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column: rL IJ� � jC)-.j "..;: il � • . Jii .. _ � _. • 0 ' . . . " : TEXT: RICHARD OVERTON ART WORK: STUART PATTERSON IS THE CELL PHONE .sOON TO BE AS UBIQUITOUS FOR BACKPACKERS AS THE SV\!I��.�,B1Y,YJ<'�!E�? I Mark Matthews and his three climbing partners were con vinced that nothing was more remote in all of California than Mt. Shasta's frozen 14,1 62·foot summit. Inching towards it, they found the trail strewn with exhausted bodies. And the few who made it to the top, some half·dozen spent climbers, lay exhausted on the edge of a rocky crater quietly relishing their accomplishment in serenity and silence. Then a nearby climber's phone started ringing. "Hello. Grandmother?" Her family had managed to find her some three miles above Northern California to make ... dinner plans. The annoy(ng but fa miliar pitch of a cel lular phone call is something urbanites have grown to live with, however grudgingly. But when the calls start penetrating wilderness areas and national parks, it feels as if some sort of inherent trust has been broken. There, a few feet from Matthews and his friends, was ringing, chatting proof that they hadn't gone quite far enough to get away from it all. In fact, it may not matter how far you go anymore. With the spread of lightweight, portable cell phones and the antennas that bring them to life, cellular technology is being used in increasing�y remote settings, often carried by neophytes whose natural response to danger is to dial 91 1. Smaller, lighter and cheaper with each revision, the new breed of cell phone is finding its way into backpacks, all the while stirring up a raging debate in the outdoor community about just how useful such an :item can be as a safety device. John Sanders is search and rescue coordinator for the Appalachian Mountain Club at Pinkham Notch, New Hampshire, high in the Presidential Range of the White Mountain National Forest. The White Mountains are perfect ly situated within range of weekenders from New York, Boston and Quebec. Millions of visitors every year come to this wilderness to scale Mount Adams and Mount Washington, which offer some of the only true alpine scenery in the northeastern United States. Three years ago Sanders first notic.ed that a measurable proportion of emergency calls were coming from cell phones carried into the park and, he says, the numbers have continued to rise. This isn't news to the wireless industry. Tim Ayers, vice pres ident of a Washington D.C. industry advocacy group called the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, claims th�re are now forty-four million cell phones in this country, and their ranks are expected to grow by ten million in 1997. Due in pi"t to deregulation contained in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, start-up cell companies are building scads of new cellular antennas in overlapping ser vice areas. Cellular service provider Cellular One, for exam ple, recently installed a cel lular relay tower in Yellowstone National Park to provide perfectly reliable service within a few hundred yards of Old Faithful. But packing a cell phone on your next overnight backcountry trip is not a foolproof link to help. The anecdotal evidence is piling up regarding the cell phone's ability to save lives. While there certainly are a handful who have been plucked from peril thanks to a wireless 91 1 call, as a tried and true safety device it leaves something to be desired. . . :hlp between technology and nature. The backcountry IS a place where you can just leave your phone at home," says the club's camp codirector Bill Arnold. Their visitors don't seem to mind. During the first year the policy was enforced, there was only one complaint. "For a bona fide emergency those phones can save time," says Bryan Yeaton, a staff member at Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities (SOLO)' a wilderness training school for search and rescue workers in Conway, New Hampshire. "The problem is that people may not recognize a bona fide emergency. " Yeaton has written about the issue for SOLO's Wilderness Medicine Newsletter, a publication that circulates among search and rescue professionals. Not only did he find that hik ers had a tendency to panic prematurely when they were carrying a phone, but he showed that the way wire less technology works can render cell phones com pletely useless. For starters, the cel lular signal travels about six miles before it needs to find a relay beacon, a much shorter distance than high-powered broadcast airwaves, such as AM and FM radio. In urban areas that isn't a problem, but in the countryside those antennas get sparse. Also, natural formations such as canyons and ridges can block a signal from reaching an antenna even when it is quite close, similar to the problem car-phone users have when they drive into tunnels. Final ly, even if you stand atop the highest ridge and your call can reach a relay beacon, there's no tel ling . where the signal may end up. In the case of northern New Hampshire, Yeaton says that it's not unusual for 911 callers to find themselves on the line with very confused dispatchers far across the border in southern Maine. But it is the tendency for cell phones to amplify bad backcountry decisions that makes the device problemat ic for people who risk their lives to save others in the wild. "People were calling saying it's getting dark, and they don't have a flashlight, and could someone come and rescue them," says Sanders. "And you just can't fine someone for being stupid " This is certainly looking like one of those there-oughta be-a-Iaw stories, but so far the books are bare and even the agencies charged with supervising our wild lands have taken a hands-off approach. Both the National Park Service and the US Forest Service say that it's up to local administrators to make decisions regarding the installation of cellular antennas on government lands, and with that the responsibility to develop policies for phone users. There may be no cure for the annoyance factor, any more than there's a cure for the obnoxious camper in the site next to yours. But possible solutions seem to be rising to the surface among backcountry enthusiasts in New Hampshire. The Appalachian Mountain Club has approached local forest service officials with the notion of placing cell phone guidelines at trailheads, but the idea hasn't gone anywhere yet. Others aren't waiting. The Randolph Mountain Club on the north side of the Presidenti al Range in New Hampshire have banned cell phones from their facilities, which include a pair of cabins and two other shelters on Mount Adams. A string of unnecessary rescue operations played a big role in the decision, but the group is also People who make their living in the back country seem to agree that the technolo gy can be useful. "I already choose to take all these benefits of technology into the wilderness with me, such as high tech clothing and maps," explains Tod Schimelpfenig, Rocky Mountain school director for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Lander, Wyoming. "And I want to take this com munication device too." Along with training some of the coun try's elite search and rescue profession als, Schimelpfenig and other NOLS staffers also perform emergency opera tions in west-central Wyoming's Wind River Range, along the Continental Divide. NOLS is careful not to rely on cellular technology any more than on satel lite phones, GPS devices and two way radios, though Schimelpfenig says that each is becoming a part of the search and rescue bag of tricks. But for wilderness users, both Schimelpfenig and Sanders agree that there's just no substitute for good safety awareness and sound judgment though sometimes it sounds like tough love. "If you can walk out, you should walk out," Sanders says, "regardless of whether it hurts." Says Schimelpfenig, who carries a cell phone himself: "Going into the back country involves t extricating myself. But if there's a com munication device that can save some one's life in the wild, then we want to use it. The question is, Will we use it well, or will we abuse it?" �e responsibil ity of