Need 2 Know
How to use a distress beacon By Ruth McKie, DOC Digital Channels Analyst
Keen tramper Ruth shares her experience activating a distress beacon ramping is one of my favourite things. Nothing beats the thrill of an empty weekend, great forecast and a map full of possibilities.I’ve done lots of tramping over the years to a range of places – Great Walks, day trips, remote backcountry huts through to off-track bush bashing and peak bagging. But until recently, I’ve never needed to activate a distress beacon, although I always make sure there’s at least one in the group.
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Above: Ruth McKie holding her beacon. Photo Lucy Holyoake
40 Walking New Zealand, issue no 292
I’m very aware, and I hope you as a reader are too, of how incredibly valuable distress beacons are – they’re lifesavers. I’m sure you’ve read news stories of searches going for days because they didn’t have a beacon or stories where it was a successful rescue because the beacon made things fast and easy. I’ve read lots of stories about people activating their beacon but often it’s light on detail, just ‘we activated our beacon and the helicopter came’. Which left me with lots of unanswered questions, like how, what, why, when!? I figured I can’t be the only one, so I’ve talked to experts and gathered the research. Here is my personal beacon story, as well as some key FAQ’s that will be next month’s issue of this magazine. When I had to activate a beacon on a Great Walk It was a calm bluebird morning; the last day of an amazing trip, and I was in my own world soaking in the waterfall views, waiting for the sun to hit it to get a nice photo. I noticed a bit of activity going on off to the side of the track and
- 2022
my friends told me that there was someone who’d hurt themselves and someone was going to be activating their distress beacon. It was a busy Great Walk, and there were lots of trampers around (a fact which turned out to be both fortunate, and unfortunate). I went over too in case I could help. A lady had badly hurt her leg. Her partner had tried to bandage it up with a makeshift splint, but she was struggling to walk and the road end was still about two hours away. She did not have a beacon, but someone else had offered to activate theirs for her. The different groups of trampers wanting to help had been discussing what to do. They’d decided that the best thing was to send someone down the track to a flat area on the map where a helicopter could land, and activate the beacon there. The plan was the lady’s partner would slowly carry her down the track and someone else would carry their two packs down to where the beacon was being activated. This way the helicopter could land in a flat spot and the rescue team could bring a stretcher up the track to meet www.walkingnewzealand.co.nz
