Here's one for you.

This one happened last month, don't know why I didn't post about it earlier.

We'd had some snow, then rain, then cold. This produced a layer of about 1" of ice on the snow, and then it warmed up, so now there's a 1" layer of ice with a skim of water on it. It's slippery - really slippery. We had a call for a guy killed by a falling tree on this day (I posted about that) and later that evening, there was a call for a cliff rescue. A guy had slipped and fallen down the side of a steep, steep hill on a road that's closed in the winter because it's so steep and narrow.

He was cold, and he tried and tried to use his cell phone to get help - but there was not enough signal to call out. He was there for hours, injured and unable to climb up - and nothing but a shear fall further below.

He got lucky. As the sun set, the cell phone, for some reason his cell phone was able to get a signal and he called 911, and because he was able to accurately describe where he was, a crew got to him. But even the crew on-scene had a hard time finding him - he was too weak to shout loudly, and they could not see him from the road. A simple whistle would have knocked an hour off the rescue - maybe more. Although there's no traffic on the road, there was occasional foot traffic - three short bursts - repeatedly - would eventually attract attention.

Simple tools for unusual situations, always a good idea.