PA Wild Med.com

Pete is the Director for our PA Wilderness Medicine and Survival Skills Conference, currently serving as an Emergency Medicine attending at WellSpan in York, PA, and as the Director for the Wilderness Medicine Trek for WellSpan's Emergency Medicine Residency Program. You can learn more about Pete's bio under the faculty section.

(Photo: Mont Blanc - Chamonix, France)

We bring all this together under a few tents in the middle of remote woods in Hanover, PA, to create a truly awesome family experience and opportunity to acquire Cat 1 AMA CME while having an amazing experience with your family, friends, and colleagues. Most often make some new friends over the course of this wonderful immersive weekend wilderness medicine experience. 

I have had a number of great adventures where I have had the opportunity to practice my Wilderness Medicine skills. White Water Rafting the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River: this was a 17-day trip where there was no civilization for nearly three weeks. Your only communication to the outside world is a satellite phone with sketchy reception. Your only method of evacuation, if needed, would be by helicopter. One really becomes an expert on Water Disinfection on a trip such as this. I share numerous other skills and “lessons learned” from this trip within my academic presentations. Another favorite adventure was the Classic Inca Trail Trek to Machu Picchu. Learning how to acclimate to altitude and why it’s a bad idea to eat “Alpaca-on-a-stick” from a street vendor from a small village in Peru are lessons learned from this trip. (Not to mention why it’s a good idea to travel with Cipro and Immodium). Winter camping while Backcountry-Skiing Tuckerman’s Ravine on Mount Washington, NH helps to hone in Avalanche preparedness skills. Needless to say, I have had numerous great adventures that involve SCUBA diving (complete with marine envenomations); temperatures ranging from -30 F to 135 F; high altitude; extreme skiing; camping in the snow or the desert; encounters with rattlesnakes, bears, moose, wolverines, and one particularly grumpy mountain goat.  Other faculty (my friends) at our courses have many great adventures that include: thru-hiking the A.T. and P.C.T.; cross-country bike trip; Iron-Man competitors; Adventure Race competitors and Race coordinators; ER doc for 6 months at Murdo Station in Antarctica; Everest Base Camp; SCUBA to over 200 feet down; Medical Directors of Yellowstone, Denali, local SAR Teams. Many of our Faculty, including myself are Volunteers for the National Ski Patrol. Every class we teach and every topic covered in our courses are given by folks who have real world experience on their topics and bring true expertise to their teaching. To list all of the adventures my friends and I have had would take several more paragraphs.

I personally want to thank you for being part of our growing Wilderness Medicine community. I hope to see you at one of our events. And don’t forget….. “Find Adventure!”

Welcome to PA Wild Med! We are so excited to introduce ourselves and our annual Wilderness Medicine and Survival Skills Conference, hosted in Hanover, PA.

Drs. Eric Bowman (left) and Peter Baumeister (right) now co-host and co-direct this event together. This is an awesome, entertaining, and engaging all outdoor, world class, international wilderness medicine conference. We pride ourselves on creating an entirely outdoors medical education and adventure weekend experience for our participants with amazing food (thanks to our two gourmet executive chefs, Rosie and Joe), surprise celebrity guests, world renowned subject matter experts, and a host of world class expert instructors and lecturers with a multitude of experiences so vast they could not all be experienced in one lifetime by one person. 

Greetings! My name is Eric Bowman and I welcome you to PaWildMed.com. I am the original founder of the PA Wilderness Medicine and Survival Skills Conference, and also served as the previous Director of the Section of Wilderness Medicine for York Hospital. This website is designed for you to follow the annual conference activities and to assist you in finding resources related to Wilderness Medicine, especially events held locally or regionally.

On our Home Page you will see my personal mantra, “Find Adventure!” One of my personal missions is to inspire you to seek out new adventures. The field of Wilderness Medicine was created over 30 years ago, in 1983, when the idea for the Wilderness Medical Society was conceived. The founding members recognized a need to develop a specialty that would educate and foster research in locations where medicine was practiced in austere environments. Our goal is to provide you the education and the tools to be prepared for the unexpected when you seek out your next adventure.