2024 Wilderness Risk Management Conference

To register for this preconference certification course, click here. Additional cost $385

Course Overview
Our Hybrid WFR Recertification includes an online component in addition to the traditional scenarios and skills. The online pre-course work allows you to review the curriculum at your own pace, and focus on the hands-on element during your two days on course. The pre-course work must be completed by the course start date. Once on course, the scenario-based approach to recertification provides you the opportunity to test your skills against realistic situations. You'll practice and relearn wilderness medicine protocols, review evacuation and decision making guidelines, and receive the latest updates in wilderness medicine over the course of two days.

Successful course completion will earn the following NOLS Wilderness Medicine certifications:
Wilderness First Responder
Adult, Child, and Infant CPR & Airway Management
Epinephrine Auto-injector

Class Format: The course includes an online training portion to be completed prior to the 2 days of in-person training.

To register for this preconference certification course, click here. Additional cost $385

Course Overview
Our Hybrid WFR Recertification includes an online component in addition to the traditional scenarios and skills. The online pre-course work allows you to review the curriculum at your own pace, and focus on the hands-on element during your two days on course. The pre-course work must be completed by the course start date. Once on course, the scenario-based approach to recertification provides you the opportunity to test your skills against realistic situations. You'll practice and relearn wilderness medicine protocols, review evacuation and decision making guidelines, and receive the latest updates in wilderness medicine over the course of two days.

Successful course completion will earn the following NOLS Wilderness Medicine certifications:
Wilderness First Responder
Adult, Child, and Infant CPR & Airway Management
Epinephrine Auto-injector

Class Format: The course includes an online training portion to be completed prior to the 2 days of in-person training.

Successful critical incident management requires a significant amount of both individual and organizational capability, and all at a time when we are at our most vulnerable. Multiple studies and first-hand experience confirm that during a crisis, we simply cannot rely on ourselves believing that we or our colleagues will make the same quality decisions and calls that we would on a normal day at work. The irony is that the need for adaptability, clear decision-making and leadership is never greater than when it is exactly the most difficult time to assure it. The good news is that it is possible to pre-prepare and plan for critical incidents. This workshop will provide attendees with a contemporary, practical, and research-informed overview of the key principles and elements of optimal critical incident management for outdoor and adventure programs. Attendees will leave with the capabilities to develop and enhance their own fit-for-purpose plan.

How well do you understand the myriad legal issues that outdoor recreation organizations face? This presentation provides an overview of the fundamental legal issues all owners and program managers need to understand: The do's and don't of collecting medical information, how to satisfy your duty to appropriately inform and warn participants, common errors in marketing materials, important considerations with waiver and assumption of risk forms, contract basics (including indemnity), insurance, and critical incident response.

The program will ask audience members to consider their capacities to assess, support and manage a broad range of escalating mental health challenges. Drawing from wilderness first aid foundations, the presenter will provide an overview of steps and strategies for prevention and intervention. Organizations can utilize this information to evaluate current strengths and gaps and develop programming, culture, and staff skills.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will be introduced to a simple but effective process for developing an impactful staff training program that develops essential skills, behaviors, and performance expectations to achieve greater programmatic impact. Participants will be guided through a case study from “Project Kindred,” a youth development program in Milwaukee where this approach has been developed and tested. Participants will have the opportunity to practice each step as they begin to apply the framework to their organizations.

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.