Over the last few weeks, we’ve been setting up a partnership with the wilderness medicine fellows of Dartmouth-Hitchcock at the School Of The Forest Campus in southern Vermont. Students at Dartmouth Hitchcock go through extensive medical training for remote locations, but are looking to expand that knowledge base with skills like shelter building, fire lighting in tough conditions and using a knife safely and effectively to harvest firewood and keep patients and themselves comfortable in the backcountry.

Participants in the course will get hands-on instruction in wet weather fire protocol, the concepts of thermodynamics as they relate to shelter building and using a knife, and a little know-how to build an effective shelter in emergency situations. They’ll get to put all that into practice with the culminating experience of an open fire night, where the shelter they build and the fire they maintain keep them warm from sundown to sun up. Knowing HOW to accomplish those tasks is one thing, but having the experience already sets people up for success when it really matters.

Really excited to announce this partnership, and even more excited to see students thrive at the tasks when they come out to our campus next month. Training groups that put the skills we teach to work in their careers is always incredibly rewarding.