ITHACA - Tim Fortuna spent three days learning about rock climbing, swift-water rescue, Tyrolean traverses and backcountry medical techniques.

No, he wasn't getting ready for a vacation. An emergency room physician at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, Fortuna was receiving an introduction to wilderness medical skills so he will be better able to cope with urban disasters.

“These are skill sets you don't typically get in medical school. But if you have to respond to a disaster, when you might have to make your way through a collapsed building, or where there might not be electricity or water or help, these are the skills that could help save someone's life, maybe even your own,” Fortuna said.

Fortuna was among 200 doctors and first-responders taking part in a novel conference on wilderness medicine this week at Cornell University - the first of its kind in the Northeast, according to organizers. The conference ends Friday.

“These skills actually have a lot of practicality in disaster response, when systems break down, when you need to rely on improvisational skills, when people are under all kinds of stress and you're facing basically rather primitive conditions,” said Dr. Jay Lemery, the conference's medical director and an emergency services physician at Cornell's Weill Medical College in New York City.

Over the past 25 years, wilderness medicine has become an increasingly well-established subspecialty, said Paul Auerbach, a doctor at Stanford University Medical Center and founder of the Wilderness Medical Society who has written extensively on backcountry treatments.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, wilderness medicine techniques have become an integral part of disaster response, Auerbach said. The medical community is now embracing techniques and tactics derived from wilderness medicine training to provide emergency care in urban areas during disasters.

“We have found that the doctors that do the best in these disaster situations are the doctors who have been trained in wilderness medicine because they know how to do more with less resources,” he said.

Cornell teaches both wilderness and traditional medical treatments, but in different departments with little overlap, said Dr. Todd Miner, executive director of Cornell's Outdoor Education program, another conference sponsor.

Lemery said he developed the idea for a conference to combine the two disciplines after spending two weeks providing disaster relief along the Mississippi coast following Hurricane Katrina. The storm left the region without electricity, water and communications while the conventional care systems fell apart - very similar to the conditions encountered in wilderness settings.

But rather than just listen to lecturers, organizers decided to offer attendees the opportunity to participate in lifelike scenarios so the conference included more than two dozen hands-on learning sessions. The rugged gorges on the Cornell campus provided an ideal training ground for survival medicine, Miner said.

Those sessions included demonstrations on constructing a Tyrolean traverse - a mountaineering maneuver that involves traversing between two high points by travelling across two ropes strung between them -high-angle rope self-rescue, building hauling systems for extricating injured patients, procedures for rope rescues in fast-moving water and wilderness survival.

On the Web

Northeast Wilderness Medical Conference: nypemergency.org/wilderness/