What is right time to utilize hiker 911?
When Tara Steele set off on a 165-mile hike in the High Sierra this month, she yielded to her daughter’s request that she bring along an increasingly popular device barely larger than an iPhone that would allow them to keep in touch via satellite.
It seemed silly and superfluous, but worth it to put her daughter’s mind at ease, Steele thought at the time. But a week into the hike, she suffered a stroke on a steep stretch of trail 10 miles from civilization.
“I got it more to reassure my daughter,” said Steele, 66, who’s now recovering at her Santa Rosa home after being airlifted by helicopter off the John Muir Trail on Aug. 14. “Until I felt my lips go numb, I wasn’t sure I was going to press the SOS.”
Devices like the one Steele used — known as personal locator beacons or satellite
messengers — send out 911type signals for hikers and other adventurers who run into trouble. They’ve been around since the 1980s, but have become ever lighter and cheaper and more user-friendly. Now, they’re almost as ubiquitous in the backcountry as sleeping bags and freeze-dried beef stew.
The devices can be lifesaving, for sure. But their popularity has come with controversy, especially among search-and-rescue experts who have to respond to the distress signals. It turns out not everyone grasps the concept of “emergency.”
“Where I’m comfortable calling for help versus where you are, that is absolutely different for each person,” said Lt. Kathy Curtice, who heads search and rescue for the Fresno County Sheriff ’s Office, which responded to Steele’s call for help.
Steele’s request was appropriate, Curtice said. Others, not so much. Just as 911 calls can be questionable — think of the reports of people calling police over late pizzas or missing cats — so too can SOS alerts from the wild.
California rescue crews have gotten calls from people who ran out of water or food; a woman who saw a mountain lion; a man who thought he saw a wolf, although it was almost certainly a coyote; and hikers with sprained ankles and mild altitude sickness who could have gotten to safety on their own.
Matt Scharper, search-andrescue coordinator with the state Office of Emergency Services, started keeping statistics on the devices in 2003, when he was already sensing they were going to be a headache.
Back then, he called them “Yuppie 911” devices, because they seemed to be used by people who had little business being on their own in the wilderness and were relying on experts to save them from the first inconvenience. His impression hasn’t changed much since.
In 2012, California rescue teams responded to 57 calls from the devices. This year, they’d already responded to 90 by the end of July. Half the calls this year have been for legitimate emergencies, he said, but the rest were a combination of accidents — usually people playing with a device — and lousy judgment.
The most infamous falsealarm story stemmed from a Grand Canyon expedition in 2009. Four hikers, two fathers and their two teenage sons, triggered their device three times for dubious reasons, including because the water “tasted funny.” The third time responders rushed out to them — in a helicopter — they forced the hikers to leave the trail.
“They were clearly abusing the system,” said John Ladd of San Francisco, an experienced backpacker who runs a message group for fans of the John Muir Trail.
It was around that time, he recalled, that backpackers began debating the devices’ merits and potential for misuse. Some people, Ladd included, were resistant to carrying what felt like a tether to civilization, when they were seeking a quiet escape. Others worried that inexperienced hikers might get an inflated sense of security and attempt treks beyond their ability.
Despite the tension, use of the devices has increased, a trend driven not only by technological leaps but by growing interest in outdoor activities. On the John Muir Trail, which connects Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney, the number of hikers each summer has climbed from 1,000 a decade ago to more than 3,500 today.
The devices, which cost about $100 plus service charges, access orbiting satellites, giving them wider coverage than cell phones. But that limits their features. Depending on the device, users can sometimes text back and forth with another person, but in many cases all they can do is send out an SOS.
The messages are routed to the county closest to where the signal originated, which can usually be determined to within a few yards using GPS. If the device doesn’t have twoway communication, the emergency responder that receives the signal has no way of knowing if the person sending it has sprained an ankle, has fallen off a cliff and is bleeding to death, or has simply gotten lost.
So the responders have to assume it’s life or death and act accordingly, said Scharper. Depending on a number of factors — time of day, weather, location — that could mean sending a helicopter or a ground team. Sometimes, just dispatching people can be dangerous if the weather is bad or access is dicey.
“We have to treat it as an emergency until proven otherwise,” Scharper said. “That’s why it’s sometimes difficult when you get there, and it’s like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re tired? You didn’t pack enough water?’
“The taxpayers just paid thousands of dollars to give someone a free ride out of the backcountry,” he said.
Nonetheless, Scharper and Curtice are fans of the devices, especially if they include a texting option. A decade or two ago, if someone ran into trouble in the wilderness, authorities often didn’t find out until the person was reported missing, which might take days or even weeks.
That forced some people to get themselves out of jams, even if it meant crawling out on a broken leg or, as in a famous memoir and movie, cutting off a hand pinned under a rock. If they couldn’t save themselves, rescue teams had to launch hunts over territories many miles across. Sometimes, people were never found.
That still happens, of course. Last month, a Bay Area woman wandered away from a campsite near Lake Alpine, in Alpine County, and wasn’t found in an 11-day search.
On the whole, Scharper would rather people carry the satellite gadgets than not. Clearly, Steele agrees.
“Any person or any group of people hiking, there should be a personal locator device with them,” she said.
She can’t say for sure that her SOS signal saved her life. But when she hits the trail again next year to finish her hike, the device will be coming along.