Wilderness First Responder App

In June 2026 I took a hybrid Wilderness First Responder course with NOLS. It was hosted at CU Boulder. 30 hours of online content followed by 5 days of hands-on training. It was really good to revisit these skills given the amount of time we spend in the backcountry and away from easy access to help. 

A big part of the course - the majority of the focus, really - is doing patient assessments. As a first responder, when you first come upon someone that is hurt there is a suggested procedure to assess that person's well being and to support their needs. This process follows what the NOLS wilderness 1st aid community calls the "Patient Assessment System." It starts with an assessment of the accident/patient scene, continues with a series of assessments of the patient's physical, mental and historical health and concludes with a S.O.A.P. report, a well structured document for reporting to a search and rescue organization. 

The course was great! A fine balance of content knowledge and practical skills. For the course, we conducted all of our work taking written notes scribbled into our small notebooks. You really should have this process memorized and be able to implement it when things go bad. In practice, since I so rarely will have a chance to apply theses skills, I thought a handy smart phone app would be helpful to jog my memory and serve as a data collection tool. So I worked with claude.ai to take the NOLS PAS and my hands on experience to make a webapp that works as a stand alone tool on my iPhone. Anyone is welcome to use it. First time you access it on a phone, it should prompt you to save it as a shortcut or web app.

https://wfr-assessment.netlify.app

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