Wilderness First Aid

Right now I am sitting in the one bar in Three Rivers, which happens to have WIFI and a plugin for my laptop.  The only other place in Three Rivers to get internet after work hours is the local historical society building, which is closed, but has WIFI and a plugin around the corner of the building by an electrical box.  The Park has computers I can use, but I haven't made the time to take the "Computer use on a Government Computer" online module yet.  The homeless life is difficult sometimes when it comes to computers.

The past two days I have been in a Wilderness First Aid class, which is a step higher than your general first aid class, and oriented towards people working in the backcountry.  This class was taught by two instructors from NOLS, which is a well known wilderness education school, and was a vast improvement over the Wilderness First Aid class that I had taken in the past by a different organization.  This class was very thorough in teaching us the steps to take when/if we come across a first aid situation in the backcountry, how to do a physical assessment of the patient, how to diagnose problems, how to recognize an urgent evacuation versus a routine evacuation, and how to treat (or not treat) the problems.  We would learn things in the class and then do scenarios, where part of the class became "patients" with some sort of injury, and the rest of the class would pair up and "come across" the patient and have to do a patient assessment to determine what was wrong and how to treat that person.  It was actually quite cool.  We also had a NPS law enforcement guy come by today during one of our scenarios to see if he would have us do anything differently, and he thought that we were being taught the right procedures, especially the procedures in reporting to NPS dispatch our findings from our patient.  Very Very neat.  If anyone ever has a chance to take a NOLS course, I highly recommend it.