Norfolk EMTs Study Wilderness Medical Skills at New Hampshire’s SOLO School

By Jon Riedeman

Imagine going for a hike in the woods with a friend and two hours into your hike your friend loses their footing and tumbles down into a ravine. You climb down the side of the ravine and find your friend unconscious and bleeding from a gash in their leg. You reach for your phone to call for help, but you have no service. What would you do?

Norfolk Ambulance members John Fernandez, Grant Mudge and Bill Brodnitzki spent a month of intensive study at the SOLO school in Conway, New Hampshire, learning how to respond to just such a scenario, along with multiple other challenging wilderness emergency situations. Their intensive training prepares you for “some pretty serious stuff,” says Fernandez. Students learn how to respond to an emergency without the traditional equipment that an EMT would usually have available. The school describes their program as “real, gritty, and occasionally messy.”

So what do you do when you are miles from civilization and your patient needs a splint on their broken leg? “You learn to improvise,” explains Brodnitzki. “You learn to think outside the box,” Fernandez adds. “You can build a splint from Mother Nature.” Clothing can be cut up and turned into strips to make a stretcher, but Brodnitzki offers a word of caution about improvising: “Don’t give up anything you might need; basically we don’t need two patients with hypothermia.” 

The Wilderness EMT course is packed into four weeks of focused study. “We were either training or studying 24/7,” explains Fernandez. There was a lot of hands-on training with additional classroom study, and sometimes the classroom was the great outdoors. The outdoor classes are held no matter how bad the weather may get. “One day we hiked a half mile into the woods through two feet of snow,” Fernandez says. 

The student body at the SOLO school is made up of a diverse population of people who engage in rural and off-the-grid activities in places ranging from farms to wilderness to areas of conflict. Mudge describes the students as “missionaries, wilderness guides and people working in areas of global crisis including Africa and the Middle East.”

Mudge was drawn to the school for its wilderness emergency training and also because it allowed him to obtain his EMT license in just one month. “I liked being able to just get it all done in one shot,” he says. The conventional route to an EMT license is often stretched out over several months, but the SOLO course combines the standard Emergency Medical Technician training with specialized wilderness-specific medical training, so upon completion of the program students receive both Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician certification and National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians certification.

If wilderness emergency training sounds like something you might be interested in, get in touch with the Norfolk Lions Club Ambulance at kittylagrenouille@gmail.com. There are scholarships available for those who would like to become a licensed EMT through the program and would be willing to commit to volunteering with the ambulance service.