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A True Account of Life Saving Technology
By Greg Bartlett

I am an avid hunter. Every year, my father and I go out to the woods to try and bag a couple nice deer. The problem I always had was that although I love being outside, I can’t read a map. To compensate for that, I purchased a GPS tracking device two years ago. Using it with the maps has really helped me to get to the good deer runs in our area.

If I hadn’t had my GPS, I know that my father wouldn’t be alive today. Last fall, my father had a heart attack while we were in the bush. Getting to our location took an hour, and then it was another 2 hour drive to the nearest hospital. Carrying him out was obviously not an option, so I called the local ranger station and explained our situation.

I provided the ranger who took my call with my login information for the GPS service I subscribe to, and asked him to relay that information to the Coast Guard. In the normal course of a search and rescue, the Anchorage Coast Guard has to scour a relatively large area in a grid pattern to find lost hunters; in my case, they were able to find us in just over half an hour. One of the guys who worked on the chopper said that this was the easiest rescue he had been on since they had known exactly where we were.

We flew directly to the closest hospital, where there was a doctor waiting for my father. They rushed him through and he was on the operating table less than an hour after his attack. I am immensely thankful for the commitment of helicopter’s crew and the skill of the doctors, but I don’t think any of that would have mattered without the GPS. It was my “darned geek gadget,” as my father used to call it, that saved the day. It would’ve taken too long to find us, had we not pinpointed our exact location for the Coast Guard team.

Fellow outdoors men, I ask you to pick up a GPS tracking device. You may never need it, like I had, but it is a valuable tool in many ways. And if the worst happens, you will be able to get the help that you need as quickly as possible. Just because something is new doesn’t mean you shouldn’t adopt it. After all, once upon a time rifles didn’t have scopes, are you willing to give up that advancement?