2024 Wilderness Risk Management Conference

Includes four short 18-minute Ted-Talk style presentations!

Search & Rescue, Stress and the Path to Resilience presented by Josie McKee: Stress injuries can occur when a stressor overwhelms our capacity to manage it. During this short talk, Josie will share her experience of working on the Yosemite Search & Rescue team. Her story includes an incident that left her stress injured and how awareness of stress injuries helped her go from burnout to finding the resilience to continue SAR work. This talk will help participants develop awareness of potential causes of stress injury and provide structure they can use to decrease stress and increase capacity to manage stress.

Odysseus Rules and Wake-up Alarms: Moving Beyond Heuristic presented by Nik White: Decision making in a wilderness setting is always complicated by human factors. Many programs have started training students on heuristic traps (FACETS?) as ways our brains play tricks on us that may lead to poor decision making. But just knowing how our brains fool us isn't enough. We need to Know about the trap, Identify when we are falling into it, choose a different Decision, and have the Skills to execute the the new plan. Odysseus Rules and Wake-up Alarms are two tools which help us Identify when we might be falling into a heuristic trap, and can help lead to better decision making in the wilderness.

Benefits of Utilizing Mental Health Clinicians in Partnership with Outdoor & Field-based Programs presented by Lauren Glass: In the past few years, many outdoor focused organizations have identified an increase in the way that participant mental health struggles have impacted program outcomes and added to staff burnout. Just as organizations may partner with professionals from outside the outdoor and recreation space, there are many ways to partner with mental health clinicians. This short talk will offer an overview of potential strategies and tiers of engagement that organizations may use to collaborate with mental health clinicians. It will illustrate the benefits that a partnership offers to risk management, equity initiatives, and supporting the sustainability of staff. This talk will outline the beginning steps to utilizing the expertise of mental health clinicians, as well as offer several case studies of successful partnerships.

Program Team Reset: Building a Program Team through Belonging and Managing for Strengths presented by Jason Croft: When there is staff turnover or big transitions in our organizations, we need to cultivate safety, belonging and strength. In this workshop we will discuss the experience of rebuilding SCA Alaska's Program Team from the ground up. My team and I were hired at the same time and were tasked with carrying out the programming set in motion by our predecessors while also, building a functioning team, gaining trust from project partners, replacing aging gear, and learning how to do everything SCA does from huge 50-person training events to our Risk Management policies. We didn't just build a program, we built a team capable of taking on the future of conservation work in Alaska.

Utilizing survey data gathered in spring 2024, we will present an overview of the outdoor industry sector’s self-assessment of the impacts of climate change on operations and perception of preparedness to face these burgeoning challenges. We will introduce the United Nation’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and demonstrate how to apply it at the organizational level. We will offer strategies for building early warning systems and highlight new decision-making challenges faced by programs. We’ll discuss how to leverage and augment existing tools to better represent the new risks posed by extreme weather events and wildfires. Finally, we will review how organizations can operationalize contributions to climate change solutions.

This session will focus on how to prepare your organization to receive and investigate reports of unwelcome behaviors. We will identify the increased harm and impact of unwelcome behaviors as they become more egregious, identify the best practices for taking a report and what an investigation should entail.

The body doesn’t lie. In high-risk situations, our body will do what it has practiced. Come understand your baseline reactions, learn new ways to manage your response, and practice what you need to successfully navigate high-risk situations calmly and effectively. Join me at a 90-minute experiential conversation to learn about cutting-edge brain science, body-based practices for students and instructors/administrators, and the challenges of being in and leading groups.