Wilderness Crisis Management
Several years as an outdoor educator and expedition guide in the 1970s and 80s led me to a hunger for something more than what St. John’s Ambulance or Red Cross had to say about first aid. Working with Dr. Bernie Lalonde from the Carleton University Sports Medicine Clinic in Ottawa, we created a course called Wilderness Medicine which began with the premise that when the other first aid manuals say “remove to medical authorities” … in a wilderness context this is not always possible. So we worked out a structure for thinking through the problems of how “accidents” happen in the first place and what needs to be done when they do happen in a back country context. The arts and science of risk management have come a long, long way since those days but this little handout, which has been published in various forms by Canoe Ontario, Algonquin College, Queen’s Faculty of Education and the now-deceased Explore magazine technical series, is now available exclusively here for a free download.
Download the PDF (10 MB) »