How to Signal for Help in the Wilderness (Get Big, Not Loud)

If someone knows your route and expects you back, staying put and making yourself visible is almost always right. Wandering is what turns a short search into a long one.

Three of everything

Three whistle blasts, three flashes, three fires in a triangle. Three is the international distress convention, and it separates you from every natural sound and light.

Space them out. Signal on a schedule rather than constantly — you will exhaust yourself and your batteries otherwise, and searchers are not listening every second either.

What actually reflects

A real mirror, a phone screen, polished metal or a foil panel. A stone, however smooth, will not — that piece of advice circulates widely and does not work.

To aim a mirror: hold two fingers in a V at arm’s length, put the aircraft or vehicle in the V, and flash the reflected light across your fingers and onto the target.

A whistle beats your voice

It carries further, costs almost no breath, and works when you are too cold or too tired to shout. It weighs nothing. Put one on your pack strap where you can reach it without taking the pack off.

Get big and geometric

From the air, a person is almost invisible. What reads is scale and shape.

• Spread bright kit out — a tent, a jacket, a bivvy bag.
• Make straight lines, triangles or a large X. Nature makes very few straight lines.
• Contrast matters more than colour: dark kit on snow, bright kit on dark ground.
• Trample shapes into snow or grass; shadow makes them visible.

Fire and smoke

Fire is visible at night; smoke is visible by day. Green vegetation or damp material makes thick white smoke; rubber or oil makes black. Keep the material to hand and add it when you actually hear or see something, rather than burning your supply on an empty sky.

The phone

Even without signal, most phones have an emergency SOS function that can reach services. Keep the phone warm — cold flattens batteries fast — and put it in aeroplane mode between attempts so it stops burning power hunting for a network.

Learn where your phone’s SOS is before you need it.