CASE STUDIES
Our instructor training had been thorough, but certain situations came up that our employers had never anticipated. What happens when your student refuses to drink water because her basketball coach told her that hydration is for the weak? What if your chaperone gets so constipated that she has to be evacuated to the ER over an hour's drive away? What if one girl gets blistering rashes from an allergy to sunlight -while you are encamped in a shadeless valley of sagebrush? What if your smallest camper breaks her finger playing tag and then faints in your arms? The crises came thick and fast. As a group, the kids still seemed to be having a blast, but every night Joshua, Nicole and I sat in the Suburban filling out the daily log and wondering what the hell was going to happen next. Back in April, my Wilderness First Responder instructor had told his class that after he became certified as a WFR (one certification down from an EMT), people had, remarkably, started to collapse all over the place right in front of him, and that it would probably happen to us too. At the time I'd thought he was joking...
Our instructor training had been thorough, but certain situations came up that our employers had never anticipated. What happens when your student refuses to drink water because her basketball coach told her that hydration is for the weak? What if your chaperone gets so constipated that she has to be evacuated to the ER over an hour's drive away? What if one girl gets blistering rashes from an allergy to sunlight -while you are encamped in a shadeless valley of sagebrush? What if your smallest camper breaks her finger playing tag and then faints in your arms? The crises came thick and fast. As a group, the kids still seemed to be having a blast, but every night Joshua, Nicole and I sat in the Suburban filling out the daily log and wondering what the hell was going to happen next. Back in April, my Wilderness First Responder instructor had told his class that after he became certified as a WFR (one certification down from an EMT), people had, remarkably, started to collapse all over the place right in front of him, and that it would probably happen to us too. At the time I'd thought he was joking...
After seven days of
aggressive intervention and encouragement on our part (“Would you
run a car on an empty tank? No? Then why won't you drink water?)
Joshua and I spotted the teetotaler sipping from her bottle without
being ordered to do so. Yes! We exchanged subtle high fives.
Hopefully she'd go back to California now and tell her coach where to
stick his (empty) water bottle. We salved and bandaged the blistered
hands of the girl with the allergy, and took the last girl to the
clinic for xrays and a splint.
The chaperone, for her part,
recovered with the aid of enema.
These misfortunes all went
down on our first course together. At the end of the trip, we took a
certain satisfaction in telling Andy, the nursing student from the
other team, about all the medical crises we had handled.
“I
heard they gave her an enema?” he said. His eyes were wide with
excitement. “Really? Did you get to watch? And a broken finger.
Woowwww!”
Alas, poor EMT, the
worst incident on his trip was menstrual cramps. Undaunted, he had filled out a SOAP note (medical procedure sheet) and
took a series of vitals. All normal, I presume.
But our team would have been
happy without the drama. So many incident reports to fill out! No
wonder our post-course debrief back in Missoula took six hours.
Fortunately, our boss had nothing but praise for the way we had
handled things.
The next trip that we took
out consisted of students from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. There
were no chaperones, which was honestly a relief, and all of the kids
had used an outhouse before. They were definitely a hardier bunch
than the Oakland, CA private-school kids, and there were no medical
issues save bug bites and blisters. Lacking the schoolside living
laboratory of the Oakland group, however, their ecological knowledge
coming into the course was a little spottier. On the pre-course
questionnaire, one student listed Ecology Project International as
one of the federal agencies controlling land in Yellowstone. Another
listed 'hypotenuse' as the first step in the Scientific Method. The
shortest path to the conclusion? I wondered, reading over the
assessments later. Several expressed the attitude that wolves were
killing all the game in Idaho and ought to be shot. The ranger Rick
McIntyre, with his wolf soap opera stories and his baby photos of
superwolf #21, changed some of their minds, but not all: the most
stubborn holdout wrote on her post-course assessment, “WOLVES ARE
AWESOME. BUT I STILL HATE THEM.”
I did not know how to answer
that.
WILD
ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN
It
was Nicole's life ambition to see a wolverine, so naturally we teased
her all the time about it.
Waiting until her back was
turned - “What was that – up on the avalanche slope?” “Yeah I
saw it too. Definitely a wolverine. I think it might have been riding
a unicycle...”
Visiting a wolverine trap
built by the Forest Service was a reasonable substitute. Trapping is
conducted only in winter, when the bears are a-bed; the wolverines
are radio-collared and then released to their wanderings. Their
territories encompass hundreds of square miles, and some of them have
been caught scaling thousands of vertical feet over mountain faces in
the snow, apparently for the sheer hell of it. The traps are hinged
boxes built of enormous logs, but a wolverine left trapped for more
than 12 hours will usually manage to chew itself free. Fierce
fantastic animals, no wonder she loved them.
We never did spot one, but
other mustelids made up for it. The other team photographed two
long-tailed weasels popping their heads out of a mountain bluebird
box, and on the first course, our group spotted a badger hunting
ground squirrels in the grass near a ranger station. It dived in and
out of the ground, kicking up sprays of dirt with all four paws. One
of the chaperones drifted closer to take photographs and all the kids
followed, breaking the respectful distance we were trying to
maintain.
“They're
all over on my in-laws' bison ranch,” Joshua said. “Very
aggressive. This one time one chased my wife across a field -” At
that moment the badger noticed the students. Its ears came forward
and it began to shamble towards us, faster and faster. The eye
contact was bright and direct; there was no fear there. It had been
hunting in a little draw below, and as it came closer it disappeared
on the slope, only to reappear over the lip, charging us. The whole
line of students stepped back as one. At the last moment, the animal
sheered off and made for the hills.
That was the wolf-watching
day, and we saw several wolves as well, but I think the badger left
the most lasting impression. To round it out, otters turned up on
almost every trip to Trout Lake. They too were a hit, especially once
the cutthroat spawning run began and the adults started teaching the
kits how to fish. One kit had paralyzed hind legs; it could swim
fairly well, but couldn't travel on land. It didn't seem destined for
a long life, and I wondered if we would continue to see it through
the summer.
Pronghorn,
elk, and bison were everywhere. Funny how something so large so
quickly becomes part of the backdrop. “What was that up on the
hill?” someone would say. “Oh, it was just a bison...”
The elk cows led their
calves into the town of Mammoth Hot Springs and lay on the lawns in
the shade. Everywhere they bedded down, a ranger followed with a
barricade to separate them from the crowds of tourists.
In contrast to my
experiences in Glacier, the bears of Yellowstone mostly manifested
themselves as traffic jams. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the
bear as you wove through the stalled cars, mostly you just saw hordes
of people standing on the roadside clutching cameras and absurdly
huge spotting scopes. I would have much preferred to see a great gray
owl, but unfortunately all the hot tips we got from rangers about
recent sightings involved remote corners of the park where our
student-centered itinerary would never take us...
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF NICOLE HARKNESS AND ERIN CLARK (c) 2012
To see the rest of the album go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/82778186@N07/
