Survival Arts

NOLS Wilderness EMT Class Review

My future plans involve expatriation, and since medical care is not as reliable in other countries, I spent last January in the Sierras taking a Wilderness EMT class. It was taught by the Wilderness Medicine Institute, part of the National Outdoor Leadership School. I attended an excellent small private college, Harvey Mudd, and have taken classes in several other fields, but I must say that this was the highest quality of instruction which I have ever received.

The 180-hour class included training and certification as both an urban EMT and a Wilderness First Responder. Unless you plan to work as an EMT or really desire the extra training, I don't recommend taking this double course. The Wilderness component was far more useful for survival purposes, and can be taken alone as an 80 hour class. Urban EMTs, due to legal restrictions and their essential role of "stabilize and transport", don't get to do much. As an example, EMTs make temporary splints out of cardboard, because the hospital is just going to rip those off and put on a cast. In the wilderness environment (defined as being an hour or more from a hospital), a solid, well-made splint is utterly essential.

The EMT class featured an excellent mix of classroom time, skills practice, and scenarios. With 30 students and 3 instructors, the ratio was only moderate, but the excellence of the instructors more than made up for it. The students were a diverse mix, including firefighters, outdoor guides, and dilettantes like myself, mostly in their twenties. A 12-hour ambulance ride-along and an 8-hour observation in a Fresno ER were part of the class, and some students chose to do multiple shifts. I found these quite useful.

Most of my academic career has been in abstruse fields like mathematics, and taking a class so fundamentally anchored to reality was both novel and pleasurable. The material was gripping because it could someday be intimately relevant to the lives of myself or my loved ones... how much more important can you get? Improving my ability to care for those around me was empowering. I'd highly recommend a NOLS WFR class to anyone with interest in first aid.

Now that I've learned how to heal, it's time to learn how to hurt, so I'm off to Front Sight next month for my first gun class (4 day Handgun). From what I've heard, it should be a similarly powerful experience.