The best safety tool on a remote hike is a well-informed person at home. The Emergency tab collects who to contact and what they need to know, then delivers it to them properly.
Emergency Contacts
Each member adds their own emergency contacts — name, relationship, phone and email, plus notes. Add contacts once in your profile, then bring them onto each hike: add a contact (the + beside Emergency contacts, or Add on a phone) and pick them under From your profile, which fills in the form for you to check. PLBs work the same way. Contacts added for a hike are used for that hike's safety brief and post-hike check-in.
You can also record emergency notes about yourself for the hike — allergies, medications, blood type, anything a rescuer or worried contact should know. These are visible to your packmates, printed in PDF exports, and included in the safety brief and check-in alerts — every member's, not just yours, so your notes reach your packmates' contacts too. Only add what you're comfortable sharing that widely.
Private Medical Notes
For anything you'd rather keep from the pack, use Private medical, under your emergency notes. Only you can see it: your packmates don't, on the Emergency tab or anywhere else. It goes to your own emergency contacts and nobody else's, in the safety brief you send and in the alert they get if you miss your post-hike check-in, in a box of its own marked as private. A PDF export leaves it out unless you tick Include my private medical notes in the export dialog, and then it's printed on your own card only.
Pack Shadows can have contacts and PLBs too, added by the hike's owner or a co-admin — the brief should cover everyone walking, not just the app users. Before adding them you're asked to confirm the shadow has agreed, and any change a co-admin makes shows in the owner's activity log.
Who Sees It, And For How Long
Everything on the Emergency tab except your private medical notes is shared with your pack, and each member's safety brief and check-in alerts carry the whole group's details, so what you add reaches every member's emergency contacts, not just yours. Before you add anyone else's details, including your own emergency contacts, make sure they know where those details will go and have agreed to it.
A hike's emergency contacts, PLBs and emergency notes, private ones included, are deleted two weeks after it ends, or as soon as it's closed, and nothing new can be added after that. The copies on your profile stay, ready for your next hike. Two weeks covers the last alert a post-hike check-in can send; if a hiker's alert was never answered, their own contacts are kept until they check in, so the all-clear still reaches them. Emails already sent and PDFs already exported can't be called back, of course.
PLBs And Satellite Beacons
Register the group's PLBs and satellite communicators: device name, hex ID, battery expiry and notes. There's a checkbox to record that the beacon's registration (e.g. AMSA in Australia) has been updated with this trip — an easy thing to forget and a crucial one.
The Safety Brief
When the plan is ready, send the safety brief: an email to each of your emergency contacts who has an email address (you get a copy too). Every member sends their own, and each one covers the whole group. It contains:
- the hike name and dates, and everyone walking with their phone numbers
- each hiker's emergency notes, and your private medical notes (only in yours)
- an overview map of the planned routes, camps, water points and marked spots
- the day-by-day itinerary — camps, travel and daily route stats, and who each entry is for when it isn't the whole group
- food drop locations, and the full contact and PLB lists
- the planned route files attached — your contact can open them in any mapping app and see precisely where you intend to be
That's the difference between "they're hiking somewhere in the Snowies" and handing search and rescue an exact planned line.
Route files are attached under the name they were uploaded with, which is often
something like export-2026-08-02.kml. So the email also carries a legend pairing
each attachment with the routes inside it and the day of the walk each one covers.
A Personal Message
The send dialog has an optional message box. Whatever you write appears near the top of the email, above the hike details — the place for the things a plan can't hold: where the car is parked, when you expect to be back in phone range, who to ring first.
Confirming It Arrived
Tick "Ask them to confirm they got it" and each contact's copy carries a one-tap button. When they use it, their contact card on the Emergency tab flips from Awaiting confirmation to Confirmed, so a typo'd address or a brief sitting in a spam folder doesn't go unnoticed. Nobody needs an account to confirm, and each contact gets their own link — so you can tell exactly which of them replied.
Sending the brief again reissues the request, since what matters is whether they have the current plan.
Note: Pack Hiker nudges you if it matters: members without any contacts get a reminder email 6 days before the start, and if the brief hasn't been sent 4 days out (or was sent before the hike's dates changed), you'll be reminded to send it.
After The Brief
Trip details changed? Send it again — contacts simply get the updated version. When the hike's dates change, the Emergency tab marks every brief sent before then as out of date, so nobody is left thinking their contacts have the current plan. And for automated follow-through when the hike ends, arm the post-hike check-in.