With so many outdoor opportunities within close radius of Southern Utah University, hiking is a favorite pastime of SUU students and Cedar City natives alike, but all too often, things can go “off the trail.” Even experienced hikers, campers and backpackers can take a bad step and end up with injuries or stuck in a bind away from cell service or emergency services. That’s when some basic wilderness first aid skills can come in handy, and it just so happens that SUU offers them in a couple courses.
Wilderness First Aid and Wilderness First Responder, listed as ORPT 1510 and ORPT 1542, have been offered on campus since 2012 and are currently exclusive to the spring semester. Any interested student can join since there aren’t prerequisites, but there are some fundamentals to know before signing up.
“Pretty much all students find themselves challenged in this course. I’ve had people comment that it’s some of the hardest things they’ve done in an educational setting,” said professor Levi Pendleton, the instructor for both courses. “If you want to challenge yourself, this is the course. If you don’t want to be challenged, don’t take this course. But I think there’s huge growth potential for students here.”
Pendleton took these courses himself in 2013, and since 2019, he’s taught them out of his own love for and experience in the outdoors. He used to work with ski patrol emergency medical services in Snowbasin, Utah, and in Tuora, New Zealand, for a season. Though he’s not currently on ski patrol, he believes that teaching these courses allows him to stay sharp in his wilderness first-aid skills.
“It’s definitely a different mindset, and the resources are limited in those situations. I’ve had individuals in courses before that have been nurses and ER docs, and while they bring a really strong skill set in the course, it’s very different from what they’re used to,” said Pendleton. “They don’t have any of the tools that they have in the ER or in a hospital setting. It’s going to be very different and very beneficial, even for healthcare professionals.”
Both the first-aid course and the first responder course teach some basic wilderness survival skills. While they both require absolute attendance, there are two key differences: their scope of practice and their time commitment.
Typically, a wider variety of students take Wilderness First Aid because it takes place exclusively over Presidents Day weekend for one credit. However, the three-day course is far from a cake walk. This course is also used as a recertification in CPR, epinephrine administration and wilderness first aid for students that took Wilderness First Responder, so it’s to be expected that over those three days, there will be simulations, labs and lectures.
“Students might expect to be fully immersed in water, to be muddy, dirty, all those kinds of things. As much as possible, we try to have accurate recreations of things that they might expect to run into: incidents in rock climbing, white water, skiing, hiking, backpacking, etc.,” said Pendleton. “Since it’s being taught on campus, I do have access to the P.E. Building, where we have our climbing wall and our pool, so sometimes we’ll have simulations inside as well as outside.”
For those not wanting to face this course, the first responder course is a great alternative despite requiring more from its students.
Generally populated by outdoor recreation majors since it is a required course for their degrees, the three-credit course is held weekly on Mondays from 2 p.m. until 4:50 p.m. in conjunction with an online curriculum. Class periods will focus on labs and simulations, and then right before finals, there will be a mass casualties simulation that incorporates multiple victims and rescuers. The simulation requires a longer period of time since there are more complex rescues and evacuations. At the end of the course, students are rewarded with a wilderness first responder certificate.
While these wilderness classes are primarily about first aid and how to help in scary situations, they also address preventative thinking, risk management and both medium-term and long-term care. They help to foster critical thinking and problem solving skills, but most importantly, these classes increase students’ decision-making abilities and keep them moving forward through any situation.’
Author: Kaylee Condie
Photos courtesy of Levi Pendleton
Editor: Kale Nelson
outdoors@suunews.net
This article was originally published in the December 2023 edition of the University Journal.