Any thoughts on this?

In a committing area away from cell phone coverage, your partner goes down, you get back to your camp or attend to their needs on the wall, hit the PLB, & help comes. No need to figure out where the 911 call came from (if you get a signal), how to interpret garbled voice transmissions, or how the HAM radio relay is being communicated.

As a tool, a better way to locate or not?

Is that a microbrew? If so I say Yes...screw your friend more beer for you!

BTW Mark, sorry for not responding to your email...would love to get up to the Black Wall with you once the road opens.

So what is a PLB anyways?

Personal Locator Beacon - you activate it when you need emergency services at your location.

PLBs, unlike other recently introduced personal tracking gadgets, transmit signals on internationally recognized distress frequencies. The 406 MHz signal is monitored by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking System (SARSAT) detects and locates distress signals. GPS coordinates greatly assist search and rescue crews, and in the event GPS isn’t acquired, position can be calculated through Doppler Shift as a reliable backup.

Here's an REI page for the product from ACR

The cost for a PLB is gonna be $500-$700; There's also the SPOT at $150 with other fees (which doesn't work off the PLB systems). The PLB works off of three redundant systems as fail safes so even if the GPS can't get a fix, they can triangulate your position in about an hour (they say 50 seconds with a GPS coord fix to relay to the EMS services -- more than likely a chopper will go to locate if they can fly & ground teams will start staging).

As a policy mandate yes, absolutely an intrusion. Looking at Mt Hood, if it's weathered in like it notoriously gets; there's really nothing anyone can do except wait out the storm. But looking at this as a tool, would you use it if your partner went down in a remote location?

i.e. do you bring a cell phone? Do you ski-mountaineer with a beacon? Some bring their HAM radio or sat phone; not really as a mandate, but just something they want to have in case they need to communicate.

Will Gadd's skills book had something that made a lot of sense to me with regard to bringing technology like a cell phone with them. Something to the effect that: High falutin ethics aside; if I'm hurt, I want my wilderness experience over as soon as possible.

Thinking, holy shit, $500+ dollars. Well, you get what you pay for. More than not, technical climbers are no longer that dirt-bag lifestyle when it comes to planning & excecuting a committing outing. We're not talking about going out 20mins to your local sporty crag for 1/2 rope routes.

Just something to ponder; it's a locator tool, nothing more.

A couple weeks ago a party of hikers got cliffed out in sketchy terrain. One used a SPOT locator. Coordination between the center, sheriff's dept, on call leader for the MRA team, and FFL had a heli at the scene within minutes to do a supply drop until technical teams could do the extractions.

Now, whether or not the hikers should have, could have, or would have -- the locator did work as intended and the hikers came out okay.

my sense of foreboding is lessened when I travel in closer, the mountains get pretty big when I'm reduced to walking both in and out of them...feels a little lonelier without a cell phone and "we" are the rescue team. Whether you use the electronics or not the wilderness is bigger without them