GPS are great and I carry one too but to be honest I don't trust it in cold weather and I never leave it on just to log my track for vanity sake, its purely to get back home if we get lost in a whiteout. My batteries die in no time whereas the spot lasts for a long time and sends out a location every 10 mins and can be tracked on a cellphone.
xcfind.paraglide.us/
Here are all the paragliders who want to be tracked on spot. Click on NW USA and bingo, if I'm moving you will see me.
SPOT should only be used as a last resort to send out a signal when all else has failed or you are unable to move. In this case a simple I'm OK but need help message would have worked to some friends without activating the full on SAR assuming there were BC friends available. I always try to be self sufficient so am not advocating the spot as a substitute for carrying a map, GPS or otherwise but there is no doubt it would have helped in this situation, no doubt. Anyone who doesn't carry one because they don't want to be seen as not self sufficient is kidding themselves too, SAR is going to come looking for you when you are overdue anyway so they might as well know where you are. Case in point in the US Paragliding champs this year in Idaho a UK pilot without SPOT went down in the boonies, broke bones, badly wounded and spent 2 unnescary nights in the wilderness while wasting countless hours of SAR time and money and cancelling 2 days of paragliding competition. SPot would have found him in no time, saving time and money all round.
You can't pick the right kind of technology unless you bring it with you hence why I travel with GPS , map, compass and SPOT.
Glad it looks like they are going to make it out.
Why not just carry a regular GPS unit, generate a track on the way out, and then follow the track back in case of whiteout?
That's infinitely preferable to any SPOT or PLB in cases like this where the party is uninjured, fully capable of moving, and simply unable to navigate home. If you're going to suggest technology as a solution to their problems, why not pick the right kind?
SPOT or PLB may be great in case of injury or accident, but suggesting that they are the best technological solution in this particular case is entirely mistaken. They would have been home on Sunday as planned if they had a GPS and had run a track on the way out, and the entire SAR effort could have been avoided.
Anyway, glad they are safe and found now.
