Medical Wilderness Adventure Race

A Medical Wilderness Adventure Race (MedWar) combines wilderness medical challenges with adventure racing and was developed to give medical students, residents, health care professionals, and wilderness enthusiasts a practical, interactive, and enjoyable curriculum for learning wilderness medicine.

The WMI Team was Dave Weber, myself, and Mike Ditolla.

We carried what we would honestly take on a winter mountain day trip – honestly. We left the Lifepack 12 and Gamow bag in the truck. Water, food, extra layers, navigation and survival items filled our packs. You’re allowed to carry a reference book. We considered Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine 5th edition, but it weighs in at 10.6 lbs, and was an awkward fit in the pack, so we relied on our brains, which served us well.

I’ve been racing biathlons recently, and the title of mountain assault made me consider bringing my rifle, but this is a non-violent medical event focused on saving, not shooting, so I left it at home.

We skied and snow shoed around 8 miles, navigating at times by GPS and stopping at 7 medical stations. We evaluated frostbite, managed a diabetic skier, reduced a dislocated shoulder, set up a pulley system to simulate a crevasse extraction, used a transceiver to find a buried skier, treated patients with altitude illness and hypothermia and dragged a patient a half kilometer across the snow.

It took us a few stations to realize that the other teams were focusing on the obvious problem while we were diligently performing a full patient assessment, as we train our students to do. This cost us a bit of time, as did a faulty ski binding. There are no rest or water stations on the route, and if equipment breaks, you have to deal with it as you would in the wilderness.

These races are held throughout the U.S. and Canada at many different times of the year. You can find more information at www.medwar.org.

Tod Schimelpfenig

February 09