I took my wilderness first aid refresher this weekend. My biggest achievement was not freezing. It’s held in a marginally heated building, plus we generally spend time outside. I wore long underwear and my thickest wool sweater. The instructor was nice enough to not make us do scenarios outside while it was raining. But we did all wear our rain pants for lying on the ground.

Generally the WFA was the same as before. The one difference is that this instructor focused more on the less serious but more common injuries and medical issues we might see out on the trail. Other instructors have focused on what to do if you find a field of passed out people bleeding to death. Getting to do more realistic scenarios (a broken wrist, but otherwise ok; an asthma attack) helped me translate from the checklists to real life. Some of it is being more confident when interacting with an alert patient. Some of it is ruling things out based on the mechanism of injury. And some of it is having the alert patient self assess.