SEKI Lyft?

[Dragonfly]

Unfortunately, it's a delicate balance. The NPS is trying to attract an increasingly urban demographic that doesn't have extensive outdoors experience. We desperately want people to connect with nature so they will care enough to protect it. But it's harder to see them through the learning curve in an age when people aren't used to being self-sufficient even with small, everyday things, like mending torn clothes or knowing how to change a car tire. Exhort visitors at the Grand Canyon to drink lots of water on the trail, and you'll wind up with several at Indian Garden suffering from hyponatremia. People who haven't experienced a lot of physical pain in their lives will panic when they fall off on a wet rock and wind up with bloody knees and elbows, and then their companions will panic, and then a button gets pushed...

It's tough, because you really, really want people to experience the wonders of our wild places. But it's going to mean a lot of people out there who figure a SPOT device is a good substitute for doing their homework, or who follow some spectacularly bad advice they found on the Internet. And I suspect the ones who would worry about paying a fine for a false alarm are not the same people who would set off a false alarm. They would be the ones you can barely convince to get on the helicopter even now, when they're at death's door in the middle of nowhere...so yeah, it's tricky. More emphasis on education isn't going to be the magic bullet to this problem, but it's the best option I can think of.

[Clown Shoes]

Maybe as part of the permit process they could advise people about the proper use of the devices the way they do with everything else