A Biker's Backcountry First-Aid Kit

The lecture, as I recall, came before the hot afternoon hours of bayonet drill and after a morning double-time march to and from the rifle range some six miles from the barracks. Squeezed between two activities dedicated to acquiring the skills of inflicting grievous bodily injury upon the enemy before it could be inflicted upon us, one would imagine that we'd have taken the sergeant's notes on battlefield first aid very, very seriously. But we didn't.

We were quiet, of course, and we were sufficiently attentive to memorize the army's three cardinal first-aid rules for the treatment of wounds (good advice in the civilian world as well): (1) Clear the airway. (2) Stop the bleeding. (3) Protect the wound. But we paid attention in the same kind of glazed-eyes manner with which most of us have suffered through required CPR classes, flipped through manuals on first aid, or read some motor club's flyer of medical do's and don'ts for major car wrecks. And why? Well, the answer is simple: It's never going to happen. You are absolutely never going to be first on the scene of a smash-up. You will never have to administer CPR. And whether in the Army or the civilian world you will never need first-aid personally, nor have to provide it. Oh, and you are never going to die. Reassuring, huh?

Psychiatrists have an explanation for this refusal to face the obvious, but those of us who write now and again on first aid must deal with the critical problem that this refusal creates: how to make people take the topic seriously. Seriously enough to think about it before you head into the backcountry (and get into serious trouble), and to assemble a first-aid kit, and not leave it behind (an essential but not always practiced last step). Of course, reading a few pages on emergency medicine — how to recognize and treat heatstroke, shock, broken bones, concussions . . . how to stop the bleeding from a bad wound or what to do after a close encounter with a snake — also makes real good sense. But let's not ask for the moon.

If you're still with me at this point, I'll be so rash as to assume you might be one of those backcountry bikers who will purchase or put together your own first-aid kit. If so, recognize from the start that, as with bike repair tools — the essentials of which have now been amazingly reduced in size and weight but, I would argue in some cases, also in effectiveness — you can minimize your first-aid kit to the point where the only solace it will provide is the pre-accident knowledge that it's there. A single 4 x 4 compress pad weighs almost nothing, granted, but it's worth almost the same when the skin you've just lost in a fall on slickrock measures 6 x 6. At the other end of the spectrum, you can purchase or put together the kitchen-sink variety kit, like the one I found recently on the Web. This puppy weighs in at a tidy one and one-third pounds and hangs, marsupial-like and bulging, in a corner of your bike frame. You tow the hospital bed behind you.

The point is that your first-aid pack should be large enough to handle the simple scrapes and bruises, as well as preserve life until you can get back to civilization, but not so large that you find yourself asking at the trailhead,"Anybody got a first-aid kit?" hoping that you won't have to pack your own. Why? Because when someone answers, "Yeah, I threw one in," you're liable to find down the trail that the "kit" is composed of a couple of Band-Aids and a cell phone — neither of which is worth a damn if your leg's eaten your chainring and you're bleeding like a sieve. First-aid kits aren't all created equal. Don't learn that lesson the hard way.