How to Winch in a Pinch

We head out into the Utah wilderness with the Cameron Advanced Mobility team to learn to off-road like military special forces.

- ELANA SCHERR

Kira Cameron looked concerned. "You don't know your blood type?"

"I don't do a lot of bleeding," I mumbled.

To be clear, I wasn't bleeding. I was just checking in at Cameron Advanced Mobility (CAM) for a three-day wilderness training experience in the ruddy rock canyons near Arches National Park in Utah. I'd remembered my hiking boots, headlamp, and work gloves-okay, flowered gardening gloves, but they have leather palms-so I was feeling fairly confident about training with a team whose usual students were military special forces preparing to offroad in war zones. Until the blood question.

"I'm an EMT. It'll be fine," said CAM founder and lead instructor Ken Cameron. Kira signed me in and waved me toward the hotel bar, where several broad and bearded men were comparing stories of how and when they reattached their fingers. First lesson of the trip: Table saws are real bastards, and duct tape always comes in (sorry for this) handy.