Dana Whitfield
Wilderness Safety Reviewer
WFR (Wilderness First Responder), 12 years SAR volunteer
Dana Whitfield is a Wilderness First Responder and a search-and-rescue volunteer with twelve years on a mountain SAR team. Most of what she knows about outdoor safety she learned on real callouts: cold, tired people who made one small mistake that grew into an emergency.
At KnowOutdoor she reviews the safety pages before they publish. Her job is to check that the warning signs we list are the ones that actually show up first, that the response steps match current wilderness-medicine practice, and that we never overstate what a layperson can safely do. If a page implies more certainty than the field allows, she sends it back.
She is not a doctor, and our safety pages are not medical care. What she brings is field judgment: which hazards deserve the most attention, when a normal problem becomes an emergency, and how to tell the difference in time to act. She reviews topics like hypothermia and other cold, heat, and altitude hazards in the safety section.