Safety Without Wiring the Woods: Cellular Call Boxes

Injured hikers and bikers trapped deep in Orange County’s wilderness territories will soon have a way to summon help, even in some of the county’s most isolated areas.

Hoping to make emergency services only a phone call away, the county will begin installing emergency cellular phones in the county’s most isolated beach coves and along wilderness trails.

Park officials hope the 20 phones will be installed well before year’s end, with the first three to be placed along the Santa Ana River Trail.

“Occasionally, hikers and mountain bikers get into accidents, and we realized we needed to provide a way for these people who get injured to contact emergency authorities,” said Tim Miller, county manager for harbors, beaches and parks.

In addition to the six that eventually will be installed along the Santa Ana River, solar-powered cell phones will dot South County parks, including the Ronald W. Caspers Regional Park and secluded beach coves in the South Laguna and Aliso areas.

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Officials hope the phones will also be a deterrent to vandalism, providing a way for trail users to report graffiti, especially along more urban trails like the one that borders the Santa Ana River.

Stringing cable to operate conventional telephones would have been too costly, Miller said, and the cellular phone idea was a low-cost solution for emergency communication.

The call boxes will operate in much the same manner as those along Southern California freeways. Calls will be received by a cellular phone service provider, which will in turn forward calls to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The cost to purchase and install the cell phones is estimated at $55,000, and will be borne in part by the Orange County Transportation Authority and the Santa Ana River Environmental Fund. County officials hope that corporate sponsors can be found to defray ongoing maintenance costs.

The wilderness emergency phone system is patterned after one built nine years ago in Sacramento County, where they have well served bikers using Sacramento’s American River Parkway, a heavily traveled bicycle path, according to Carol McElheney, a county parks ranger.

“I personally went on a drowning call, and the family was there by the phone,” she said. “It’s a secure feeling to know there’s one every mile.”

Hikers say the idea is a good one, as long as the phones don’t become eyesores along otherwise pristine wilderness routes.

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Jill Davison, who frequently hikes solo in the Caspers park, said the presence of emergency phones would probably make her feel more secure. But she worries that the sight of a phone will ruin the hiking experience.

“People need someplace to get away from civilization, and there are so few places left in Orange County” to do that, Davison said. “I took a woman on a hike recently and her pager went off, and she spent the rest of the time looking for a phone.”

While Orange County hiking and biking accident statistics were not immediately available, Patti Schooley, a county parks supervisor, said the numbers remain low.

At the same time, however, Schooley emphasized that the total acreage of wilderness open to the public has increased in recent years, and more open space means more potential accidents.

Schooley said that the county’s expanding wilderness park area is attracting ever more people and that the nature of these park visitors is changing. In the past, she said, “you’ve had the hard-core hikers. But when you get more of the general public in there, there’s more of an opportunity for accidents.”

County officials say that the phones will be placed in locations at trail heads, where they will be accessible but unobtrusive.

The idea is a good one, hiker Larry Simonton of Buena Park said, as long as hikers don’t merely pick up the phone for directions.

“The whole idea sounds very noble to me. If you have a friend to reach the phone, at least they can,” he said, adding that most hikers go out to “meet the country on its own terms” and rarely need outside help.