By Bruce
After spending the holidays at home with my family, I traveled to the East Coast to get my WEMT (Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician) in New Hampshire. Before the WEMT course, I spent a week exploring Boston with my brother, which is packed with a lot of America’s earliest and most important history. Sadly, a lot of the historical sites were closed because it was the winter offseason.
At the end of my week in Boston, I dropped my brother off at the airport to fly back home and headed north for the White Mountains. I was taking my WEMT course with SOLO based in Conway, NH. I arrived at the cute “toad” dormitory on January 6th of 2026, where I would spend the next month.
For the first week and a half, everyone doing the WEMT and WFR (Wilderness First Responder) were combined learning hands-on medical practices for the front and backcountry, SAR operations, and running rescue scenarios. Every day was a long day packed with tons of knowledge and practice. The fact that the scenarios were being done outside in the cold New Hampshire winter greatly helped in demonstrating how inclement weather and body heat loss plays an important role in emergency situations. I met some really cool people who I will never forget.
After that first week and a half, we focused on our EMT skills. I greatly improved my BLS (Basic Life Support) skills and my general medical knowledge during this time. We dove in depth into the bodily functions that cause medical emergencies, showing why we people have the symptoms we have and why the actions I take as a first responder work. It’s crazy the amount of components that go into the most basic emergency medicine concepts like using End Tidal CO2 during resuscitation.
Class was not the only fun part, I started doing clinicals where I was able to gain firsthand experience in real medical emergencies. With my other off time, I explored the local area and neighboring towns. I attempted summiting Mt. Washington and did some skiing with a few of my colleagues. All other time, sadly, was spent studying for my NREMT exam.
My time in New Hampshire flew by fast. At the end of January, I took and passed my NREMT exam. It was sad leaving New Hampshire, I had grown fond of the challenges I faced and the friends I had made.
