I WILL SURVIVE!!

For those of you that didn't know I have started working with Life Flight along with working at the hospital. So pretty much on my days off I get go and fly places. Sometimes they are a lot colder than here like Colorado, Wymoing or even Montana or warmer like down south to St. George. I usually perfer to go were there is warmth. But other than flying places, Life Flight also has us train in other areas in case something happens like our plane crashing, which doesn't happen that often I promise! But today we went out and trained for avalanches and how to stay warm if we are stuck in the snow. In other words it was Winter Survival training! Pretty much the day consisted of us doing a like of hiking, falling, and being covered in snow!

Here is my group! We are all the Adult Respiratory Therapist on the Salt Lake Life Flight team. There is only 9 of us total here in Salt Lake area. What you can't see behind us is the trench we had to dig and then cover with branches and tarps and then cover it with snow to see if it would hold. It had to be big enough for all of us to fit in. Just to give you an idea of how deep the snow was I'm actually standing behind the girls in front of me but have sunk in waist deep in the snow!

This is the opening to our trench and I have crawled up in to show that we can fit in. I don't really like being in closed areas so not knowing if this was going to fall on me made me nervous but at least for me I did have life flight people around.

I think the look on face explains it all. Being raised by a wonderful outdoors wildlife father he has taught us many things about being safe while outside. We were learning how to start a fire. Easy right! Well I don't know what she was doing but it wasn't easy! So thanks to being taught by my father I was able to start the fire first and not by doing it the way they showed us! What ever works to stay warm is all I can say!

I wish I had a picture to make my point about this story. But one of the things that we had to do was practice finding people that were buried in the snow. They had these beacons on and we had to use ours to find them. Well like I said earlier the snow was really deep and I'm not very tall. So one of the other girls and I were leading the way when she took a step and sunk waist deep. She wasn't able to get out so I was right behind her and I figured I had pretty good footing where I was standing. I was trying to help pull her out when next thing I knew the ground beneath us went and we were both over waist deep in the snow and unable to get out. If any of you have ever felt the snow shift and then give way beneath your feet it isn't a very good feeling. But I have never laughed so hard as both of us were like swimming, crawling, doing whatever we could to try to get out of this snow hole we were in. Luckily for us we had two guys in our group that had to wade over and half drag half lift us out because there was no way we could get out. So from then on out we weren't allowd to lead or tread the way.

Some of the other people in my group had some more pictures so hopefully I will get those soon and will be able to post some more! But it was a fun adventure that I'm happy I only have to do once a year!