ALUMNI PROFILE By Paul Riggi
Mike Webster The Wilderness Guide

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As the executive director of Wilderness Medical Associates (WMA) in Canada, Mike Webster has been to both ends of the world and in between, working as a wilderness guide and paramedic.

Quick, what movie would you watch if you were on a ship in the roughest stretch of water in the world, battling 50- to 60-foot waves? If you’re Mike Webster BA ’95, the answer is “The PerfectStorm.”

“That was pretty good fun,” Webster says of that experience four years ago through the treacherous Drake Passage, en route to Antarctica.

As the executive director of Wilderness Medical Associates (WMA) in Canada, he works as a wilderness guide and paramedic, and has traveled to about 50 countries and some of the most exciting terrain on earth.

Webster never mapped out his career. But looking back, he sees some logical links to his days at the University of Windsor. A sociology major, his education exposed him to “different things, different viewpoints.” He took kayaking and canoeing through a campus recreation program, and became a first aid instructor through lifeguard training.

Webster’s first full-time job was leading a group of youths in a court-ordered wilderness “hoods-in-the-woods” program in Arizona. He helped create a program to train participants in first aid and first response so they could be on call to do search and rescues in the area.

“The experience springboarded into everything else I’m doing now.”

Webster continued in the American southwest doing park medic work until 1999 when he moved back to Ontario. The next year, he started work as an instructor with the WMA.

Through the WMA, he’s followed the footsteps of the great Antarctic explorer Ernest Shakleton to his gravesite on South Georgia Island and been on an icebreaker in the Scandinavian Arctic, where he viewed breathtaking, marinebased life including humpbacked whales, seals and penguins. During one such Antarctic trip three years ago, Webster and his fellow crewmen rescued six Ukrainian scientists adrift on a Zodiac inflatable raft who gave them thanks and brownish-tinged homemade vodka.

The WMA is Canada’s source for wilderness medical and rescue training, offering state-of-the-art certification programs recognized around the world. One such program is linked to the University of Windsor – a first aid wilderness training in the Outdoor Recreation Course offered through Windsor’s Kinesiology program. Course instructor Dr. Victoria Paraschak says the training has been “invaluable” for instructors and their students, who go to Algonquin Provincial Park every year.

The WMA helps instructors understand the “underlying problems” of a medical emergency and provides a “holistic” way of dealing with first aid, Paraschak explains.

Webster has evacuated people for various injuries and conditions, including broken bones, heart attacks, thrombosis and gastro-intestinal disorders, including seasickness which can be quite serious. Just how bad it can get was made clear in the January 2005 Town & Country article, “Antarctica: The Bill Chill.” Writer Thomas P. Farley tells of his own experience through the Drake Passage and of receiving a warning from Webster, who served on the ship’s medical team: “There are basically two stages of seasickness,” Webster told Farley. “‘Please shoot me’ and ‘Why haven’t you ou shot me yet?’”

©July 2005