This was one of the reasons I wrote You’re Doing It Wrong: Dump the Myths, Misconceptions, and Bad Advice You Believe.
This is an excerpt from the book:
The advice goes viral every few years, usually packaged as a survival hack you should know before your next hike. If you get lost in the wilderness with a phone that’s almost out of battery, change your voicemail greeting to record your location, your intended route, your medical conditions, and the time of your last contact. The voicemail lives on the carrier’s server and persists even after your phone dies. When rescuers call your number, they hear the message and know where to look.
The advice sounds clever, which is why it spreads. It is not the lifesaving tactic it’s presented as, and the time spent executing it is time taken away from the things that actually work.
The technical premise is correct: voicemail greetings are stored on carrier servers and remain accessible after the device powers down. The problem is in the operational logic. Changing a voicemail greeting requires a cellular signal — the same signal that, if you have it, allows you to do several things that produce dramatically better outcomes. You can call 911 directly. Modern Enhanced 911 systems automatically receive precise GPS coordinates from your phone, often more accurate than what you would manually describe in a voicemail. You can text 911 in most U.S. jurisdictions, which uses less bandwidth than voice and may get through where calls fail. You can text your location to family — a single message with GPS coordinates does in two seconds what a voicemail greeting attempts to do in two minutes.
The other half of the premise — that rescuers will call your number and listen to your greeting — does not match how search and rescue actually operates. Missing-person investigations use cell carrier forensics: the carrier hands over historical tower-ping data, last-known location, and active GPS positioning to law enforcement under emergency exigent-circumstance requests. SAR coordinators don’t dial your number and wait for the beep. They get your phone’s location data from the carrier directly. The voicemail message isn’t part of the workflow.
The advice may have grown out of a kernel of legitimacy. Pre-smartphone, when location data and 911 GPS integration were less reliable, leaving voice information for whoever called was marginally useful. The technology has moved past it.
What actually works in a wilderness lost-person scenario, in rough order of preference. If you have any cellular signal, call 911. They can locate you and dispatch rescue. If voice won’t connect, send a text — to 911 if available, to a contact if not, with your coordinates from any maps app. If you have an iPhone 14 or newer, or certain newer Android devices, use Emergency SOS via Satellite — it works in remote areas with no cell coverage at all. If you are a regular outdoor traveler, carry a dedicated personal locator beacon (PLB) or satellite messenger — Garmin inReach, Zoleo, or a 406 MHz PLB registered with NOAA. These devices reach search-and-rescue infrastructure directly, with no cellular network involved, from anywhere on Earth.
I learned to carry a satellite messenger everywhere when my clutch went out in Grand Escalante Staircase in Utah, well out of cellphone coverage. Don’t wait until you have that experience if your cell phone doesn’t have an emergency satellite capability.
Conserve your phone battery. Stay where you are if you told someone your route. Make yourself visible. Build a fire if conditions allow.
What to do when you’re lost is covered in my Preparation and Survival Guide.
The voicemail trick is the kind of advice that sounds like preparation while displacing the things that actually constitute it. By the time you need a rescue, the time to have made yourself findable was before you left the trailhead — with a filed plan, a satellite communicator, and a charged phone you knew how to use.
Don’t change the greeting. Send the coordinates.
