I'm a paramedic and licensed AEMT instructor based in Anchorage. I've spent over 15 years working emergency and austere medicine — including nearly a decade on the Alyeska Pipeline, where remote access, extreme conditions, and long evacuation times were just part of the job.
Since 2010, I've been a wilderness responder in McCarthy — a community at the end of a 60-mile unpaved road with no hospital, no clinic, and no guaranteed medevac. McCarthy is where wilderness medicine isn't a credential. It's just how things work.
Alaska Backcountry Medicine exists because the gap between a standard first aid course and what Alaska actually demands is too wide. These courses are for people who work in real terrain and need training that holds up when conditions aren't ideal and help is a long way off.
Our instructors bring real clinical depth to the classroom — field experience backed by formal credentials. Small classes mean real hands-on time, and scenarios are built around Alaska conditions. Groups over 10 students get a second instructor so nobody gets lost in the crowd.
All ABM courses run on Base Medical's hybrid model — self-paced online modules followed by focused in-person practical days. Base Medical sets the curriculum standard and certifies education centers statewide. Their wilderness medicine content meets WMEC standards, the same framework used by the leading wilderness medicine programs in the country.
base-medical.com →Jacob instructs EMT courses for APEC statewide. That partnership runs deeper than shared classroom time — APEC and ABM are jointly developing a wilderness medicine add-on track for EMT graduates, creating a pipeline from street medicine into austere and backcountry practice. APEC is the institutional backbone of pre-hospital education in Alaska.
akmeded.org →