|  An old Chippewa I know carries a folded-up garbage bag in his pocket. He claims it is his portable home, keeping him warm and dry if he gets lost or tired. He finds coyote dens by scent, and whittles the heads of canes into renditions of his “dream birds.” His favorite drink is a double martini. He asked me to check for a phone number of a “love” he had lost in 1931. He was somewhat disturbed, he told me, when it occurred to him that people didn’t know that every single tree was different from every other tree. He is making me a cane to repel bears and to attract wolves and women.
— Jim Harrison From time to time I have written things – for my own enjoyment, in response to a discussion, because it helped me get something straightened out in my head, because I thought it might be helpful to someone. I will post some of those articles here for your use and enjoyment. Please feel free to use and distribute these materials as you wish, as long as you make sure that my name stays attached to them. Check back frequently, as I will be constantly adding to this list. And please note: When I bring methods of wilderness emergency care to your attention, I try to give you the most accurate and sound information that I can find. But medical protocols change, medical judgments differ, and circumstances vary. Nothing I say is intended to – or ever can – replace the sound judgment of a competent caregiver at the scene. Outdoor Leadership  How to set up a risk management program A good risk management program does two things – it tells you what to do to prevent an accident or disaster, and it prepares you to handle and control it when it happens. This is an outline and check list of the things you should be considering as you think about the risks in your own program and how to manage them.
 Thinking about wilderness programs A large number of often overlapping terms are used in the field of wilderness education; and there are a large number of activities and programs which take place in an outdoor or wilderness setting, and which are held to provide psychological benefits of one sort or another for participants. This is a brief guide to the various forms of wilderness programs that are available.
Methods of team building in the wilderness A wilderness group that is not a team has a low probability of accomplishing its goals, or even of surviving in the face of sudden adverse circumstances. Turning a wilderness group into a wilderness team is not only for educational and therapeutic goals; it can be a survival necessity. From campfires to meetings, from cooking to drumming, this article explores all the ways in which an effective leader can build a team out of a group of individuals.  A brief guide to gear If you are new to hiking and backpacking, or if you are about to lead a group of people who are new to the wilderness, this brief guide to gear will lay out the basics of what you should bring, what your options are, and – very important – what you might want to think about leaving at home. I wrote the kind of guide I wish I had had when I first started.
Dealing with violent behavior in the wilderness A wilderness leader may have to deal with disruptive, violent, or out-of-control behavior within the group under a variety of circumstances. Such behavioral crises can occur, for example, when leading adjudicated or at-risk youth in the wilderness, especially if they are in the group against their will or as an alternative to juvenile detention. Some trips involve groups who are in the wilderness specifically to heal wounds, such as sexual assault, or to deal with stressful personal transitions such as aging, divorce, career change, or bereavement. With any group, the stresses of being in the wilderness – ranging all the way from simple unfamiliarity to perceived life threats – can cause ordinarily rational and controlled people to resort to out-of-control or assaultive behavior. This article outlines how to prevent, control, and manage violent behavior in the wilderness, based on indigenous, peacemaking, and reintegrative models. Wilderness Spirituality Getting closer to the Earth Many people who go into the wilderness seek, among other things, to get ”closer to nature” – sometimes without a very clear idea of just what they mean by that. The personal experiments in this work are a tool kit intended to help develop new ways of relating to the natural world. Use them for yourself or for the members of your group. Entering the imaginal world In the wilderness, we become open to the presence of spirits; we are – somehow – closer to the imaginal realm where spirits live. I am not about to decide whether these spirits are real, whatever that means. As far as I am concerned, they are real enough. One of the few modern psychological traditions to take the spirits seriously – James Hillman calls them “the Gods” – is that of Carl Jung and his progeny. This article explores this psychological approach to encountering the spirits of the wilderness. Carrying council in the wilderness The idea of council is very simple, and can be described in a few sentences. In council, people sit in a circle, and pass around what is called a talking stick. Whoever holds the talking stick talks, and everybody else listens. There are no interruptions, no questions, no challenges, no comments. People speak one at a time, in turn, honestly from their hearts, and listen devoutly from their hearts to each person who speaks. The effect can be miraculous. Here are the basic procedures for creating council on your next wilderness trip. Myths and symbols on the quest for vision The vision quester goes out alone, and returns alone, but is nonetheless a member of a community, which forms what first Joseph Campbell and then Jerome Bruner called a “mythologically instructed community.” Such a community, says Bruner, possesses “a corpus of images and identities and models that provides the pattern to which growth may aspire.” Myths and images are what inform the wilderness fast experience, make it meaningful, turn it into a vision quest. What are these myths and symbols, and how can we integrate them into our work? Wilderness Emergency Care How to stay out of trouble with proper documentation Wilderness and survival people often engage in lengthy debates about what should and should not be included in a medical kit. Very few people mention what I think are two of the most important tools you can bring with you – a pen and a pad of paper. This article tells you why, and how to use them. Managing snakebite in the wilderness Wilderness snakebite management is filled with myth, fears, and confusion. This article boils down wilderness snakebite management to its essentials, explaining both the hows and, even more important, the whys of proper care. Everything you wanted to know about infection, gangrene, and maggots Lacerations and burns are two of the most common injuries in the wilderness, and both raise the risk of serious infection. This article tells you how to recognize an infection when one occurs, and answers two questions that are asked with surprising frequency – where does gangrene come from? and can you clean out a wound by putting maggots on it? No kidding. How to pack a medical kit This is not a list of stuff you absolutely should have with you in the wilderness. There are already a gazillion such lists circulating around, and they are all different. Instead, this article offers a way of thinking about your wilderness medical kit, outlining the tradeoffs among risk, weight, and bulk, and listing the considerations that should determine what you bring and what you leave behind. The prevention and treatment of heat illness Heat illness is a serious and potentially deadly problem in the wilderness, yet it can often be prevented simply by adequate hydration and good common sense. This article explains the difference between heat exhaustion and heat stroke, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them when they occur – including what not to do. Evaluating the cervical spine in the wilderness One of the most difficult decisions a wilderness caregiver may have to make is whether to immobilize, package, and evacuate a team member who may – or may not – have a cervical spine fracture. Fortunately, a number of recent clinical studies, involving thousands of patients, can provide some guidance in making a good decision. Guest Articles Traveler’s diarrhea Leigh Culver is the CEO of Global Med-X, a company that provides remote medical support for international corporations and governmental agencies. He has more than twenty-five years of cross-cultural medical and survival experience in the Arctic, Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. Here he discusses traveler’s diarrhea – what it is, what causes it, and how to prevent and treat it. Military manuals and misinformation Many people purchase military survival manuals because they are cheap. The problem is that many of these books contain outdated, inaccurate, and sometimes dangerous information. David Alloway, a working cowboy, professional guide, survivalist, and a former naturalist for Big Bend Ranch State Park, taught survival for over twenty years in the United States, Mexico, and Australia. He was the author of Desert Survival Skills (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), ISBN 0-29270-492-5. David died suddenly of an illness on March 11, 2003, at the age of 45. In this article, he explains why we should be skeptical about what we read in military survival manuals. It is an honor to print it here. Letters to the river Sparrow Hart, founder of Circles of Air, Circles of Stone, undertook his first wilderness rite of passage in 1971, a five-month solo pilgrimage in the Cascades and Canadian Rockies. For more than twenty years he has studied both modern and indigenous therapeutic approaches, apprenticed with a variety of native and non-native teachers, and undertaken more than fifteen vision quests, while leading several quests each year in various parts of the country. One of his projects has been writing what he calls Letters to the River – lyrical essays on wilderness and spirit, reflecting on the interplay of nature and his own soul. I am pleased to be able to share two of these letters here with you. Gourmet cooking in the wilderness Jesse Gilbert is an ultralight backpacker, Continental Divide Trail hiker, mathematician, gourmet cook, and creator of a piece of software called the Travel Light Planner, which helps you plan every aspect of your outdoors trips – including the weight of erverything you will be carrying. In this article, he gives some advice on how to turn your trail meals into gourmet treats. | |
