I recently had occasion to use my inReach in an emergency situation and in the post-emergency aftermath. The inReach proved exceptionally useful. I’d like to share a few lessons learned from that experience. Feel free to pass along to others as you see fit.
WHAT HAPPENED? We were on a multi-day river trip in the central Idaho wilderness. At our second camp, one member of our group went out fishing for an hour or so. When he was overdue to return, we sent out a search party. They found him a few hundred yards from camp, non-responsive with a head injury and a very faint pulse. Our group started CPR and other emergency treatment led by a physician in our group. I initiated an inReach SOS. A Life Flight team reached us about 1.5 hours later. Unfortunately, my friend did not survive.
The next day, I used the inReach to obtain non-emergency assistance from the outside world. We wanted to find out how/when the county authorities would deal with investigation and body recovery, and also make arrangements for my friend’s wife to leave the trip, contact family members, get a jet boat pickup for our entire group, arrange for changes in our vehicle shuttle arrangements, etc. I used about 200 messages (outgoing and incoming) during the non-emergency phase.
So, some lessons learned…
THE INREACH SOS SYSTEM WORKS. We were in the middle of nowhere, at the bottom of the second deepest canyon in the United States. A Life Flight emergency medical team arrived after a 50-minute helicopter flight from their base, 10 minutes of searching for a landing zone, and a 15-minute walk from the nearest usable LZ. Had my friend’s injuries not been quite so severe, that emergency response could well have made a life-or-death difference.
TELL SOMEONE ABOUT YOUR PLANS. When you activate an SOS, the emergency response center will telephone you and the two emergency contacts listed on your account; they are trying to determine if it is likely a real emergency. They will leave a message if there is no answer. I was not reachable by phone of course, nor was my first emergency contact (my wife, who was on the trip with me). My second emergency contact – my sister – listened to her voice mail and returned the call to the emergency center. However, she was not aware of our adventure plans. She did give the right answer to the emergency center – “if my brother says he needs help, he definitely needs help”. My sister then contacted another family member who did know our plans, and my sister then confirmed our general location to emergency personnel.
“Tell someone about your plans” is so fundamental I’m chagrined to admit I didn’t get this right. I configure one of the preset messages on the inReach as a “checking in okay here, no reply needed”. I normally send this periodically during multi-day adventures, and often at the beginning of a day trip as well. However, the recipient list for my “checking in okay here” message did not include all of my inReach emergency contacts; it does now.
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO. I’ve owned my inReach for over two years and have used it enough to consider myself fairly proficient. I would not have wanted to be figuring all that out for the first time during an emergency. Some basic important skills to practice:
- “how do I send a message?”
- “did that message actually get sent or is it still trying?”
- “how can I force it to check for incoming messages?”
- “how do I manage multiple conversations?”
The inReach subscription allows five test messages per month to the inReach test address. Also, I highly recommend sending a few SMS and email messages to yourself or a friend, so that you can see what recipients will be seeing on their side, and so you can get a feel for how an inReach conversation back-and-forth might go.
SOMEBODY ELSE SHOULD KNOW TOO. If you are in a group, what happens if you are the one who is injured and unable to communicate? I highly recommend doing a quick training session for at least one or two others in your group. (The first time somebody handed me an inReach, I truly could not figure out how to use it; fortunately it was not an emergency situation.)
USE THE EARTHMATE APP. My inReach Explorer has a four-way arrow keypad for picking out one letter at a time from the on-screen keyboard. It is cumbersome and s-l-o-w and error-prone. In a real emergency, it is brutally slow.
The Earthmate app (I have it on Android) is free for registered inReach users. The app uses Bluetooth to synchronize with the inReach, and lets you use your smartphone keyboard for messaging; a huge win. The app is useful in its own right for map display and tracking, waypoints, routing, etc. The Earthmate app also gives you access to your smartphone’s contact list.
Advance practice with the app is essential; setting up the Bluetooth pairing, how to re-establish pairing when your phone is in airplane mode, etc.
BUT DON’T RELY SOLELY ON THE APP. You might do what I did, accidentally tap the wrong menu item on the screen and lose the Bluetooth pairing during an SOS (!) No way was I going to mess with setting that up again while an emergency was in progress; back to using the four-way arrow pad…
PREPARE THE INREACH CONTACT LIST. If you use the Earthmate app, you’ll have access to the your contacts list on your phone. But if you don’t have the app, or if your phone craters, you’ll have to rely on your memory and the contacts that you’ve stored on your inReach. As a minimum, you’ll want to store mobile phone numbers and/or email addresses for all your emergency contacts, and anyone else that you might be likely to reach out to for help. Don’t forget trip-specific contacts (local emergency contacts, emergency contacts for trip companions, the vehicle shuttle company, the outfitter’s office, etc.)
BROADCAST A WIDE NET FOR HELP. In the post-emergency phase, I started contacting outside friends for assistance. But I made those contacts sequentially; when Friend 1 didn’t reply after a while, I then tried Friend 2, etc. The first person to respond was not the first person I messaged (but he had some local knowledge and was the absolute best person for the specific tasks at hand, Dan thanks again).
I should have sent the “assistance needed” message to several people all at once, casting a wide net rather than trying sequentially. The delay was not critical in this particular case, but in another situation might have mattered. Better to have multiple responses and be able to say “thanks, Person X is already on it.” (Everyone I contacted did respond; thank you all very much)
HOW TO REACH YOU. As a registered inReach user, you have an assigned inReach email address (mine is ray.fink@
The only way outside people can contact you is if you contact them first, or if you enable a MapShare page and allow messages from that page. Which brings us to…
MAPSHARE. As a result of this experience, I have enabled a MapShare page so that others can see my location history. I have set up the MapShare page so that viewers can send me a message from that page. Garmin recommends using a password on your MapShare page in order to maintain some privacy. However, I am choosing not to password-protect my MapShare page; in an emergency, I don’t want my outside contacts to be delayed by trying to find the password in their email archives or wherever. My “checking in okay” preset message now includes a link to my MapShare page, as a hopefully convenient reminder. Feel free to check mine out (contact me directly for the URL) but please don’t send me unnecessary messages. I’m still experimenting with MapShare; for now I am sharing an hourly location update. (Note that the lower-cost subscription plans charge $0.10 per tracking update.)
SOME USEFUL INREACH SETTINGS
- Listen Interval Under the default setting, the inReach checks for incoming messages every 10 minutes. If you are trying to conduct a conversation (or multiple conversations) this will be excruciatingly slow. Short intervals use battery power more rapidly, I suggest changing this to shorter intervals only when conducting a conversation. For normal use, I have set mine at 20 minutes, to further reduce battery usage. Settings > Messages > Listen Interval
- Tracking Interval. How often to send a location update to your MapShare page. The default is ten minutes; I am using one hour, to reduce battery usage and costs. Settings > Tracking > Tracking Interval
- Auto Track. The default setting is Off; the inReach does not send tracking points unless you “Start Tracking” from the Tracking icon. I have set mine to On, so that it will automatically send tracking points unless I explicitly turn Tracking off. One less thing to remember to do…
KEEPING IT CHARGED
The initial SOS and the subsequent 200+ messages in post-emergency communications over a 36-hour period would likely have depleted the battery on the inReach. Fortunately I carried a portable USB power pack. I wouldn’t bother to carry backup power on a day trip, but I do now consider one as an essential part of my multi-day adventure packing list.
I hope you find some of this helpful, and I also hope that you never have an emergency where you need the inReach SOS.
Safe travels,
-- Ray
Copyright 2018 Ray Fink
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