Emily’s Story: Emergency in the Boundary Waters
Today’s blog is a powerful account of a time that wilderness medicine skills helped to save a life, written by a former Don’t Panic student. Emily took our Desert Mountain Medicine Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course Custer, SD in May 2025 and put her new skills to the test a few months later on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. Her experience is a perfect example of why medical training is so vital, and we couldn't be more proud of her.
Here is her story.
The Value of Being A Wilderness First Responder
By Emily White
Originally published in the South Dakota Volunteer Naturalist Newsletter
Since the South Dakota Volunteer Naturalists have been in existence, the safety of our members and those around us has always been our highest priority. Safety has been woven into the fabric of everything that we do. You may not always realize this when attending an in-person event, but we are doing head counts, monitoring people’s hydration intake, sun exposure, etc. And we’ve started offering online webinars through Survival Med via Track It Forward to help give you the skills of a good naturalist.
I went all-in in May of this year when I took a Wilderness First Responder training through Don’t Panic/Desert Mountain Medicine. This was an 80 hour course that covers everything from patient assessment, basic life support, traumatic injuries, and a lot more. I spent five intense days in the field learning all sorts of skills. And luckily a lot of this information stuck in my head.
Last week four of us headed out into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area near Ely, MN. We had a six day paddling trip planned out. We’d been working on putting this trip together for almost eight months. We had all of the details covered that we could think of, and things went well until the very end of our trip when my best friend got sick. She wasn’t keeping fluids in and hadn’t been for two days despite adding electrolytes to her water.
We had an all day paddle to our exit point on our last day on the water. It was clear from the morning onwards that my friend was losing energy very quickly, and she was soon unable to paddle. We pulled into a campsite for a break. This gave me the opportunity to take her vitals and do a quick assessment of her overall condition. Right off the bat, her vitals were into a danger zone – her heart beats per minute and her respiration rate were elevated. She also couldn’t stop throwing up, which meant that she was continuing to lose precious fluids. I continued to take her vitals every five minutes until I could get a clearer picture of what was going on. She wasn’t getting better.
My training told me this: She was severely dehydrated. This is a problem for many reasons, because dehydration often leads to other environmental illnesses, like hypothermia in this case. Her vital numbers told me that she was in hypovolemic shock, meaning she had lost a considerable amount of fluids, to a dangerous level.
This is when you call 911 and plan your evacuation. Except that we are in the middle of the Boundary Waters. One of our phones had one bar at the top of a hill (where I was standing next to recent bear scat, just to add a little excitement to the situation), and luckily I was able to get through to a dispatcher. Here’s the cool part: Because of my WFR training, I knew how to collect all of the data that the dispatcher needed to assess my friend’s condition. I had to calculate where we were by lat/long from my fishing map, but otherwise, he had what he needed to send a rescue boat… except a rescue boat couldn’t get to us because there were two portages between us and where their boat could land.
Let me introduce to you the concept of “self-rescue.” My friends and I had to move across water and land to get my best friend to definitive care. Here is where I have to say that if it weren’t for the two guys in our group, this would never have been possible. They did all of the work it took to get us to a safer location. All of it. They were strong paddlers, they figured out how to make a “bed” in one of the canoes for our ill friend, they knew how to redistribute the weight of our canoes, they knew how to navigate. I do not want to take credit for any of this. Their help was invaluable.
Eventually we were met by a Forest Service boat with an EMT, and my friend was taken off to a waiting ambulance and eventually the hospital in Ely. Because of my training, I had written timed notes with vitals and changes in her level of responsiveness that the EMT could take with him. This helped to create a seamless transition of care.
Meanwhile, the three of us had to paddle the rest of the way out down a person, with the weight of four people’s gear, against headwinds. The guys figured out how to tie the boats together, redistribute the weight again, and we paddled until sometime after 9:30 pm that night. I didn’t get to the hospital to check on my friend until after 11:30 pm.
My friend took 3.5 liters of IV fluid, and two bags of nausea medication, which meant that my assessment of hypovolemic shock was correct. Her labwork indicated that she was close to kidney failure, with no indication of viral or bacterial infection. We are assuming that she came into our trip already dehydrated, and the condition worsened due to the exertion of paddling and setting up camp. After rest she will be ok, and I was able to drive us home the next day. She is still exhausted.
Takeaways: Without my first responder training from Don’t Panic, I wouldn’t have realized how bad off my friend was as quickly as I did. The numbers told me what was going on. I felt confident completing a patient assessment, taking vitals, making the call to evacuate, relaying information to the dispatcher and EMS as we moved locations, and treating her for hypothermia when needed. I was able to take notes on all of this and hand them off to the EMS when he arrived, making her transition of care as seamless as possible. I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing basic first aid or advanced aid before you head out on a hike, canoe trip, etc.
