Emergency contacts and check-ins

Giving one person a read-only copy of the plan

An emergency contact is an email address, an optional name, and a permission of either view or email. View gives them a link to the itinerary. Email adds them to the messages Parks Manager sends about the trip.

The link opens a read-only, print-friendly copy of the plan: days, parks, stays, and the route. No sign-in, because the person you want reading it at 11 PM is not going to create an account first. The link expires after 7 days, which keeps the blast radius small if it is forwarded somewhere it should not go.

Check-ins from the trail

A trip can run a check-in session from the day before it starts through its end date. Each check-in records your GPS position, the time, and an optional note of up to 280 characters — enough for "camped at the second lake, going over the pass tomorrow" and not enough to be a journal.

Signal in a national park is intermittent, so check-ins queue on the device and send when a connection returns. Up to 25 go in one batch, and duplicates are discarded by their client identifier rather than posted twice. Full check-in data is kept for 30 days.

What the public link deliberately withholds

A link with no sign-in is a link that can be forwarded, so the public view is a reduced projection of the real data rather than the same page without a login.

Somebody holding the link sees the last 24 hours only, at most 8 points, with coordinates rounded to two decimal places — roughly a kilometre. Notes and GPS accuracy are dropped entirely. Signed-in crew members looking at the trip see every check-in at full precision, notes included.

The rounding is the part worth being explicit about. A kilometre is precise enough to tell a search coordinator which drainage to start in, and coarse enough that a forwarded URL is not a live pin on a person.

The email that asks whether you got home

After a trip with a real return date, every emergency contact gets an email asking them to confirm you are back. The first one goes at 8:00 PM Central Time on the return day, or 7:00 AM the next morning if that evening window was already missed.

Each contact gets their own confirmation link, and any single confirmation stops the mail for everyone — the point is to find out, not to collect responses. If nobody confirms, Parks Manager follows up once a day.

Confirming requires an actual click that posts back. Some mail clients fetch every link in a message to build previews, and a plain link would let a mail server confirm your safe return on your behalf, which is the one bug this feature cannot afford.

What it does not do

Be clear about what this is not, because getting that wrong in the backcountry is expensive.

• This is not a satellite messenger. Sending a check-in needs a mobile data connection, and a queued check-in sits on the phone until it finds one.
• There is no SOS button and no emergency service integration. Nothing here contacts search and rescue.
• Nobody at Parks Manager monitors any of this. The recipients are the people you named.
• A check-in session needs at least one emergency contact on the trip before it can start.
• Onlookers on a crew board can see check-ins but cannot send them.
• Full check-in history is kept for 30 days and then removed.

Common questions

Related features

• Weather and park conditions

  Forecast, park closures, and severe-weather warnings for the parks on a trip, pushed by email before they matter.

• Crew boards

  Share a board with up to eight people across three roles, and settle competing edits with a vote instead of a last-write-wins overwrite.

• Trip routes

  Order up to 60 stops and get a real routed distance and time on every leg, with the estimate labelled when it is one.