Learning to be a Wilderness EMT

I'm a fan of being useful, and my latest endeavor to become more so is a course in wilderness medicine. It's a month-long intensive course that covers urban EMT curriculum, combined with the outdoors' own medicine practices. I'm taking it through NOLS, with their Wilderness Medicine Institute.

The course is located in remote Lander, WY, at the base of the Wind Rivers mountain range. It's in an outpost of the Central Wyoming College, at Sinks Canyon Center. There's no cell phone reception on site, but if you hike up the nearest ridge, you can usually get a couple of bars. There are trails to neighboring BLM lands (but don't go to the neighboring buffalo farm, a 'shoot-first' trespassing policy is in effect). There's a climbing wall, a volleyball court and a fire pit. We make good use of all of these.

There are 30 students in the class, ranging from high school students through to veteran antarctic safety experts. Everyone is very active and interested in the outdoors. There's a contingent of climbers, some avid Ultimate frisbee players, some volleyball enthusiasts and a bunch of hikers. Everyone shares their skills and gets everyone else in on their sport. It's a pretty ideal community. The staff here say that we're unique in our cohesion, especially for the duration (4 weeks gets to be a long time).

We're here to take a 180+ hr course in 4 weeks. We spend every day in class, from 8am to 5pm, with two evening sessions per week. We learn concepts in class, then head right outside to put them to use. By the end of the course, we've 'treated' 'patients' with a wide range of ailments, from lighting strikes to heart attacks, from altitude sickness to obstructed airways, from broken femurs to seizures. And then there were the big scenarios.

Interspersed throughout the month, there were large-scaled scenarios where multiple people would be injured in a plausible backcountry way (swept away in a flood, fell on a climbing accident, etc). We as a group would respond, stabilize everyone, and transport the patients. We as a group had great growth from our first chaos-ridden scenario to our final scenario. It was very rewarding to see the skills of our group as a whole grow. We became a rescue machine. Too bad it was all fake.

We've mostly all made it through the course. We're now (very expensively) trained wilderness EMTs, qualified to work on ambulances or in hospitals in the urban setting, or act as field medics in the back country. Subjected to mounds of red tape and protocols, of course. But we're qualified medical professionals. If at the bottom of the ladder.