Aerie's Spring Semester in Wilderness Medicine: Recap of the first week at Rich Ranch

We’ve survived our first week at Rich Ranch. Luckily the weather has been reasonably kind to us in transitioning from the heat of Mastatal. We’ve experienced sun and rain with temps reaching the fifties during the day! Good thing we’ve been allowed to acclimatize because next week we head out for some winter camping near Morrell Mountain in the Swan Mountain range. There students will learn about safe travel on winter backcountry trips such as avalanche safety and rescue, cooking in cold weather, travel on the snow, and preparing camp in the snow.

OK, back to how we’ve filled our time and heads this week! Since our last check-in on Saturday the students have continued preparing for becoming nationally certified as EMTs. This includes working on skills such as bleeding control, musculoskeletal splinting, AED (automated external defibrillator) and CPR, oxygen administration, airway management, trauma assessments, traction splinting, seated backboarding using a KED (Kendrick Extrication Device), and medical assessments. Are you tired yet?

Focusing more on the cold weather aspect of EMT skills, we discussed prevention and care for hypothermia and cold injures. These topics all came to a climax with the instructors sacrificing themselves in the name of learning by jumping into the snowy-banked creek near the ranch. The students then had to care for mildly hypothermic patients who also had a lower leg fracture (don’t worry, the instructors didn’t really get hypothermic, just satisfyingly wet). That’s all for now folks!