Chinook Medical Gear
Founded in Durango, Colorado in 1990, now in Tulsa — a licensed drug wholesaler that builds custom medical kits, majority-owned since 2015 by the employee who bought it.
Adventure Medical Kits
Littleton, New Hampshire, 1989 — first-aid kits laid out by injury rather than by item, built in the same house as SOL, Counter Assault and the consumer QuikClot line.
Adventure Medical Kits dates itself to 1989 and sits inside Adventure Ready Brands, the Littleton, New Hampshire house that also runs SOL, Counter Assault and the consumer-channel QuikClot line. Its one real idea is organizational: the company says its kits fold open with a separate compartment for each type of injury, so the bag is sorted the way a problem arrives rather than the way a warehouse ships. What the brand designs is the bag, the layout and the assortment — most of what is inside is somebody else's medical device, with somebody else's labeling, expiry date and regulatory status.
- 1989The founding year AMK publishes on its own About page
- 55+Countries parent Adventure Ready Brands says its brands sell into
- One addressAMK, SOL, Counter Assault and consumer QuikClot all list 944 Industrial Park Rd, Littleton NH
What we'd reach for
- Mountain Series kitsThe backcountry family — Hiker, Backpacker, Explorer and up. Contents, counts and expiry dates differ by SKU and are listed per product, which is the only place to check them.
- MOLLE Bag Trauma KitThe bleeding-control end of the range, and the one that carries components whose regulatory status belongs to their own manufacturers rather than to the bag.
- Ultralight/Watertight kitsThe gram-counted, sealed-pouch versions. AMK's own weight and volume figures per SKU are the ones to read.
Adventure Medical Kits sells a layout more than it sells a list. Its own About page says “every item in our kits has its place,” and that many of the kits carry “a unique design that folds out with separate locations for each type of injury as well as reflective elements.” That is the whole proposition, and it is a real one: a first-aid kit is a filing system that has to be legible to someone who is not calm. Sorting by injury pattern instead of by item type is a design decision, and it is the reason this brand shows up in packs that otherwise contain nothing bought on price.
The company gives 1989 as its founding year. It is worth reading the rest of the page for what it does not say.
One house, four front doors
AMK belongs to Adventure Ready Brands, whose About page gives 944 Industrial Park Rd, Littleton, New Hampshire, says “The company was founded in 1975,” and lists the stablemates: After Bite, Ben’s, Natrapel, Easy Care First Aid, RapidPure, LuminAID, SOL and Counter Assault. The ARB homepage groups them into platforms and puts Adventure Medical Kits and QuikClot together under Adventure Health + Wellness, alongside a claim that its brands are “sold in over 55 countries around the world.”
The legal entity behind the trade name is easiest to see on a document neither company wrote for marketing. The EPA-accepted label for Counter Assault Bear Deterrent, stamped 26 March 2025, names the registrant as Tender Corporation d/b/a Adventure Ready Brands at the Littleton address. Tender is the older name; Adventure Ready Brands is what it trades as.
What AMK makes, and what it buys
AMK designs bags, compartments, instructions and assortments. Most of what fills them — dressings, gloves, tools, medications, hemostatic gauze — is manufactured by other companies and arrives with its own labeling, its own instructions for use, its own expiry date and its own regulatory status. That distinction is not pedantry. It decides who you contact when something in the bag is recalled, and it decides which document actually governs a product claim.
The clearest example is on AMK’s own storefront. The homepage markets QuikClot with the line “More than just gauze, QuikClot gives anyone the power to stop severe bleeding fast,” and the banner claim “Stop Bleeding 5X Faster.” Those are AMK’s words about a technology Teleflex owns, and the page carrying them cites no study. The controlling document for what any hemostatic dressing is cleared to do is its own labeling.
Where they fall down
The kit is transparent; the contents are not. AMK publishes contents lists, but not the manufacturer of each component, and a kit’s regulatory status is never the kit’s — it belongs to each item inside. Anyone specifying kits for a workplace has to check contents against the standard themselves, because no AMK-wide ANSI or OSHA compliance claim is published.
Marketing claims outrun the paperwork. “Stop Bleeding 5X Faster” is a consumer banner for a prescription-controlled device family. It may well be defensible against the underlying labeling; on the page where it appears, it is unsourced.
Origin is a company address, not a factory. Littleton, New Hampshire is where the house sits. No country-of-manufacture claim is published for kit contents, and readers should not infer one.
Expiry is the quiet cost. Medications and dressings in a kit date at different rates. AMK does not publish a single replacement schedule, so the buyer inherits a maintenance job the packaging does not advertise.
Where AMK fits
Backcountry and travel, where the bag has to be readable. The injury-pattern layout earns its price in a hurry rather than in a catalog.
As a base to modify. Most serious users add a tourniquet from a source like North American Rescue and remove the padding.
Not for: anyone who needs a documented workplace-compliant kit, or who expects a single manufacturer standing behind every item in the bag. For custom and agency work, Chinook Medical is the more literal answer.
Why we rate them
The organizing idea is sound and stated in their own words. Sorted by injury, not by item.
The house is legible. Four brands, one address, and a regulator’s document naming the entity behind them.
They are honest about being a kit company. The failure mode is that buyers forget it — and that is a reading problem more than a manufacturing one.
More in Field & pursuits
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
My Medic
North Salt Lake, Utah — the direct-to-consumer kit brand whose legal identity changed hands in January 2026, and whose own pages tell you which components came from where.
North American Rescue
Greer, South Carolina, 1996 — the company behind the C-A-T tourniquet, and the loudest voice warning that counterfeit copies of it have reached responders and failed.
QuikClot
The kaolin hemostatic brand Teleflex bought with Z-Medica for $500 million in 2020 — and whose consumer-channel paperwork is the part nobody publishes.