Wilderness Survival School

The annual Wilderness Survival School (WSS) is designed to provide the skills and self-confidence to increase your odds of survival in an unexpected stay in the wilderness.  Topics covered include, but are not limited to, preventing a survival emergency, psychology/attitude, shelters, signaling, fire craft, and hypothermia. Survival related medical emergencies and other priorities will also be covered.  This course includes three weeknight evening lectures and one overnight field lesson that provides practical training/ experience in a simulated survival situation.  This school is particularly informative to the novice/intermediate hiker, but even very experienced CMC members have found this school valuable.

Enrollment is open to all CMC members (only) with ANY level of backcountry experience or hiking classification.

Planned dates for the 2024 course are as follows:  LECTURE SESSIONS: Mondays, May 6th, 13th & 20th from 7 pm to no later than 9:30 pm at the American Mountaineering Center in a main floor conference room.  The overnight field session is scheduled for June 1st & 2nd 2024 (will be all-day Saturday with a return to town Sunday morning). 

NOTE: In the past twenty-seven years there has not been enough demand for the WSS to offer the school more than once a year.  We fill the class to capacity and seldom have a waitlist to get in.  

Most of our instructors in the WSS also teach in other CMC Schools which causes scheduling conflicts both with them and for students also enrolled in these other courses.  We have to schedule classroom lecture session space in the American Mountaineering Center the prior year for our classes to avoid overlapping with other CMC Schools. 

Additionally, we are required to get a USFS Group Use Permit or a costly private land reservation for our group's overnight training session many months in advance.  These reservations have become more competitive and harder to get every year as more people recreate in the Colorado backcountry.  

We open enrollment about two months in advance of our first session and the roster fills up slowly during that period.