Because iOS features can sometimes be a good thing.
A group of 10 teenage hikers who spent last Friday night lost was located by a search and rescue team with the help of Apple’s Emergency SOS feature.
Members of the group — who are all 16 to 18 years old — spent about three hours Friday stuck on the trails of Santa Paula Canyon, in Los Padres National Forest, without proper hiking clothing, water and lighting equipment before they were rescued, Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Mackenzie Spears said in a text message.
The group was mostly outfitted with “t-shirts and shorts,” according to Spears, who added that “there were multiple water crossings and they needed to scramble” in certain sections of the hike, or climb steep terrain by hand.
The group reached out to the sheriff’s office around 8 p.m. on Friday after finding themselves lost on the trails, and were able to make contact with emergency officials using Apple’s Emergency SOS feature, which allows iPhone users to call or text local emergency services, sometimes even without cell service or Wi-Fi access. The feature allowed them to share their possible location and conditions with emergency personnel, said the sheriff’s office, which added that the teens’ parents also reported them missing.
The hikers were aided back to safety at Santa Paula Canyon, California.
More than a dozen members of the Upper Ojai Search and Rescue team, a group of local volunteers, headed out to look for the hikers within 30 minutes of having received their plea for help, the sheriff’s office said.
Following an approximately three-hour, 4-mile hike into the canyon that featured “low visibility, multiple stream crossings and trails that had been previously damaged from the heavy rains,” the rescue team found the missing teens on the so-called Last Chance trail around 11:15 p.m., the sheriff’s office said.
The hikers and the search and rescue team returned to the Santa Paula Canyon Trailhead around 2:40 a.m. Saturday, it said.
Via NBC News
