PHOENIX — Would you know what to do if you got lost or hurt while exploring Arizona? As more people move to the Grand Canyon state, a West Coast doctor is making new Arizona survival training classes more accessible for locals and out of towners.
The classes are called Survival Med and they’ve all been developed within the last year. All of the courses cover medical and survival scenarios and focus on the most common injuries seen in local emergency rooms.
There’s an Arizona specific course happening on Monday at 6 p.m.
Dr. Natalie Bonthius, a Utah Wilderness Medicine doctor, developed the Survival Med courses. There are special sessions tailored for Arizona, Colorado and California.
The class teaches hands-on skills for things like how to stop bleeding, create splints, neck braces for spinal injuries and more.
The Arizona specific course covers environmental dangers here across the region, like heat illness, dehydration, venomous animals and then what to do if you get lost while hiking.
“How you approach that is somewhat different in a really hot desert environment than it necessarily is in the mountains and so we teach people how to find water, whether they should even try to do that or whether they should stay in place and wait for search and rescue and how to gauge that,” Dr. Bonthius said.
The course is easy to sign up for and can be taken live online, or downloaded to watch at your convenience. The whole family can watch and learn.
After Monday night's 6 p.m. course, there will be another Arizona live session on March 28.
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