Jeremy and I normally do outdoor sports with just us – hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, and snowboarding. After watching 127 Hours and read some stories about wilderness emergency, I really wanted to take some survival and First Aid classes because we will most likely depend on each other to rescue the injured one.
Luckily, there is one in town - SOLO Wilderness First Aid Course (WFA) presented by Central Arizona Mountain Rescue Association (CAMRA) a partner of SOLO Schools.
We immediately signed up for the 16-hour long, 2-Day WFA Certification Course and try to learn as much as we can about WFA. The classes were held at North Mountain Visitor Center. The classes focus on the basic skills of: Response and Assessment, Musculoskeletal Injuries, Environmental Emergencies, Survival Skills, Soft Tissue Injuries, and Medical Emergencies.
One of our instructors, Mike Englund, offered lots of on the field rescue examples to explain how important it is to have these basic skills to self rescue or help others.
We spend lots of time in the classroom going over the literature, then we will do outdoor hands on training to see if we can run through the essentials of things to look for to help someone who might be in need of a rescue or as simple of some water.
The course covers mostly situations in the desert that deals with heat and dehydration and we learn to recognize if someone is in shock.
We both passed the written test and earned our 2 Year WFA certifications. Now we just have to sign up for First Aid/CPR and other wilderness survival course~
