HJL,
I’d like to add another positive comment about taking a WFA course. I attended a WFA class taught by SOLO (Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities) at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in Bryson City, NC.
I had previously attended a Red Cross first aid class and came away, as I put it, underwhelmed. So long as you could call someone else, their instruction and procedure was okay, but remove the “civilization” element and you basically have a box of band-aids and kind words.
As a previous poster indicated, the WFA covers a lot of “what if”situations and how to deal with them using very limited supplies. Improvise, improvise, improvise was the mantra of the day. I came away from the training with a very useful set of skills and the confidence to be able to use them.
I return to an item previously mentioned– civilization. One baseline item taught in the class is that wilderness is defined as more than one hour away from definitive medical care OR more than one mile up a trail.
The subtle point here is that is if the power is out and you’ve suffered a storm that has disrupted things, you could very well experience “wilderness” in your own home. As a resident of northern Alabama, the tornadoes of April 2011, rendered an entire county without power. Those of us on the far side of the county had no damage, just no power for a week. Just a thought on how easily situations can change.
JD