry foundations: oval bases. Learn to weave a basket base in the morning. Weave a second base in the afternoon while the learning is fresh.
  • Friday morning: Weaving sides onto baskets with basic weaves and simple borders. Use your first base to complete an oval willow tray with low sides.
  • Friday afternoon: Reinforcing (waling) bands and French randing weaves. Complete your larger basket with a more advanced border.
  • Saturday morning: Add a hoop handle to your shopping basket. Weave the oval base for your pack basket.
  • Saturday afternoon: Add sides to your pack basket and begin weaving up.
  • Saturday evening: The big free concert evening at Mountain Harvest Festival!
  • Sunday morning: Complete your pack basket.
  • Sunday afternoon: Add straps to your pack basket. Class concludes at 2pm.

Meals: Tuition includes a farm-based lunch on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. On Saturday, we’ll take a longer lunch break so participants can explore the Mountain Harvest Festival.

Lodging: Tuition includes a campsite at our riverside educational farm. You can set up a tent or park a vehicle on-site. The campsite has an outdoor shower, composting toilet, and running water. Wifi is available across the farm (a 5-minute walk). On warm days, people enjoy a dip in the river.

Two large canvas wall tents with beds are available for rent—please contact us for details. Participants are also welcome to find other lodging, though options may be hard to find because this weekend coincides with the Mountain Harvest Festival in Paonia.

Environment: Class will be outdoors in a shady riverside area. Class on Friday and Saturday may potentially be in Groundwork’s tent in Paonia Town Park at the Mountain Harvest Festival.

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Meet The Instructor

Jeff Wagner

Jeff Wagner

After a university education didn’t provide sufficient answers, Jeff began seeking answers to the big questions that weren’t answered by academia: how we might reimagine U.S. society in the age of climate change, and what it means to be a responsible human in an unraveling world. For over a decade, Jeff sought answers outside the mainstream: living at wolf sanctuary in the Colorado mountains, leading NOLS expeditions across North America, and facilitating cross-cultural semesters in the Andes, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and the great Mekong River Basin. Jeff’s biggest focus has been teaching to the cultural roots of environmental issues, and helping students both experience and examine different ways of life that can be applied as cultural activism at home in North America. As a person dedicated to questioning the mindsets stemming from settler-colonialism, Jeff finds inspiration in the communities working to maintain and strengthen relationships with the natural world and with the sources of food, water, clothing, shelter, and meaning. Jeff likes walking slowly, weaving fabric and baskets, and growing beautiful varieties of heirloom seeds. Jeff founded Groundwork to help people pursue the goal of becoming ancestors that their descendants will be proud to tell stories about. Jeff is a certified Wilderness First Responder.

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