About Outerlands

Outerlands Medics & Rescue was born from a simple but urgent belief: that life-saving medical knowledge should be accessible to everyone — including the queer, women's, and outdoor communities we call our own. As a queer, woman-owned and operated wilderness medicine training company, we know firsthand how often the people most excluded from outdoor and emergency preparedness spaces are also the people who need that knowledge most. Founded in Santa Cruz, California, Outerlands serves the Greater Bay Area. 

Our motivation is personal and community-rooted.

Outerlands exists to meet folx where they already are — in their communities, their schools, their organizations — and to remove the physical, socioeconomic, and psychological barriers that stand between people and feeling safe and confident outdoors. Every instructor we hire is a woman or LGBTQIA+ professional, because representation isn't an afterthought here — it's the whole point. Every course is designed with our communities in mind.
 

We offer a full suite of nationally certified wilderness medicine trainings — from a one-day Backcountry First Aid introduction, to a two-day Wilderness First Aid course, to the intensive eight-day Wilderness First Responder — as well as custom group trainings. Every course is offered on a sliding scale, because the people who most deserve access to this training are often the same people priced out of it elsewhere.