How telling someone where you’re going can save your life

One of the best ways to get out of a survival situation is to wait somewhere safe until a group of well-trained professional mountaineers come to your aid with medical supplies and rescue equipment. This is of course the ideal situation but also well within the realms of reality if you remember to tell someone where you’re going.

(It only takes the simplest of accidents to make you a part of the latest survival story)

No one thinks it’s going to happen to them, why bother telling someone you’re going to spend a night in the woods that you’ve been in a million times before? You know the layout and exactly where all the streams and hills are, so why do you need to bother anyone to make sure they check up on you?

The simple answer would be that you can’t guarantee you won’t have an accident, no matter how agile you are or familiar with the terrain, all it takes is one slippery rock to snap your knee like a twig.

I’m actually guilty of this myself, but I’ll leave my own story at the bottom of the page. For now, here are a few reasons why it’s so important to tell people where you’re going when venturing out into the wild.

1) No one will rescue you if they don’t know you need rescuing

This one may sound obvious but the amount of times someone has been found dead because rescue got to them too late is quite staggering. Normally when search teams go looking for someone it’s because they’ve been gone for too long, and not because they’ve missed a scheduled check-in.

(The box death hollow wilderness in Utah, not a great place to get stranded)

An excellent example is the story of Victoria Grover. She went for a hike on her own in the Box Death Hollow region of Utah. She stayed in a lodge that served evening meals and after checking in one morning, she left for her hike and asked the clerk at the front desk to save her some dinner for when she got back around 8-9 pm, to which he said “OK”.

She spent the first night in the wilderness after losing track of time, and on the next morning, she broke her leg trying to jump down a ledge. After spending the next few days sitting by a stream with a snapped knee, she was convinced a search team was looking for her. She only found out rescue had been dispatched after she didn’t check out four days after she arrived at the lodge.

She later blamed the clerk for not raising the alarm but the public seemed to be against her, as she didn’t tell a single person where she was going and when she’d be back, not even her husband. Saying to someone “Can you save me some dinner this evening” is not the same as “I’m going to this specific area and this is the route I intend to take, if I’m not back by X time then something’s wrong”.

2) Rescue may come too late if you don’t make check-ins

On any big venture such as climbing a large mountain, it may take you several days to reach your goal, and in this time there are a million things that could happen to you. On any long or particularly dangerous hikes, arrange check-in points with someone to shorten the rescue response time should you need it. If you’re going to be gone for 5 days and tell someone to raise the alarm if you don’t return by day 6, then you’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you get hurt on day 1 and can’t call for help. Doing this can be as easy as calling the same person whenever you make a check-in, or anyone who would be responsible enough to raise the alarm.

3) Don’t go off course, and if you do let someone know

I’d say the vast majority of hikers and bushcraft types have done this, and I can be included in this number. When on a long hike in an area you’ve never been to before, you are guaranteed to see a beautiful-looking lake, cliff, or something in the distance that you just “have” to get a better look at.

(There are always teams of rescuers waiting for a call to go and get someone, most of which are volunteers, but they can’t do that if they don’t know where to look)

If you’re going to go off course by a considerable amount then update your contact on the route change, as rescue teams will first look where they think you’re going to be and not where you could be.

4) If it is an option, always have your contact be someone who’s trained

What I mean by this is various areas have organizations governing them, such as national parks often having a visitor center or hiking lodge somewhere. These people are trained to keep an eye on return times and have direct contact with various rescue groups.

Telling anyone responsible is a good idea, but if you have the option of notifying the group that governs the area you’ll be in, that should always be a priority.

5) When injured, don’t try and make it to rescuers if you know they are looking for you

You are much more likely to be found faster if you stay with your vehicle, and if you don’t have one the rescue teams will first search your known route. If you try and make it to them before they get to you, you’re going to risk not only making yourself more lost and prolonging the time it takes for them to get to you, but could also risk making your injury worse.

It may seem tempting to start heading towards flashlights in the distance, but there’s a much greater chance you’ll make your situation worse than better in the long run.

How I learned my lesson

I used to hunt rabbits in one particular woodland I had permission to do so in. It was well away from any roads and the nearest people were an elderly couple who lived about 500 meters from the edge of the trees.

The woodland was in a small but very steep valley with a stream at the bottom that had a fallen tree over it. The stream was only a few feet wide but you had to go down a bank to get to the edge, so I used to walk over the tree trunk. This is something I’ve done more than a dozen times and since the tree was about 2 feet thick I was sure it was safe, then one day when I was in the middle I heard an almighty “Crack”.

The trunk snapped in half in the middle right where I was standing and I fell about 5 feet into the stream but managed to land on my feet. One part of the trunk was under tension and pinged off in the opposite direction to me, while the other fell straight down and landed so close to my foot that it made a bad scratch down the side of my ankle.

If I had landed two inches further to the side than I did, the end of the trunk would have come straight down on me and completely crushed the entire half of my lower leg. This was a fully grown tree that must have weighed several tons, and what was a bad scratch could have been the loss of my right leg, or at the least several shattered bones.

My phone was on charge at the time as I didn’t think I’d need it, so in the event my leg was crushed and I didn’t get trapped and bleed out in the stream, I would have had to crawl up a steep valley slope covered in ferns and brambles with a crushed leg. Lucky for me this wasn’t the case but before this happened I thought to myself, I’ve been there many times and just wanted to do a couple of hours of hunting before dark, what could go wrong? It goes without saying that I got very lucky, and also that I’ve learned my lesson.