STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Natalie Smith spent the morning teaching a Mountain Masters class at Sun Valley Resort. Then she and four fellow skiers, including a fellow ski instructor and an ER doctor, spent the afternoon skiing the bumps on Limelight.

As they boarded the Challenger chair for yet another ride to the top, she realized someone was trying to call her on the new Apple iPhone she had tucked away in her leg pocket. Reluctant to risk dropping the phone in the snow below, she finally answered it at the top of Bald Mountain after missing three calls.

“Mom, are you okay?” her 15-year-old daughter asked. “We’re trying to find you. We’ve been notifying people from here to California to look for you.”

It turned out that a crash and fall detection on Smith’s new phone had determined that she had crashed five times, even though she hadn’t fallen at all. The phone had alerted 911, and dispatchers had tried unsuccessfully to make contact. Smith, bundled up and wearing a helmet, was so busy concentrating on her skiing she hadn’t heard the notifications.

“Blaine County Sheriff’s office attempted to reach me via phone calls and texts. My next of kin was also notified and, by the time my family finally got ahold of me, they were making plans for a rescue mission. And all I was doing was skiing hard with my rockstar friends,” she said.

Smith, who doubles as a Sun Valley ski instructor and artist, isn’t alone.

The crash and fall detection features on Apple’s new iPhone 14 Pro models, Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch SE and Apple Watch Ultra are reportedly flooding 911 emergency service and dispatch centers in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado and elsewhere.

A Summit County, Colo., interim director of emergency services told The New York Times that her whole day is spent managing crash notifications that she says could divert resources from real emergencies.

In response, Aspen Mountain posted signs encouraging users to upgrade to the latest software version or disable the service to prevent ambulances from having to make unnecessary trips to the slopes. A ski patroller at Schweitzer ski area in North Idaho said they fielded 63 such calls one recent weekend.

And it’s not restricted to ski areas. The New York Times reported that a British spin teacher said her watch sending alerts when she ramped it up in spin class. And a man hitting a lever at a strong man exhibit at an amusement park said his phone went off like an air raid siren.

The Apple watches and iPhones are equipped with a sensor meant to notify emergency responders in the event of a car crash or fall. They automatically call emergency services after a 20-second delay if the owner is unable to respond.

The calls have become especially prevalent in ski areas as something about the way skiers ski seems to set the technology on edge.

“I had just gotten a new phone—my old one was seven years old and the battery was dying. I didn’t know my new phone had that feature. I was completely oblivious that my family was putting together a search party,” said Smith.

After she learned about the feature, Smith said she witnessed a skier trying madly to turn his feature off after he’d fallen on Bald Mountain’s Broadway.

“I worry that all the Spring Breakers are coming into town for Spring Break, that people are coming here for President’s Week and many of them are going to be using these new devices and a lot won’t even know they have this feature,” she said. “I’m afraid that Blaine County first responders will be inundated with false 911 calls and that a slew of false notifications could potentially prevent 911 operators’ timely responses to an actual emergency.”

Sun Valley Resort’s mountain team has not noticed such calls impacting the Sun Valley Ski Patrol’s ability to respond to emergencies, said Jenna Vagia, brand and communications manager for Sun Valley Resort. But there has been an uptick of such calls in the county, said Chris Corwin, Blaine County’s Emergency Manager.

Robin Stellers, director of Blaine County Emergency Communications, said that it has been an issue.

“If the phone determines the crash was hard severe enough, it does notify 911. We work to establish contact with the person. If someone signs up for Rapid SOS, we can determine whether somebody seems to be mobile,” she said.

Apple reportedly made updates to the software in late 2022 to reduce the number of false dials. And the business is surveying emergency centers to see how it can better assist because a lot of 911 centers are being overwhelmed, said Stellers. Users can deactivate the program temporarily or permanently, she added.

At the same time, it has proved its worth in some cases.

“Just last week we had a call and it turned out someone had had a hard fall on the ice and hit their head. So, it did have its intended use in that case,” she said.”