Herb (Herbie) Ogden MD, a wilderness medicine legend among National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) faculty, recently retired from 33 years as NOLS’ Medical Advisor.
Herb graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in philosophy in 1975, and in the same year took a semester course at NOLS, learning wilderness skills, leadership and expedition behavior.
Herb became a field instructor for NOLS in 1978 and over the next seven years led expeditions in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, including NOLS’ Denali expedition. In between his NOLS courses he was a “technical ice consultant” for a car commercial filmed on Alaskan icebergs and the sales manager for a radio station in Maine. He was a teacher at a school for dyslexic children, an illustrator for a children’s animated film, and a bicycle messenger in New York City.
Thanks to the wilderness medicine he taught in NOLS courses and an interest in high altitude medicine, Herb decided to pursue a career in medicine. He completed Bryn Mawr’s Post- Baccalaureate Pre-Med program and attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. His residency in Emergency Medicine was at Harbor-UCLA in Los Angeles.
NOLS had been developing the wilderness medicine training for its field instructors and had come to the point where a set of protocols and physician oversight seemed wise. In 1991, at the end of his residency, NOLS asked Herb to become the school’s advisor for matters of student screening and field medical practices and protocols.
Herb and Tod Schimelpfenig, then the NOLS Risk Management Director, crafted a set of protocols for field medical practices and medication administration, possibly the first for an outdoor education program. These protocols were cutting edge practice at the time, and still set a high bar for adventure education. They became, as one instructor commented, “a doctor in our pocket.”
At a time when communication with field expeditions was difficult, instructors relied on the protocols to guide their medical care and evacuation decisions. These protocols have been revised annually, based on field instructor use of the protocols and the evolving practice of wilderness medicine. Herb would use the NOLS Field Incident Database to review the injury and illness profile from the field expeditions, and revise the protocols accordingly. He also was instrumental in advising and reviewing guidelines as participant screening became a more formal process.
Herb was always available and quick to respond to requests for help and advice, anytime day or night, whether at work, play or at home. He returned requests for advice between patients at the hospital, while on a 100 mile bike ride, and when he should have been sleeping after a night shift in the ED. When satellite phones came onto the scene, Herb was able to give invaluable direct consult to instructors in the field.
His consults were as varied as NOLS courses: an open fracture with developing compartment syndrome deep in the India Himalaya, screening participants with a variety of medical conditions, anaphylaxis in the Wind River Range, acute abdominal pain in Patagonia, and during the Covid pandemic, decisions about course participants with flu-like illness.
Herb was willing to support hundreds of field instructors for so many years because of his confidence in the Wilderness First Responder training the NOLS instructors receive and his experience with their context of practice. Instructors appreciated that his advice was always grounded in his field experience, and given from the perspective of the field instructor.
Herb, recently honored by NOLS as a Trustee Emeritus, and his wife Sheila have two grown children. He continues to ski, bike, and enjoy life with friends and family.