Monthly highlights of November

“Monthly highlights” is a series of post concentrating on a 10-month wilderness guide course I am taking this year at Niittylahden opisto near Joensuu in Eastern Finland. These posts try to summarize the best parts of each month and are naturally published at the end of each month (or in the beginning of the following month as it seems to be now). Hopefully you enjoy it!

Highlights of November: Advanced First Aid and Safety Management Courses!

Enjoying the sunset at Niittylahti instead of sitting in the class listening entrepreneurship lectures.

My November started with an additional week-off from the school that was spent packing stuff in my apartment and moving it to my parent’s place where I’ll be crashing for a while. During the week I missed some lectures about multi-culturalism and customer service but I don’t think those were especially crucial for my future professional skills. The second week of November was one of the best weeks of all the autumn period: Wildmed’s Wilderness Advanced First Aid course. The third week was filled with lectures and exercises about entrepreneurship which were quite familiar to me already. And the fourth week we spent in the woods on safety management & leading course.

Year's last morning swim in Niittylahti for me in snowfall at November 16th. It was cold.

The Wilderness Advanced First Aid (WAFA) was possibly the best course we’ve had in the school during the autumn period. It was a very intensive no-nonsense four-day first aid course specializing in wilderness context and held in English by Wildmed. There are two WAFA courses held in Finland annually in November. These are open to anyone interested and in addition to our guide student class there were four other people participating on the same course. In addition there is also an annual Bridge course to upgrade a WAFA certification into Wilderness First Responder certification, something I’m intending to do in the future. I won’t go too much into details about the course content as it is well presented on the Wildmed’s course description but I’ll write a few words about my personal experiences about the course.

Learning to inject epinephrine to treat anaphylaxis.

The course was very intensive: the days were filled with lectures and exercises from  08:30 until 18:00 or so and for the evenings we had 50-60 pages of reading to do. I believe that the intensity actually helped learning and enabled learning a huge amount of useful information and skills. Both the lectures and the hands-on exercices were good and in my opinion it all culminated to the often asked question “Makes sense, right?” And it made sense. Wildmed teaches a simple and effective assessment system for wilderness first aid and medicine that really makes sense, benefits learning and probably works very well also in real life situations. The teachers, Brad and Eric, were both experienced EMTs with outdoors, ski patrolling and SAR background meaning that they knew what they were teaching but in addition they were also good teachers and great dudes.

H cleaning a wound (on a chicken breast).

According to the teachers in USA the WAFA is seen as a good first aid skills level for someone doing trips to remote areas and I do agree. But for people taking customer groups to remote areas the Wilderness First Responder level is recommended and it sounds about right to me. Comparing this course to the first aid courses by Red Cross is somewhat pointless as in my opinion the WAFA is way superior. Mostly because it really makes sense. If you have the four days and about 400 euros to spare, go and do this course next year. You won’t regret it!

 

Yours truly assessing a patient with a TBI in a multi-patient exercise.

The safety management & leading (i.e. “Turvallisuusjohtaminen” in Finnish) was a lot discussed, rumored and anticipated course. There were some wild rumors concerning the six-day course but in the end it was a lot easier and more relaxed than I anticipated. I won’t be telling too much about the course so that the next years students can enjoy the uncertainty and intentional lack of information but in a nut shell: We spent six days in the woods with the Lumo11 course (a two-year vocational school program somewhat similar to our wilderness guide course) doing different tasks and exercises related to basic wilderness skills, first aid skills, leading and safety management.

Spending two minutes in the lake to get wet and cold...

We slept under tarps, we made a lot of fires. Sometimes we were cold, often we were wet. We didn’t get a full nights sleep every night, we didn’t always know where we were, neither did we always know what would happen next. Sometimes we walked longish distances, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes someone got lost, lost motivation or got sick. Sometimes we had big multi-patient first aid cases. (Where the WAFA skills came very handy!) It was quite a good exercise though I see also a lot of room for improvement. For me it was relatively easy and in the beginning I was occasionally bored. But one gets what one wants. For example after deciding to make all the fires (We made a lot of them!) with a fire steel and without any special tinder instead of using matches and tinder carried with me, making fires started to be an interesting challenge. The weather was quite challenging as the course started with snow and temperatures below -5C but in the halfway the temperatures rose above freezing and occasionally it rained heavily. My kit worked out pretty well though it wasn’t the optimal kit for the conditions and tasks: over 2kg weighting serious winter down bag, Inov8 Rocklite 390s without gaiters, a traditional puukko (I want a big full tang blade now!) and so on.  But I wanted to use my typical hiking kit to see how it manages and a lot of my kit worked really well like the Haglöfs Flexable softshell, PHD Minimus down vest, Fenix Hp10 headlamp, Evernew Pasta Pot (Btw. it’s also great for coffee as the holes in the lid act as a filter!) and so on. It was an interesting experience to camp and tarp almost a week in such conditions. Occasionally a bit miserable but mostly very enjoyable.

In a summary it was a nice exercise though it could have been even better if it would have been more challenging and better planned regarding the first aid cases. It was a nice experience and I learned some new things, honed some old skills and it was very interesting to learn to know the Lumo people a bit better.

... before, once again, making a fire.

As I wrote earlier the autumn period in the school is now done from my part and I’ll be having few weeks of before starting my internship period in Husky Center Kolmiloukko. Because of this there might not be a post about the highlights of December but a summary post about the whole internship period later in January. And when school starts again, I’ll start again with the monthly posts at  the end of January.

At the moment temperatures are well above freezing and it’s been occasionally raining quite heavily. Seems like a depressing start for December with no sign of snow. I hope that the winter would set in soon so I could start skiing. Meanwhile, I might take my packraft and drysuit for a final paddle before the lakes freeze…

Situation report

It’s been once again quiet here for some time. Here is a short “sitrep” about the reasons and things to come later this year and the next.

Sun set at the backyard of the school.

In the school we had the Wilderness Advanced First Aid course that I mentioned in my previous Monthly highlights post. The course was really good but very intensive with no spare time for writing a blog. I will write more about the course in the next Monthly highlights post so stay tuned. In addition we’ve had some entrepreneurship lectures and exercises leaving time for sports to stay fit but once again not much time for blogging after all the gym/running/climbing. And the next week we will spend in the bush on a safety management/leading course lasting until Saturday. So getting to write the next blog post might take some time…

And when not in school I’ve been busy with moving. I spend the weeks at the school in Joensuu and at the moment my girlfriend works and lives in Helsinki during the weeks so there wasn’t much point in paying a rent for an apartment in Lappeenranta that was empty most of the time. So, we gave the apartment away and now I’m spending the weekends mostly crashing at my parents place. Changing residence was quite a gruelling experience. You know that you have stayed in one place too long when the closets appear to be full of stuff that you didn’t even know to own. And once again I’m feeling more and more confident about applying UL principles on every day life but I have to see how it turns out as this isn’t the first time I’m having the idea.

The next week I’ll have to pack all my stuff from the school’s dormitory and bring them with me to my parents as the autumn period in school will end on my part and so will my rental contract for the room at the dorm. I’ll be moving back to the dorm again around mid January next year when the school continues. During the December and first half of the January we have a (voluntary) internship period to get some real-life experience about working as wilderness guides.

Guess what I'll be doing?

I decided to do my internship period in a nice small husky center at Taivalkoski. I’ll spend a month there starting from mid December to mid January. I visited the Husky Center Kolmiloukko on my way back from the school’s autumn hike and the place, dogs and owners seemed all really nice. I’m really excited to learn some dog sledding stuff as it is not teached in our school and I’m interested in it as the dog sledding has a strong historical connection to the (Ant)arctic explorers of the old times. The Kolmiloukko also offers relatively long trips ranging from one-day trips to one-week trips instead of the typical one-hour or so tours. In my opinion this is a really good thing. I don’t think I’ll be doing that much actual mushing but more driving with a snowmobile taking care of the dogs and the customers but hopefully I will get to do also some dog sledding. During the month I will live at the husky center and probably won’t have too many days off and for sure not having a holiday for Christmas as it is the high (midwinter) season in the business. This would mean not seeing my girlfriend at all during the time but luckily it isn’t the case as N will be working at the same place as a guide starting also in mid December but she’ll continue working there until late April – and she gets a sallary for that.

Later this year I'll be spending some time also with these young guns.

In addition to the internship period at the Kolmiloukko I’m planning to do some additional training for Vaiska KY the company of the Ultima Thule 2011 expedition guide and leader Kari “Vaiska” Vainio. I’ll be attending on weekend courses in Kouvola as an assistant instructor and I’ll be also going for a one-week ski tour in Sarek national park in March as an assistant guide. These are actually the same courses that I took in 2010 (Some pictures from the trip in 2010) but now I’ll be a guide instead of a customer. I think it will be really interesting!

The fells of Sarek in March 2010.

Unfortunately I don’t have time to write more as I should finish a presentation about the Ultima Thule 2011 expedition for an annual meeting of the Arctic Club of Finland. The meeting is on Saturday in the Arctic museum Nanoq in Pietarsaari but I’ll be going there already on Friday to meet other members of our expedition and some other interesting people.

Recommended read: Very white water and flying kayaks

There is not much to read this time but you’ll get cool videos instead!

The winter is closing in and at the moment we are living the twilight period between autumn and winter. Winter is a great season for adventure and one I am very comfortable with and I have also some cool plans for the snowy season but I have mixed feeling towards the forthcoming winter as I would like to packraft more. I didn’t get to packraft as much as I would have wished and I can still hear the call of the water nymphs at the Iso-Kurkkio that we didn’t run on the packrafting trip in the North.

Iso-Kurkkio (IV+) in Lätäseno. One of the few rapids we portaged.

So while preparing for the cold season I’ve been also planning packrafting trips for the next summer and happened to find a punch of very inspiring Finnish hard-shell paddlers and their cool videos. I can only dream about the stuff these guys do and I’m not sure if I even want to dream about it  but it is very inspiring none the less. It would be really cool to be on a same river with these guys at some point but I guess that first I have to reach a whole new level, or few, in white water paddling… But lets cut the crap and bring you some cool videos instead of dreaming:

A video by Tuomas Vaarala from the great white waters in the Northern Norway from 2010. There is some talking in Finnish but you don’t have to understand it to enjoy the flights:

And another video from Norway (Lönsdalelva and Rana rivers) from 2011 by Mikael Lantto:

Our ways of camping probably differ a lot but it seems that these guys know how to barbecue. The video (by Mikael Lantto) is one again in Finnish but you’ll get the point anyway

Both Tuomas Vaarala and Mikael Lantto have more cool videos on their Vimeo sites so they are very much worth visiting if you like whiter water stuff. Tuomas Vaarala has also a white water kayaking blog but unfortunately it is only in Finnish.

So… Instead of upgrading my winter gear for the upcoming season I’ll probably need to save money and invest into a better paddle, a real white water helmet, better PFD and maybe get one of those cool GoPro HD HERO2 cameras… Hmm…

Monthly highlights of October

“Monthly highlights” is a series of post concentrating on a 10-month wilderness guide course I am taking this year at Niittylahden opisto near Joensuu in Eastern Finland. These posts try to summarize the best parts of each month and are naturally published at the end of each month (or in the beginning of the following month as it seems to be now). Hopefully you enjoy it!

Highlights of : Orienteering exams passed, cooking on open fire, climbing stuff and water rescue & survival!

When first watching our schedules I thought that there wouldn’t be much to write about October as we had one-week autumn holiday and no big trips coming up. But luckily I was wrong. The month was full of very interesting stuff and here are the best parts. One of the definite highlights is the 24-hour walking challenge where I covered 105km with few classmates. It is not included in the highlights post as there is a separate thorough report available.

Happy faces after passing the day orienteering test

In the beginning of October we had our orienteering exams. Even though most wilderness guides never have to navigate off-trail in unfamiliar terrain with customers I still consider orienteering as an elementary skill for every wilderness guide and it is also required to qualify as a wilderness guide. During the autumn we had quite a lot of orienteering training in preparation for the orienteering tests. I found the training quite useful and I believe that my orienteering skills got better, especially with the accurate 1:10000 maps that I rarely use for anything else.

To prove our skills we had two separate tests: a day orienteering test with a 4-5km course (measured as straight lines from marker to marker) and a night orienteering test with 3-4km track. To pass the test you were required to complete each course in less than two hours. In my opinion the requirements are actually quite easy. You don’t need to be an especially good orienteerer to complete the tracks well under an hour! But then again, wilderness guides don’t have to have the skills of competitive orienteerers and fulfilling the minimum requirements is enough to prove that you wont get totally lost in the forest. I played it safe and walked passing both tests easily with times around 70 minutes. So, from now on I don’t have to know how to orienteer any more.

Catching the food...

... and cooking the food

Repe the duck on his way to the pot

The second highlight was the open fire cooking course. It started on Sunday so I was a bit pissed because of the short weekend but the course made it up: Basically four days of cooking tasty treats outside on open fire – and of course eating them all! We catched some small fish from the lake but also had salmon, pork, duck, chicken and many other nice ingredients that we cooked, fried, barbecued, smoked or blazed. I think I put up a few kilos during the course… As usual the teacher was a nice guy and very proficient: a chef and entrepreneur who had done the same wilderness guide course in 2008.

Rappelling at Heinävaara. Fun. And possible even with a fucked up knee as shown by S here.

Training at school's wall. Your's truly playing the role of a stupid customer in trouble.

Teacher demonstrating a rescue technique.

We also had some climbing and rope training during the month. To qualify as a wilderness guide in Finland you don’t have to know a thing about ropes or climbing but in Niittylahden opisto we can also get a KTO qualification by SKIL as a part of the guide course. (The same applies to the paddling instructor courses, white water rafting and many other things.) The KTO is an abbreviation from the words “Köysitoiminnan Ohjaaja” literally meaning “Rope Activities Instructor”. The training doesn’t involve any actual climbing but provides the skills and knowledge necessary to arrange safe top rope climbing and rappelling for customer groups. Special attention is paid on safety and solving possible problems. As a KTO instructor you are qualified to arrange/lead top rope climbing and rappelling on artificial walls and on rock but you are not technically qualified to teach your customers how to climb which I find to be somewhat weird…

Well, we are not qualified yet as we just had the two two-day modules both including one day inside and one day outside building anchor points and training rescue techniques. Almost everything was new to me so I learned a lot and it was mostly really fun. And now that we have passed the training modules we can freely use the school’s climbing gear for independent training, so I guess I’ll be doing also some climbing during the rest of the year in Niittylahti. In the next spring we will have a full day of qualification tests including written and hands-on parts. After passing the KTO test and fulfilling some other requirements one can attend a course and test to become a qualified SCO i.e. Sports Climbing Instructor (thus being also qualified to teach how to climb, including lead climbing) and after that even a RCI i.e. Rock Climbing Instructor.

Search and rescue exercise in Wednesday evening.

For me one of the most interesting things of the whole year is probably the water rescue and survival course held in the end of October. As a preview we had a day of search and rescue training related to Volunteer Rescue Service. During the day we did search & rescue exercises in the forest as a big group and in the evening we visited the local volunteer lake rescue association the Joensuun Järvipelastajat for some water search and rescue. We search some islands to find a missing person, used search lights and night vision goggles to find PFD floating in the water and did some rescue swims. The first part in the woods was a bit boring but the evening was really interesting!

Training in swimming hall. Lights off and cold water sprayed on us.

J turning the life raft.

The water rescue & survival course itself started on Friday morning and lasted the whole weekend. First we had some theory in the classroom but quite soon after it we went to the local swimming hall to train swimming and floating techniques and the use of a life raft. The training in the pool continued in Saturday morning with three of the local lake rescuers joining us as students while few of them acted as security crew. After the pool sessions we had information for lunch. The information was that we were not going to have a lunch. Nor a dinner. Nor a supper. The next meal would be the breakfast on Sunday after finishing the course. This meant about 24 hours without food and to make it even more realistic I decided not to have much water to drink during the rest of the course. I think I drank some 2-3dl of water during the last 20 hours of the course. In the beginning I felt hungry but it eased out after the first ten hours or so but towards the end I was quite thirsty. In saturday afternoon we continued training in open water with dry suits: swimming, huddling, getting into the life raft, moving a hypothermic or injured person into the raft, etc.

Security boat Pärske and the life raft. For the night the raft was towed further out.

Around 6:00 pm we put away the dry suits for maybe the most interesting part of the course: a hypothermia swim! This meant performing certain tasks as small group in +5C water wearing only swimming pants and PFDs. We have been doing morning swims nearly every morning at the school so I knew that the water would feel very cold but the sensation eased off after the first minute or two in the water. For our group of four the compulsory tasks took around 5 minutes 45 second and towards the end I was feeling quite good: I had lost sensation from my toes but the water didn’t feel that cold anymore.

After the tasks we decided to stay in the water floating on our own in HELP position waiting to get really cold. The rescue crew was regularly checking our conditions and told the time we had spent in the water. Somewhere around seven or eight minutes I started to shiver slightly and after 11 minutes the shivering started to be quite intense affecting a bit on talking and body control. After 12 minutes we were called out for safety reasons. While climbing to the wharf I was shivering vigorously but felt otherwise good. The paramedics took electrocardiogram from S and it shoved some extrasystole and heart skipping some beats while heart rate was around 137 (while standing still after floating still for 6+ minutes and climbing up a ladder). According to the paramedic these are clear symptoms of hypothermia and after some five more minutes in the water we would have lost most of our ability to function.

Ice cream - after 12 minutes in +5C water!

After the swim I offered everyone an ice cream (our teacher allowed it as he has a good sense of humour) and we went into the sports hall to warm up. Some took a hot shower and some did physical exercise to regain body heat. I did both first training until the shivering stopped and then showering hot water on my  feet to regain sensation and normal blood flow to my toes. The latter lead to some more shivering and it took about an hour for me to feel normal again. Even though the 12 minutes we spent in the water was longer than any group had previously done, I would have wanted to stay there even longer, long enough for the shivers to stop and to start feeling warm but as that would not have been safe I have to settle with the experience that I had. It wasn’t maybe the most pleasant experience I’ve had but one of the most interesting ones.

A night in the life raft.

After warming up we donned the dry suits again and prepared ourselves for a night in the life raft. The raft was towed further out to the lake and we swam there as a group to find the raft full of water. Emptying the raft with the standard fabric bailer took some time but the work kept us warm. Quite soon after emptying the raft we spooned up on the rubber floor in hope for some sleep. During the night we were regularly woken up by the instructors asking how we were feeling on the radio. We also had a couple of pee breaks with the help of the rescue boat Pyörre and during the night some people decided to leave and end the exercise for their part. (A free tip: the best way to pee while in the raft is to pee into the bailer. Peeing over board is quite a tricky task to do safely.) One of the best moments of the weekend was to stand at the deck of Pyörre and watch the starry skies above.

I got some sleep in short snippets but probably spent most of the night awake because of either being cold, not finding a comfortable position to sleep or because of the waves rolling the raft. The night wasn’t especially fun but it wasn’t really miserable either, only uncomfortable. Towards the morning my toes got really cold and lost sensation at some point but quite soon after it we were told to untie the anchor and get to the shore with the life raft. Luckily the wind was plowing straight to the shore so we detached the raft and just floated to the shore enjoying the morning while H played his mouth organ. It was a really nice way to end the exercise. After cleaning and sorting up the kit we had a breakfast and sauna and that was it.

After the exercise I felt quite tired because of the lack of sleep and food. I ate some more, had a nap and drove back home, ate a pizza and slept some 11 hours. I was also quite dehydrated because even though I drank well over five liters during Sunday I was still about one kilo lighter than usual in the Monday morning. Now about two days after the exercise I’m feeling about normal. The instant flu I got after the hypothermia swim is almost gone and body is again hydrated but for some reasons my calfs are stiff and sore… And now I have a huge respect towards the MS Estonia survivors – every one of them is a sheer miracle! And I also consider taking my dry suit with me if I go to a cruise…

- – -

In November I’ll have a week off for personal reasons and we will have one week of entrepreneurship lectures which probably isn’t the most interesting topic on the course. (Though I hope it to prove useful.) But to compensate these we will have the Outward Bound’s Wilderness Advanced First Aid course which is said to be excellent and a six-day safety management & leading course out in the woods – hopefully with coldness, darkness, sleet and appropriate amount of misery. I’m really looking forward to these courses!

And in the beginning of December we will start our six-week internship period but more about that later…