Alpine Club warns mountaineers not to rely on mobile phones

The Swiss Alpine Club carried out 374 rescue missions last year Keystone

The Swiss Alpine Club has warned people not to rely on their mobile phones to call for help, if they get into trouble in the mountains. Some 93 people died in the Swiss mountains last year.

The Club’s general secretary of rescue operations, Hans Jaggi, said that there had been several cases last year in which people had been forced to call in the rescue services by mobile phone.

He said the phones could act as a lifeline, but warned that “in the Alps there are places where there is no contact possible so it’s best not to count on the mobile phone”.

The Club, which is a voluntary organisation with 2,500 members, said that it carried out 374 rescue missions last year involving 510 persons in distress, the majority of them Swiss.

It added that 93 people had died in the Swiss mountains last year, a figure which is on a par with other years, except for 1999 when the number deaths rose to 115.

The number of fatalities in that year rose because of a canyoning disaster, which killed 21 young people in the Saxet gorge near the resort of Interlaken in the Bernese Oberland.

Of the 93 deaths last year, 38 were hikers, a significant increase over the 1999 figure (27), while mountaineers accounted for a further 23 deaths.

The Club, which is this year marking 100 years of rescue activities, also said it had problems with some Alpine resorts’ advertising campaign, which featured, for example, snowboarders jumping over cliffs or skiers in spectacular powder snow.

Jaggi said such advertisements could encourage people to take unnecessary risks. He added: “If people don’t have the necessary knowledge of a particular area, they should go together in a group or hire a mountain guide.”

The Swiss Alpine Club is increasingly being called out to rescue people involved in sports other than skiing and snowboarding. These include hang-gliding, parachuting, mountain biking and potholing.

swissinfo with agencies