It's Late February, So I Must Have Been....

Looking toward Breckenridge from Copper

...skiing!  This, plus the final push at work, and taking a class in Boulder, CO, explains why I have done almost nothing of note in the kitchen in the last month.

Well, that's not entirely true.  We brought 1 jar of salsa and 2 jars of jam with us on the trip, and brought home 3 empty jars.  We had our usual go to meals, with a few variations.  Since there were a few more people this time, I started with roasting 2 chickens.  One chicken was dinner the first night with mashed potatoes and green beans, and the meat from the second chicken was the protein for the burritos another night.  The bones all went into making soup, which was lunch for several days.  We had BLT night, and pasta-with-Rick's-famous-lamb-sauce night, and went out for dinner one night.  At that point, I left the crew and headed to Boulder for my class, and they were on their own with instructions to eat up whatever was left.  They did pretty well, actually, only bringing back a little bit of food to my sister's place.  My sister had been kind enough to buy all the groceries before we got there, which saved us a HUGE amount of time and effort.  I think it was, quite possibly, more groceries than she'd ever bought at one time ever in her life!

While in Boulder, I recertified as a Wilderness First Responder.  It was an adventure!  I was one of the three people who got to be doused in cold water and shoved out into the snow so the rest of the class could rescue someone with hypothermia.  To be fair, I did kinda volunteer.  It was fun, in a shivery sort of way.

I got home last night, and today involved a lot of quality time with the laundry machine and some time spent chipping away at the ice that covered half our driveway.  I did make 2 loaves of bread, and I have a pork roast in the oven.  I think we might use the last of the spiced crabapples on the roast.  And preserved garlic.  I can't wait for dinner!

Skills

Well, I finally did it.  I am a certified Wilderness First Responder, having just taken the Wilderness Upgrade for Medical Professionals, aka WUMP.  I have been wanting to enroll in this course for two years now and, two days ago, I completed it.  (The first time I planned to do it I got jury duty so I held off, good thing, because I broke my hand right before I would have gone so I would have had to cancel anyway...)

Me on a backboard

It was really fun.  REALLY fun.  There were 19 students, some were people taking a month long EMT-B course with the final week in wilderness medicine, but there were 8 physicians and a nurse as well as other EMTs and paramedics who wanted to add to their skill sets.  The classroom sessions were jam packed with information and stories and then we would do scenario after scenario to reinforce the learning process.  We learned how to make traction splints out of sticks.  Cervical collars out of baseball caps.  How to roll people safely and how to warm them up if they get cold.  It's all about thinking outside the box and using whatever resources you have very creatively.  We practiced with a mass casualty incident and a night time rescue.  My friend and I slept in a tent for 5 nights and drove 2 days in each direction to get there and back.  The weather was perfect and the setting simply gorgeous (we were in Cullowhee, NC).  We even had a little time to go fishing but we didn't catch anything; it was relaxing nonetheless.

Foraging was sort of out of the question due to the time constraints and the location but I did find a tiny wild strawberry, some mint, some bittercress, and a few other greens.

We had to prepare all our own meals and my chili, stroganoff and baked beans were just the thing.  People started to ask, "What did you can for dinner today?"  I fielded a lot of questions about canning during the week.  They have a really nice set up there for cooking - a pavilion type area with picnic tables and a concrete slab at waist high for the camp stoves.  It was perfect.  The place was covered with ladybugs which were swarming at the time, and butterflies flitted about when it was warm.  The nights were cold, though, and I was grateful for my thermarest pad and wool blanket which I used under my sleeping bag for added insulation.

Would I do it again?  Absolutely.