As my finger hovered over the button, I worried about how would I be judged by my fellow long-distance hikers. In a genuine emergency, the actual rescue MAY not cost the person anything, just in the same way you don’t pay to pay the fire department to rescue you from a burning house. I can appreciate your perspective regarding the Duplex and Zpacks, although I do find it quite disappointing that they didn’t reply. I bought an inReach last year and it has always provided me with a sense of security when in the wilderness.

If you’re planning a camping or caravanning holiday, one of the smartest investments you can make is in a windbreak Windbreaks provide much-needed protection from the wind and rain when enjoying outdoor activities, helping to keep your camping space sheltered and comfortable. If you want to stop people peering into your tent, a windbreak can make a great privacy wall, as well as giving you somewhere to enjoy a drink without a gale blowing through. For messages to anyone other than the Garmin Response during an SOS, standard messaging charges will be applied based on your plan.Then I needed to continuously press the button while the timer counted down backwards from from 30 on the screen. I struggled to find somewhere to block the wind in the pitch-black darkness with the snow swirling around me.

I wedged myself between the boulders and flipped my tent upside down (so the thicker bathtub floor was toward the sky). Before I knew it, I was lying in a ER bed and being treated for hypothermia and the cold injuries to my hands and feet. But, I’m here to stomp on the illusion that you’re safe just because you’ve hiked thousands and thousands of miles. The spikes are way too short, couldn't even get them to stay in place whilst we attempted to guy the damn thing out. I’d checked the weather forecast once again on the way back down, and it now showed a 30-60% chance of rain/snow overnight.

Around 9:40 pm, the SAR coordinator texted me again to inform me they were hoping to try another helicopter rescue during a break in the storm after midnight. When I was deciding how to use my REI dividend back in May of this year, I had one major purchase on the top of my wish list. It can shelter your dining area from the wind, give your tent or caravan entrance extra privacy, or form a partition between your tents. Rescue costs could, however, become reimbursable depending on the circumstances involved and what state it occurs in. Then I pulled all the slack of the tent fabric taut and tucked under me it as tightly as possible to keep the strong wind from blowing me away.

But I would never have taken the extreme measure of pressing the SOS button unless I was ready to cross over the threshold of summoning a real-world rescue. Plenty of my fellow hikers and backpackers will read about my near-miss and continue to assume they don’t need a GPS locator on their solo backcountry adventures. I’d broken down my unstable tent to meet the helicopter, and now there was no way I could possibility get my it set back up again in this wind. The local fire departments didn’t have helicopters designed to fly at high altitude or pilots who felt skilled enough to make the rescue.When I woke the next morning, not only had several inches of snow fallen, but I now found myself in the midst of a genuine blizzard! Honestly though, I didn’t put too much effort into following up because I wasn’t really interested in continuing to use a product that was quite so fragile in adverse conditions.

My last big adventure of the 2020 season was a thru-hike of the Uinta Highline Trail (UHT) in northeastern Utah.It was a never-ending battle to try to brush the snow out of my tent so I could keep my down sleeping bag dry. Cobey – When it comes to a life and death situation, money shouldn’t be most people’s primary consideration. With this hasty shelter in place, I was able to wrestle my sleeping bag out of my pack and wrap it around me like a cocoon inside this makeshift tent-bivy.