I was attending a rescue today, and spent most of the time waiting at base because thankfully there was a Air Ambulance and RAF Seaking on Scene, that didn’t require our assistance. However over that time in base the usual casual debriefs on recent jobs led to the discussion of a recent piece in the Daily Mail that blamed iPhone and smart phone users for a 50% hike in rescues over the last few years.
I have mentioned before that if you look at this diagram below from the Ogwen Valley MRT, then you can see that there is a sudden rise in callout around the mid to late 1990’s. This incidently is the same time that mobile phones drop in both price and running costs, the so called tipping point. My guess is that most teams will see a similar pattern.
What Jame Tozer (the name says alot me thinks!) suggests is a growing number of people are now relying on a smart phone with google maps and the built in GPS, and that they are coming unstuck on the mountain because of it. Now whilst I can’t deny that this has to be hapening, as I get a growing number of clients on a whole manner of courses with smart phone with anything from google maps to memory map loaded onto them, and my experience have played with them is that they can be accurate, very accurate. However they can also be off by a few hundred metres, it is this reliability issue that is a problem, combined with battery issues.
However, on Snowdon we have probably rescued as many people with neither a map, a compass or if they had the equipment then the ability to use it was somewhat lacking. However recently we had a rescue and it was this incident that I really want to mention, as it highlights not so much the negatives, but the positives that smartphone technology is bringing to Mountain Rescue, as long as we as a team are tech savy enough to use it.
So picture a scene with low cloud, pooor visibility and two people lost somehwere on Snowdon, our usual response is to ask them where they started from and get them to describe their journey, and by piecing it together formulate a ‘best guess’ as to where they are. We then deploy the team to search these places.
I a recent rescue the party mentioned they had a smartphone so we asked if they could send us there location from the phone. We recieved a screen shot of google maps (satelite image), with a green dot marking their rough position. To confirm this the coordinator then got them to take two pictures one facing either direction on the path. With those three images their position was pinpointed, and rather than search we could direct the team straight to them.
Smartphones are a fact of life now, and yes people are going to try and get up and down a mountain with google map, even the libyan rebelion are using them to fight a well armed and perpared army, and people will get lost, batteries will run out, they won’t be able to use it properly. However there is a plus side to using them.
On the case I mention the couple had a new map and compass brought from Pen Y Pass, but unlike there smartphone they could actually use it.
Anyway I thought it made a nice counter point to Mr Tozzer’s piece, because lets be fair unless you really know how to use a Map and Compass, then even moderately poor visibility can lead to people getting lost. On mountains like Snowdon, which are swamped by hords of ill prepared hill goers that in 99% of cases make it up and down safely, it is often only the ones that don’t get away with it that end up in the firing line as irresponsible. I see ill equipped hill goers every day I am on Snowdon, so Smartphones or not some of them will still need rescuing.