What a good plan contains
An outing you share is only as useful as the information attached to it. This page is about what to put in, and why each field earns its place. Everything here takes seconds to fill in and is filled in before you leave, while you still have signal and a warm phone.
File: img/myjikita/plan-01-form.png
Shows: The outing plan form with activity, place, expected return time and
planned route filled in.
The four fields that matter
1. Activity
Ski touring, hiking, trail running, climbing, mountain biking. It looks like a label and it is really a set of assumptions: how fast you move, what terrain you are likely to be on, what goes wrong in that discipline, and what equipment a rescue team should bring.
A hiker who is two hours late is probably tired. A ski tourer who is two hours late in February is a different conversation. The people following you will read your silence differently depending on what you were doing, and so will a rescue team.
2. Place
The massif, the summit, the trailhead, the refuge — whatever you would say to a friend if they asked where you were off to. It does not need to be precise; it needs to be searchable by a human being.
This is what somebody reads at 22:00 when they are deciding whether to be worried. "Pointe de Chalune" gives them something to act on. A timestamp does not.
3. Expected return time
This is the most valuable field in the app.
Everything else tells people where you are. This one tells them when to start worrying — and worrying at the right moment is the whole mechanism. Without an expected return time, nobody knows whether your silence is a problem or a long lunch, and the natural human response to that ambiguity is to wait a bit longer. Waiting a bit longer is what costs the hours.
With it, the app marks your outing overdue the moment you pass it, and the people following you are told. Nobody has to decide to be suspicious. The clock does it for them.
Two pieces of practical advice:
- Be honest, not optimistic. Put the time you will actually be back on a slow day, not your best-case time. An alarm that fires every time you stop for a coffee trains your contacts to ignore it.
- If you are running late and you are fine, say so. Send a message in the outing thread. It costs one line and it keeps the alarm meaningful.
4. Planned route
If you have a GPX route, attach it. It buys you three separate things:
- Navigation. The route is drawn on your map, and works offline once the area is downloaded.
- An off-route warning. If you drift more than about 200 m from the line, the app tells you — which is most useful precisely when visibility is bad and you are least likely to notice. See Off-route warnings.
- A search corridor. For a rescue team, a planned route turns an area into a line. A line can be flown in one pass.
How to get routes into the app is covered in GPX routes and tracks.
Who to share with
Pick people who will notice and act. That second word is the one that gets skipped.
A good contact is someone who:
- Will see a notification within an hour or two of it arriving — a phone that is on, not a laptop that is checked at weekends.
- Knows roughly what you do and what "late" means for you.
- Is willing to make the call to the emergency services, and is not going to hesitate for two hours out of politeness.
Two or three such people are worth more than ten who assume the others are handling it. If you share with several people, it is worth saying once, out loud, who is expected to act — diffusion of responsibility is real, and a group of five can each quietly assume somebody else has it.
If you are on the receiving end of one of these, read Watching someone else. It tells you what is actually being asked of you.
How often the app sends your position
You choose the update interval — typically every 1, 2, 5 or 10 minutes. It is a straight trade:
| Interval | What it gives you | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | All-day battery on a long outing | A gap of up to 10 minutes' travel in your last known position |
| 5 min | A sensible default for most days | Moderate battery use |
| 1–2 min | A tight track, good for fast or exposed terrain | Noticeably more battery |
A ten-minute gap is not much when you are walking a valley floor and is a great deal on a ridge. The honest advice is to use a longer interval by default and a short one where the consequence of being wrong is high. During an SOS the app switches to its fastest rate automatically, whatever you chose.
The details are in Battery and tracking interval.
Before you put the phone in your pocket
A short list worth running through at the trailhead:
- Battery charged, and a power bank if the day is long or cold.
- The map area for where you are going is downloaded for offline use.
- Your route is in the app, if you have one.
- The outing is started and shows as sharing — not just planned.
- Location permission is set to Always, and battery optimisation is off for myJikita. If this is wrong, tracking stops when the screen does. See Permissions.
- Your Jikita tag, if you carry one, is on you — in a pocket or on a strap, not in the pack you might take off.
Next: Watching someone else