You’re hiking in the woods. A branch snaps…and suddenly you’re on the ground, immobilized by pain. As the sun begins to set, you wonder what you’ll do next, and who might come to your rescue…

Wilderness Warriors

It takes intense training to rescue and provide excellent medical care to patients under normal, predictable circumstances. To do the same thing in untamed wilderness? Well, that takes an extra layer of grit.

That’s why each spring for the last 33 years, UMBC’s Emergency Health Services (EHS) program has sent a group of hardy students deep into the forest to learn the finer points of search and rescue. Over the course of three days, in remote Garrett County, 17 students in this unique program will practice everything from orienteering to “dead reckoning” and learn to be a team – all under the careful watch of a community of alums and emergency volunteers.

No matter the weather, these Retrievers are ready for anything.

Story by Jenny O’Grady
Photographs by Marlayna Demond ’11

“Everybody Helps Everybody”

A fresh layer of snow covers Abbott’s Orchard, a small clearing near the lodge in New Germany State Park where students will spend their weekend training. The first challenge: pitching tents in less-than-optimal conditions. Later, as the teams gather at benches in units to compare notes and brace themselves for the weekend ahead, they meet the more than 30 alumni and friends from across the EHS program’s history and nearby rescue operations who will teach them everything they know – including bear safety.

“The biggest thing that draws them back is the camaraderie, and the fact that they overcome adversity together,” says Cole Brown ’88, EHS, who leads the training staff for the weekend. Through that, “they build friendships, and they learn how to put aside their personal views and from there come to be a team. So they go from being an I to a we.”

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Spider Straps and Stokes Baskets

Emergency personnel refer to the “golden hour” as the all-too-limited time between the occurrence of an injury and the best window of opportunity for care to be given. Finding success as a rescuer means not only understanding how to use the best tools for the job – but how to do it quickly and carefully. To prepare for real-world rescue scenarios, EHS students practice everything from orienteering – using compass and paces to estimate locations in unknown terrain – to strapping victims with unknown injuries to back boards, to rolling them safely to care in a wheeled basket. They also study standardized lost person behaviors.

“This training is absolutely essential in wilderness medicine because you can’t always get a helicopter to the scene,” says Jeff Mitchell, a clinical professor in the department, who has run this exercise since its start in 1983.

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Sweep and Clear

With tools and equipment skills at the ready, students take to the woods searching for clues – and hoping to find their patients in time to be helpful. Alumni like Raven Gronsbell ’15, EHS, who now works as a paramedic in Kent County, volunteer to act as “victims,” often sitting quietly for hours in the woods before being found by student rescuers.

“I will be out there sitting in the woods… waiting… and hoping they’re fast,” says Gronsbell, who in a nighttime search portrayed “Casey Wood,” a teen who wandered away from her family while exploring. Gronsbell spoke so highly of the class that her math major sister, Jessica, decided to take part this year. “I also really enjoy helping out with the training. That’s why I come back.”

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Read more about the EHS program: Practicing What They Preach

With Lisa Soumphontphakdy ’14, Visual Arts

Back in 2012, Lisa Soumphontphakdy ’14, visual arts, was a recent transfer student looking for a home at UMBC. She loved music, she loved to sing, and she especially loved the idea of making more female friends, so the Stilettos, UMBC’s only all-female a cappella group, seemed like a natural fit.

After auditioning, she quickly bonded with the group and became as involved as possible, arranging music, designing T-shirts, acting as president, and shooting and editing the group’s first video – Meghan Trainor’s hit “All About That Bass,” complete with sassy choreography, which she uploaded to YouTube. “I fell in love with it a lot more than I expected,” she says.

“[Lisa] definitely was a maternal figure in Stilettos,” says fellow Stiletto senior Valerie Pasquale, health administration and policy, who was pleased to work with Soumphontphakdy again last fall. “[She] always was pushing the envelope, trying to get us to be the best that we could be.”

The video she made – a cover of “Boy,” originally performed by the British girl group Little Mix, and arranged by junior Becca Nolder, social work – now has more than 11,000 views. So, what exactly does it take to make a video go viral?

STEP 1: GET A DEGREE IN… DESIGN?

While Soumphontphakdy started off at UMBC as a film major, she switched her focus to graphic design to broaden her post-graduation career options: “Every single business needs a graphic designer,” she says. However, she’s kept her video muscle strong in her current job at Educational Funding Company, a Bethesda-based software firm, since video has proven so effective in online marketing in recent years. It would also provide her a golden opportunity off the clock.

STEP 2: GET YOUR GIRLS TOGETHER

Last fall, when Pasquale asked Soumphontphakdy if she wanted to shoot a music video for “Boy,” with its intricately structured harmonies and, as Nolder says, its “empowerment, Cheetah Girls kind of vibe,” Soumphontphakdy jumped at the chance. A cappella was such an integral part of her college career, she says, that she wanted to maintain the connection.

“This was an organization that I loved and was passionate about… I didn’t want it to be a thing where once I left school, I just forgot all about my a cappella life,” she says.

The group laid down the track in the studios at UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building (PAHB), assisted by fellow Stiletto Jenna Polignone, music and computer science, and Matthew Neary, computer science. After Polignone mixed and mastered the song, the group was ready to shoot. The production ended up spanning locations across the entire PAHB, from the Linehan Auditorium stairwell to the Forum sculpture outdoors.

STEP 3: GET GOOFY!

While a cappella will get you used to being on stage, performing for a camera isn’t always as familiar – or comfortable – an experience. Luckily, Soumphontphakdy had a strategy there, too: during filming, “we had some of us standing behind the camera, dancing and singing, so that they didn’t feel too intimidated by the camera. [We were trying] to get everyone to loosen up and be more comfortable with the video.”

STEP 4: GET TO THE EDITING SUITE

Filming a cappella groups, Soumphontphakdy says, is a multi-step endeavor: with everyone lip-synching in tune with the audio track, it requires multiple takes of each voice part, the soloists, and the group as a whole. “We managed to knock this down in about two to three hours,” she says, with one to two takes of each group. (“I’m a big advocate for being efficient with time,” she adds.)

Lisa shot the video on DSLR and edited it in Adobe Premiere. “It probably took me four or five hours [to edit] because […] I had to watch through each [clip] individually, to make sure I’m grabbing the good bits. I put markers on the parts where I felt like they were particularly good with the energy, or [with] their expressions, or… just in their overall performance.” In splicing together the video, she wanted to gather “the best of everybody.”

STEP 5: GET ONLINE

The video was released on Facebook on November 28, one week ahead of the Stiletto’s 2016 winter concert, and has since garnered more than 11,000 views. Comments poured in from both inside and outside the UMBC a cappella community, including from Soumphontphakdy herself:

On December 4, the Stilettos played to a full house… or, more accurately, a full lecture hall.

Says Pasquale: “We had [our concert] in the afternoon on a Sunday. Usually you wouldn’t think there would be a lot of people that came, but because of the video, everyone was like ‘Oh, we’ve got to see this group!’ So the auditorium was packed. That just tells you how useful the digital marketing was, and how grateful we are for Lisa’s help.”

As of this writing, another Stilettos music video is in the works.

— Julia Celtnieks ’13

https://www.facebook.com/umbcstilettos/videos/10154688410664882/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE

Watch “Boy” by the Stilettos at bit.ly/umbcstilettosboy.