Last Updated on September 12, 2025 by foxintheforest

This is a story that feels a bit difficult to write. In fact, I’m not even completely sure where to begin. I suppose everyone likes to think they are prepared to use the Garmin inReach’s SOS feature, but can you really be ready for living through an emergency situation? Is the emotional, physical, and logical side of your brain truly prepared for being evacuated?

Sure, you can pack the essentials. Know your first aid. Read accident reports. And be ready to respond. But living it is a whole different animal.

This is a simple, yet complex story.

It’s impossible to reflect back on my 7-day backpacking trip and not have calling Garmin’s SOS be a “highlight.” But there is so much more to this story than waiting for a helicopter.

We went on a journey.

We wanted a challenge. An adventure. To test our skills. And we got it in more ways than just one – and that doesn’t include our rescue story.

My hope with the story I’m about to tell you is that you can learn from our experience. Hopefully, this tale will give you insights to what it is like to call Search and Rescue and what you can expect.

You’ll gain knowledge and get a look at what we did well and what we would have done differently.

But there is a human element to being stranded in the wilderness. And it’s much more complex than pack this and do that.

Backpacking the Wind River High Route

Let me set the scene a little here.

My friend and I were on a seven-day backpacking trip along the Wind River High Route (Alan Dixon Route).

For those who don’t know, this is a cross-country route covering 86 miles and around 22,000 feet of vertical gain. You go over 13 high alpine passes (9 of which are named) and cross one glacier.

Most of the route is not on a trail – meaning you are making your way from basin to basin via cross-country travel.

It is an extremely rugged, remote, and advanced backpacking route where you are frequently talus hopping (3-plus hours a day), going over multiple high-alpine passes, passing countless lakes, and constantly route-finding.

This route is recommended for the light and fast who can cover 12-18 miles of cross-country travel per day.

My friend and I collectively have 30-plus years of backpacking experience. We are also competent mountaineers with nearly 200 summits between the two of us. We are also alpine climbers and ultra runners. We were in excellent shape and had plenty of experience in the mountains.

To put it bluntly, we understood the challenges we faced. And even though we still came into camp exhausted each day, we never felt like we were above our pay grade. We had ample skill and competencies to be in this environment.

The route is stunning and one of the most incredible backpacking trips of my life.

It’s been hard for me to pull apart the beauty and sense of accomplishment from the first 6 days of our trip from having to be in a rescue situation. However, it’s important to understand that we had an entire adventure before things went south. And keeping that perspective helps me reflect back with a sense of wonder mixed in with all the other traumatizing emotions that came from this experience.

The reality is, anything can happen out there, regardless of experience level or skill.

To be very clear, we were not noobs who understood nothing about our environment and the risks we were taking on. We were prepared, ready, and understood that all it takes is one bad step to have a completely f*cked day and that’s exactly what happened.

The Incident that Caused Us to Use the Garmin InReach SOS

I think many couch mountaineers (what I like to call people who simply read something but have limited experience actually doing it) assume that if someone calls search and rescue and isn’t in a life-threatening emergency, they are somehow wrong in doing so.

However, that’s simply false.

There are plenty of injuries that are serious problems in the mountains.

We were coming over Raid Pass – the last off-trail pass of the Wind River High Route when my friend got their foot caught and fell.

I won’t go into her medical diagnosis due to privacy. But it was a serious injury that quickly left her immobile.

We had just descended the headwall of the pass (the steepest part). But we still had some downhill left, then the route countoured across a flat section before dipping steeply again to the basin floor.

We estimated we were about 800 vertical feet high and about a 1/2 mile from flat ground (reality was closer to 1,000 vertical feet).

She was screaming in pain, so we took a break.

The fall left her unable to bear weight on her leg.

To be very clear, I’ve been adventuring with my friend for nearly a decade – her pain tolerance is higher than the average person, so I believed her when she screamed, cried, or winced with every step.

At first, we thought we might be able to walk it off – sometimes pain is immediate and subsides. So she took some ibuprofen and we began to crawl our way down the rest of the pass.

I checked in about 10 minutes later when she was falling far behind, even though I was moving quite slow.

I took her pack and mine so she could just focus on moving.

We weren’t in an area we wanted to linger. There was no shelter, no water, no flat ground (just rocks), and it wasn’t a great spot. However, we were moving slower and slower.

About 15 minutes later, when no progress was made, I asked if she was feeling any better and they said the pain was worse.

At this point, we were moving less than a 1/4 mile per hour. We were 2-plus miles from the nearest trail. And over 20 miles from the nearest trailhead.

I had contacted our emergency contact on my Garmin InReach to let them know what happened a little bit earlier. I told him that we were likely going to need assistance.

We stopped and splinted my friend’s leg with trekking poles and climbers’ tape. It helped, but it was impossible to go downhill on talus with the splint.

We decided we had to call search and rescue by hitting the SOS button on my Garmin.

The call was challenging to make, even though it was obvious we should make it. It wasn’t life-threatening afterall. But we wouldn’t be able to make it out on our own power.

Outdoor culture has such a stigma about calling for help. It’s almost as if, unless you’re bleeding out on the side of ridge, you’re a moron. You’re not prepared. You are just another dumb tourist from Texas hiking in the mountains with nothing but Chacos, a tank top, and a 1/2 liter grocery store bottle of water.

But the reality is, there is a huge spectrum when it comes to rescue. Non-life-threatening emergencies could become life-threatening with time.

Issues can compound.

There was no way we could get out of there without help. My friend could hardly move.

And we were prepared. So prepared, in fact, the SAR team thought we were emergency responders.

Search and Rescue Process

Immediately upon pushing the SOS button on the Garmin, it begins to scream. Beeping incessantly as a 20-second countdown begins.

Our tactic was simple. Call for help, let them mobilize while we work our way down the pass to safe ground.

Garmin dispatch immediately contacted me for basic details of what our issue was. Although I was unaware, they also called my phone to see if the emergency was real.

I explained our plan for self-rescue to a safe spot, gave them relevant info about what gear we had on us and what condition we were in, and they asked if we could get to a place where a helicopter could land and if we could signal. We said yes.

They also relayed details to my emergency contacts set up in my Garmin.

Finding Safe Ground

From there, the process got heavy.

I decided to put my bright orange pack cover on my friend while I scouted the route ahead.

I would hop down a bit, look up, and give her instructions for finding the least rocky, steep, and exposed path down.

The orange pack cover was so she remained highly visible, just in case something happened, she fell again, vitals tanked, or anything of that nature.

I did this while managing to talk to my emergency contact, Garmin dispatch, local search and rescue dispatch, and my friend’s spouse.

It was a teadious process. I was managing a lot of input from all directions while also trying not slip and fall myself.

I have to be honest. I have no idea how my friend was able to hobble off that pass.

There was a lot of pep talking, screaming, shouting, yelling. At one point we were just screaming “we are bad b*tches and we can do hard things.”

Rescue Attempt 1

Eventually the rocks gave way to grassy slopes and the slopes eased into a small flat section of earth.

Eager to set up a marker (and ditch a rather heavy bag) I sped out ahead to find a place for us to post up.

I built a helicopter pad with things I had on hand.

We took the orange pack cover and put it in the middle of a flat, rockless area. I built a huge X with boulders I had to harvest from nearby drainages. Then lastly, I hung a neon yellow camp shirt on a hiking pole I stuck in the ground for even more visability and to act as a wind indicator.

Then we waited.

About 3 hours after we first called we heard the chopper in the distance. As it appeared in the valley, the winds picked up.

Sheer 2,000-foot granite walls were on either side of us, creating complex wind conditions.

As the chopper circled and passed we held up our arms in an X – the symbol for medical help needed. I raised some hiking poles in an X and waved the entire X in an attempt to be more visable.

It felt like they saw us, but we weren’t completely sure. There was some confidence that they had our GPS coordinates – but they still have to visually locate us.

After 3 attempts to get close, the chopper disspeared over the valley’s ridge and out of view.

The storms roll in

The Garmin buzzed to life – both Garmin’s dispatch and our local coordinator said they would try again in an hour. The winds were too wild.

We later learned that they almost lost control of the chopper twice. It was just as harrowing for these volunteers as it was for us.

The one thing that kept our spirits up was that we had originally planned to be out for another day, so we had enough food, shelter, and warmth to be quite comfortable.

So we resigned to a few camp chores. I fetched water from a nearby stream while my friend dug into some lunch.

Then the thunder rolled in. Quickly I set up our tent – a thoughtful endevour for one person. We were using a Durston X-Mid 2p tent which is a finicky tent to pitch. You need to guy out all the points to make the tent stable in the wind. And this meant I needed even more big rocks.

So off I went up the hillside to grab the supplies.

Once we got into the tent (we didn’t pitch the inner) we had ample room.

As the rain pattered down and the thunder grumbled overhead, we prepared for the eventual reality that we were likely going to get that 6th night of backpacking.

Overnighting while we waited some more

The rescue team made one more attempt at coming to get us once the storm passed. But they didn’t make it more than 5 minutes from the base before a storm headwind pushed them back. Meanwhile, it was sunny, calm, and delightful at our little makeshift camp.

We got the news that the chopper had to turn around and it would return at first light.

This meant one thing – my friend was going to have one hell of an uncomfortable night out. But again, we had the essentials. Morale was a bit low, but at the end of the day, we were determined to make the most of it.

We each only got about 3 hours of fitful sleep that night. My brain finally settled into the seriousness of our situation – as the part that was compartmentalizing everything eventually went to sleep.

Kat was in tremendous pain.

And windy rain battered the tent all night. As a result, we lost hope that there would be a good window in the morning and the thoughts of rationing our food plagued our dreams.

Finally getting evacuated

I jolted upright at 5 am when the Garmin inReach buzzed.

When you set off an SOS – you can’t turn off the Garmin and you can’t turn off tracking. I was paranoid about the battery (which I had to recharge twice throughout the day). Luckily we had an extra charger.

The local coordinator said they would be making an attempt as long as the weather looked good up where we were. I told them it was cloudy, but no low clouds, precip or wind.

And within 40 minutes we could hear the chopper.

The Huey popped over the horizon, circling our area for what felt like forever.

Are they landing?

Do we have to hike to them? Them to us?

Will we get out of here?

All of these thoughts were racing through my head until eventually the chopper finally landed and two SAR team members popped out.

This was the first time I could finally let go of running a rescue. I could finally pass the baton of keeping everything together to someone else. In a rush of emotion, I started balling and couldn’t stop.

It was hard to tell the happy tears from the tears of fear, saddness, relief, and release. The only thing I could compare it to was the birth of my child. It felt almost (but not quite) on that level emotionally.

This was both of our first helicopter rides. We strapped into the canvas jump seats, put our bear spray in a Pelican case, and watched the beauty of the landscape we had spent a week traversing pass us by in mere minutes.

Once we arrived at the air strip an ambulance met us to take my friend to the hospital. One of the search and rescue team members offered to give me a ride to my car almost 2 hours away.

And from there we went to the local hospital where everything began to slowly spool down.

Things We Did Right

I was able to chat with the SAR team after we landed. I asked what we did well and what could have been done better.

Honestly, they had very few notes for us. In fact, the guy who gave me a ride was 100% certain one of us had emergency response experience based on how we handled the situation.

Neither one of us are emergency responders – the closest thing I have is lifeguard experience.

We were both very proud of ourselves both in the moment and afterward with how we handled the situation.

But here’s a look at the things we did that I would 100% do again

• Carry neon orange clothing or gear. We were told this is the most visible color in the mountains. Dull colors cannot be seen regardless of the environment – stand out!
• Remain calm and collected, but allow space for emoting. Every feeling is valid, but it’s imparative not to panic. We allowed each other space emotional outbursts. Then we would collect ourselves and move on.
• Create a plan and communicate it clearly. SAR knew: What gear we had, how much food we had, if we had access to water, and any changes in my friend’s condition. We clearly communicated our plan to self-rescue to a safe area and where that area was. We also explained what we were going to mark the area with.
• Focus on the things you DO have and keep conversation light. This kept our spirits up.
• Know your hand signs. Waving your arms means you don’t need help.
• Bring extra food. We each had one additional dinner in case something happened. We nearly needed it.
• Do not skimp on a first-aid kit. You can have a lightweight first aid kit with all the essentials, but don’t go into the wilderness with nothing but a few band aids and good vibes. Here’s what I put in mine (be sure to read the show notes as things have been added).
• Bring 2 battery packs. We were at the end of our trip and battery saving was a concern. With 2 battery packs, we had plenty of charge. I had to charge my Garmin twice – you cannot turn off your device without cancelling the SOS.
• Have 2 emergency communication devices. We had two Garmin inReach devices. If something were to happen to mine (ie the battery died and we couldn’t charge) my friend had all the contact info to use her’s to communicate. This isn’t possible if you’re alone, but this isn’t group gear either. Double up!
• Be creative. It is nearly impossible to see people on the ground from a helicopter. Your GPS is not a gauruntee of rescue. Be visible! Bright, neon, contrasting clothing or gear is key. But so was our t-shirt swaying in the wind. The more you do, the better your chances at being spotted.
• Have a trip plan and leave it with 2 people you trust. This lets people know where you expect to be each day, what to do in an emergency, and how to coordinate something if you don’t check in. We checked in with a pinned location of our camp every day.
• Know that rescue will take time. It took 20 hours for us to get evacuated. That was no surprise to us – there are a lot of factors at play when evecauating someone out of a remote environment.

Things We Will Change

There is always some room for improvement. Here are a few things that we both agreed we should change for our next trip.

• Get WFR certified. I realized my ability to triage was pretty limited. I’ve been talking about getting a Wilderness First Responder certification for years, it’s well past time.
• Add perspecription-strenght pain killers to our first aid kit. That would have helped Kat tremendously overnight.
• Carry a signal mirror. That was the only thing we didn’t have to signal that would have been very helpful for SAR – this was SAR’s one recommendation for us.
• Know the medical allergies of party memebers. I was traveling with my best friend – I knew enough about her medical history but I didn’t know her medical allergies or bloody type. This can easily go in a trip plan for referenece later.

Things we didn’t expect

There were a few things when it came to Garmin that were very unexpected. Here’s a few things to chew on.

First, my spouse and I share a Garmin. So our emergency contacts are one member from his family and one from mine. It doesn’t make sense to list each other. Or list any friends who may be out with us.

But in this instance, Garmin wouldn’t give my spouse any information about our situation because he isn’t an emergency contact. The best he could get was the local county in charge of coordinating efforts.

This wasn’t a huge deal because I was in direct communication, but had things been different it would have been very alarming.

You cannot conserve battery on your Garmin. My device definitely drained the battery quicker than I thought – largely because you cannot turn tracking off. Keep this in mind when planning your tech stack.

You cannot have bear spray helicopters. This is obvious – because bear spray going off in a cockpit would be death. But be sure to tell SAR if you have any aersol cans on you.

Lastly, while sending multiple messages, the messages would get severely delayed. At one point, I was in contact with 4 different people. Eventually I had to tell my spouse I had to stop messaging in order to deal with SAR messages.

If you’re finding there’s a big delay, cancel outgoing messages and start with the most important one, then send them one at a time.

Understanding Search and Rescue (SAR) and Their Risk

If you’re not familiar with SAR teams in the United States – they are primarily volunteers. These people put their life on the line to come and extract us.

Full stop.

I was told by the SAR volunteer who gave me a ride that he has spent 1,000s of hours in a helicopter and the winds when they first showed up were so severe it was one of the scariest rides of his life.

We would not have hit that button had we not felt that we could not get to safety ourselves. And that is worth considering before you head out on any adventure. Are you prepared to take on the risk? Are you understanding that these folks are acting completely self-less to come and rescue you?

Had there been ANY chance of us walking out of there, we would have grit our teeth and dealt with it. Hell, we TRIED to do that. But it became evident that simply would not be possible. Doctor’s later confirmed that my friend’s injuries were severe enough that walking out was not an option.

Frequently Asked Questions About Being in a Wilderness Rescue Situation

What did it cost to be helicopter evacuated?

$0.

This varies by state, but in Wyoming, Fish and Game licenses pay for search and rescue efforts.

We both donated to the SAR team that rescued us.

The ambulance ride and doctor visits were not free. And had the helicopter landed at a hospital, it would be charged as a medivac case.

Are you okay?

Yes and no. My friend is still dealing with their injuries. They were severe enough to need follow up treatment.

I wasn’t hurt to be clear. But mentally it’s a lot to process. It was a traumatic event. Something I hope I don’t have to relive again.

It’s only been a few days since the incident (at the time of writing this). It’s hard to pull apart how this experience will change my outlook on the outdoors. But the trip without the rescue was already changing me.

I told my friend on day 3 that this trip was meant to shape me somehow. So I have a lot to unpack in the coming months.

But we are both home and reunited with our families.

How long did it take to be evacuated?

Around 21 hours from the time of the injury until we touched down at the air field.

How Did You Know You Had to Call SAR?

It was a gut feeling. When my friend started walking after she fell, something didn’t feel right. I know her well and know she will push hard. But I had a feeling we were in a bad situation.

I hadn’t made the decision yet, but everything we did was to go down a line of possible solutions before we called someone.

I was sure in my decision when her symptoms worsened despite taking iburpofen.

There was a brief moment where she needed a gut check – “Are you sure this is warranted?” they asked. “Absolutely” I replied. “You can’t bear weight on it and we are over 20 miles from the nearest trailhead.” That was all I needed to make the call.

What did you do afterwards?

After I got my car I drove the 1.5 hours back to Pinedale, scooped up my friend and got food. We were starving and hadn’t eaten much in the last day (adrenalin does that).

Then I drove us home. It was an extremely long day.

Was this your fault?

No.

No part of me believes we did anything wrong. We were prepared. Trained. Qualified. And within our limits.

It was a simple matter of a bad step. The same thing can happen on your stairs at home.

Did you feel prepared?

Yes.

It was really confidence inspiring actually. We both felt in control of the situation the entire time. We never fought. Panicked. Freaked out. We felt fully prepared to handle the situation. There was never a moment where we felt helpless or over our heads. It helped that we had enough food and supplies, but overall, we knew what information was relevant and that it was going to be a long process.

On-the-ground vlog of getting rescued on the Wind River High Route

Over on my YouTube channel I’ll give an in-depth vlog experience from what it was like in the moment of the rescue. Recording my thoughts was a helpful tool for me to remain calm and get my thoughts out without alarming my hiking partner.