Modular Stories

I have no real experience in the backcountry. I’ve taken a few overnight hikes on well-maintained trails. They included a one-month trip around Ireland’s Ring of Kerry via Kerry Way. That was my spontaneous plan, anyway, formulated in a youth hostel two days before I set out.

I turned back after my first night out on the trail. I gave up in part because flood waters washed the trail out, and in part because that night while I slept, some animal tall enough to reach my garbage bag left hoof prints and trash everywhere and also chewed through one of my tent’s webbed loops. That was creepy.

And there was the time my wife Carrie and I were hiking on BLM land northeast of Bellingham and lost the trail in the runout from a logging operation, failed to read our map correctly, and decided that if we kept going up we would eventually reach the summit of the hill and from there figure out where to go next.

We got lost that night and ended up watching Fourth of July fireworks from a ridge above the city. Afterwards we hiked back down in the dark to the clearcut. We pitched our tent next to logging machinery. In the morning, I replenished our water by drawing it out of a big tanker nearby and running it through our purifier.

gearhead
I don’t have a great track record, really. I’m a gearhead by nature, and three-fifths of my attraction to the great outdoors seems to come from having the right gear for any given situation. And I mean any situation. If a catastrophic meteorological event instantly transformed the Northern Cascades into a desert plain, I’d be ready to make it out alive.

Gearheads, in case you don’t know any, tend to spend more time in REI than they do in the backcountry. The gear makes them feel confident enough to go traipsing around all sorts of places without really knowing what they’re doing, because, hell, something in that massive pack will be able to save them, right?

Or that’s what I do anyway. So as a result, without even going anywhere so dangerous, I’ve had several moments of real stupidity and luck.

crazy lady
Carrie’s stories are worse in terms of sheer danger—mostly because she’s actually made it outside. And she’s not a gearhead. Quite the opposite. I’m slowly converting her, but at the beginning she was perfectly content with her poorly-fitted, two-ton, first generation internal frame, Kevlar backpack. It just sort of wobbles from side to side on her hips, making it impossible for her to ford creeks without falling in and, of course, there’s not a stitch of Gore-Tex on her.

But somehow she’s survived–and that includes the time she was travelling unroped on a glacier with two of her equally crazy friends when she slipped, failed to self arrest, fell into a crevasse and gave herself a deep puncture wound with the sharp butt end of her ice axe.

Luckily her companions had stashed away a length of narrow-diameter cord they’d found next to the trail on the approach. They used it to pull her out of the hole. She hiked out with the gash in her leg.

that time she died
Or there was the time she passed out from hypothermia face down in the snow and her friends treated her condition by beating her with their ski-poles and yelling at her to get up so they could keep climbing.

This was actually the second of three times she would go hypothermic. On the first she required CPR, and on the third she experienced aural hallucinations. Laughing volleyball players, she thought. In Olympic National Forest.

People wonder why I have a tendency towards over-protectiveness. My wife died and came back to life. And her Navy stories? …another post maybe.

If I could get away with it, I would ask Carrie to rope in any time we left the house.

FYI: the proper treatment for hypothermia is not to beat someone with a ski pole. It’s to get them out of their wet clothes, get them dry, get them protected and insulated. Getting a fire going and putting bottles of warm water at their neck, groin and armpits works well.

If they’re far enough gone so that they’re acting nutty (hallucinating volleyball players qualifies) or passing out, you DON’T MOVE THEM because the cold blood pooling in their limbs could move to the heart and actually shock it to a dead stop.

That’s right, cardiac arrest is a possibility. Hypothermia is a life-threatening condition. Consider slashing open the bottom of their tent so that you can pitch it on top of them instead of trying to drag them in through the door.

gearhead + crazy = clumsy disaster
So back when we met, she had her stories and I had my gear. There wasn’t a lot of sanity or experience between the two of us. She was rarin’ to get outside again. I started having nightmares that featured her wandering off a cliff in front of my eyes (Kevlar pack flopping from side to side as she stepped over).

So that’s what motivated me to add some skills to my gear. Maybe learn how to use a compass for instance?

She bought me Freedom of the Hills, and that was my first experience with the Mountaineers. After that I saw their clubhouse near our martial arts studio and realized they were local, so I started looking into their classes.

wilderness navigation aborted
The first class we took was Wilderness Navigation. Unfortunately Carrie couldn’t finish because right before the weekend when we were supposed to take our field trip she was side-swiped by a half-ton pickup truck going about 60 mph on I-5.

The crash deployed our van’s airbags and totalled it. Carrie insisted she was fine, but after I finally met up with her, she let me take her to the hospital in a cab. The pain started to kick in about an hour later.

I stayed around to take care of her that weekend, but went out the next month to complete the course. Carrie was still in too much pain to go along. She’s been in physical therapy for over a year.

MOFA
The other basic skills course taught by the Mountaineers is MOFA—which stands for Mountain Oriented First Aid.

stories he told… David Shema’s stories kept us entertained. More importantly, they served as mnemonics for the knowledge we’ll need in the field. This one stuck with me. The lesson: Always try to determine why an accident happened instead of focusing narrowly on the injuries that resulted. The story: In the late 1980s, Shema was working as an EMT for the Issaquah Fire Department. He was on duty and happened to be in the area already (close enough to hear the crunch) when the accident occurred.A car ran over a cyclist—a woman, who was biking alongside her husband. The car dragged her 100 feet before crashing in to a parked car. While Shema’s partner and the husband lifted the car, Shema crawled underneath and pulled the woman out. After he stabilized her, the woman was airlifted to a hospital. As it turns out, the car that struck the cyclist went off the road because the driver was having a stroke. And the driver who was sitting in the parked car happened to be in the middle of a diabetic emergency. Shema treated all three of them, and received a commendation for his lifesaving work.

David Shema, who led the course, has stories too. In terms of sheer competence and preparedness, his are just about the polar opposite of Carrie’s. Shema is a former emergency medical technician (EMT) and an avid Mountaineer. Both he and his wife contributed many hours to the new clubhouse at Sand Point, and I get the feeling he’s been climbing glaciers long enough to be approaching legendary.

His co-instructor, Brian Booth, is equally seasoned and passionate about what he does, which includes tracking and other wilderness awareness instruction with some mushroom hunting thrown in on the side.

Unlike Shema, Booth had no formal medical training before he joined Mountaineers. But he took to heart one of the principles that’s foundational to the whole club—namely, you don’t really learn something until you learn how to teach it.

The club’s vast offering of outdoor classes are sustainable only because of the Mountaineer’s volunteer teachers.

So Booth is on the club’s first aid committee and he teaches these classes. And he’s also invented probably the best-organized roll-up kit you’ve ever seen. I’m convinced he could make real money (mostly off gearheads like me) if he sold the custom hanging-bag he stitched himself from mesh, ripstop, and Velcro.

The rest of the class—fifteen of us in all—were a motley crew constituted by seasoned veterans all the way down to rank beginners (me). Some people were there for the refresher, others because it was a requirement for another Mountaineers course.

There were aspiring alpine scramblers like Pete, ski mountaineers like Chuck (telemark) and Jim (randonnée), climbers of ice and rock and snow like Ryan, Andrew, Michelle, Diana and Janine.

Among them all I probably had the least amount of actual field experience. Whenever they ran a scenario, Shema and Booth would set the scene by describing an actual Washington traihead or mountain. While everyone else was saying things like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there, the yellow jackets are really nasty under that bridge this time of year” (Chuck), I’d be thinking, “That’s in this state? I need to get out more.”

But that’s why I’m here, with the Mountaineers, after all. I just have to get over my embarrassment about the fact that all of my gear (and there’s a lot of it) still looks like it just came out of the package. Because it did.

a step beyond
The class itself was excellent—both the instruction and the content. I’d taken first aid before as a lifeguard-in-training, so I thought I knew what to expect. But there’s a huge difference between first aid in a climate-controlled building that can be serviced by an ambulance in less than 30 minutes, and first aid in desolate terrain on which any shelter has to be built on the spot and the rescue could take hours or more.

Photos copyright David Shema. Used with permission.

For one thing, you have to do more as a rescuer. It’s not just about keeping the patient moderately stable until the fire department arrives—you’ll be splinting bones, making plans to hike out (potentially), deciding whether you can safely thaw frostbitten hands or if you’ll just magnify the damage when they refreeze again.

And you’ll be working with a kit that you designed for lightness and portability in the comfort of your climate-controlled home.

things I took for granted
In MOFA I started to realize how much mental preparation goes into backcountry travel—and how much our highly developed civilization has allowed us to stop thinking about our own survival on a day to day basis.

In an urban environment, high-tech medical care is always just a phone call away (if you can afford it), and getting warm and dry is even easier (if you’re not homeless).

Not so in the backcountry. If you can even get a call out, how long will it take for the rescuers to arrive?

And if you’re deep in the wilderness and rescue doesn’t happen for a day or two, Shema reminded us, you’ll almost certainly encounter infection.

get the training
Here’s the plug: if you want first aid, take a MOFA course. It costs less than $100 with the Mountaineers, and you can sign up even if you’re not a member.

Photos copyright David Shema. Used with permission.

You can get by as a good, educated, safety-conscious citizen by taking only a community first aid course (through the Red Cross for instance). But MOFA gives you the Red Cross cert and then it goes beyond.

MOFA lets you start to peel back the layers of your invisible dependencies as a middle class American. It gives you a slightly deeper understanding of how your body works and how it breaks down. And of course it prepares you to spend a lot of time outside.

coming soon
What’s next for me? I became a full Mountaineers member last August, and I’m still totally awe-struck by the people I’m meeting in the club. I’m applying for Basic Alpine Climbing, an eight-month series that starts next year. I’ll keep you posted.

And in the meantime, I have more gear to buy—I absolutely must have a first aid kit as cool as Booth’s and EMT shears as bad-ass as Shema’s.