travel and rhum

Hey again people, this is a follow-up to a post I made in a bit of a panic last night.

TL;DR: My friend and his dad are safe and sound, and SAR was not needed. There was a miscommunication that led to the making of the first post, but they were not in any danger!

For those of you who were a part of the experience last night, really big thanks for helping me, a non-hiker, navigate a strange situation and providing personal experience and expectations alongside other things.

The Situation: without going back into everything major from the first post, my friend and his father planned to take a days-long journey through the JMT. He had told me and our friend group about this well in advance, but none of us are at that level of outdoorsy. We last heard from them eating at a hotel Wednesday night, where they implied they’d be starting the journey Thursday morning.

Fast forward to last night and I receive a foreboding text that set off this chain of events. Posting to Reddit, as many have pointed out, is not a great idea for a potential emergency, but it paid off in other ways that I’ll get to below. Most notable about the ordeal is that I learned what kind of cool technology and services are available for hikers and rangers, and of course, my friend learned what kind of mess you can make out of being vague and not communicating what kind of situation they might be in, both before and during their hike.

Nevertheless, I had received a text requesting help, and after an hour without contact, I called the nearest Sheriff’s office in Inyo National Forest. They were very professional and helped to alert SAR of the situation, and asked me to keep them updated if my friend ever got back to me. All in all, I’d say I wasn’t worried when I called, but it was definitely the lack of communication from my friend that had me concerned.

The Resolution: I had only heard of sat phones in movies and media, so I never truly knew how they worked—only that they offered rudimentary service in places where typical cell signals are nonexistent. The help and advice from the people at r/hiking, along with my GF and the rangers of Inyo National Forest led me to understand exactly what these things do and how they work—such as the lag between responses equal or greater than one hour. And I had texted them rather frequently throughout the ordeal.

Sure enough, I received about five messages back to back at around 10:21pm eastern replying to my messages from almost two hours ago. Turns out (as many suspected) that the two were fine and okay, and what they were looking fire was information on whether Sawmill Pass was closed off from snow. They assured me they had overnight gear and an SOS built into the phone for emergencies; they told me multiple times to call off SAR (which I did but they’d need to wait to get that reply lol).

Inyo National Forest sheriffs called off SAR and took down the garmin number from my friend’s texts, along with their coordinates and told me they’d attempt to contact them with info on Sawmill’s condition. In the morning, I reached out to the hikers and they told me they never got contacted, but to play it safe, they’d extract by backtracking the way they came. I wished them well, told them SAR was off, and let them know that r/hiking was mildly annoyed and interested by this situation.

Takeaways:
– happy ending, despite the panic!
– Sat phones take time to send and receive messages, and this probably should’ve been explained long before the hike began.
– Communication and understanding how to communicate are a hiker’s best friend when asking for ANY kind of help.
– There’s no shame in calling for help from the rangers and SAR if you or anyone involved in a hike are in need of it. Always better safe than sorry.

Once again, thanks everyone for your help and patience. This hiking stuff seems pretty cool, I might have to give it a try—with the right training of course. 🙂