Agreed. A lot of people don’t plan for contingencies or emergencies very well. A SPOT type PLB with rescue insurance at a minimum but I’d also rent a satellite phone for occasional check ins and emergency communications. Same as I do for saltwater and offshore fishing. I think the last satellite phone I rented for 2 weeks for a 10 day hunt and with the prepaid minutes, shipping, insurance, etc it was around $200. That’s extremely cheap insurance for all kinds of unforeseen issues. Having a wife and young children at home at the time I worried more about them than something happening to me and being able to put my mind at ease allowed me to enjoy the hunt more. Our flight service dropped us and a couple days later, while we were out in the bush, they crashed a Beaver across the inlet which seemed to scare the local flight services in the area. Two caribou hunters were waiting for their flight service to pick them up but after 4 days had passed since their pickup date and no plane they knew they were on their own. They were planning on having to hike out and said they figured 10 days to get back to civilization but when they saw us they spent a day hiking over to us. I loaned them my satellite phone and they got the confirmation that the flight service at Moose Pass fu.cked them over. They were told that the weather was too bad but in the past several days several planes came and went. The flight service got cold feet and were not very accommodating…very rude to them. I called my flight service and within a couple hours those guys got flown out. They were headed directly to Moose Pass to confront the ass holes that left them without concern even though they had paid for the round trip in full.
That simple lesson is enough for me to pony up another couple hundred for the piece of mind that a sat phone brings.
