EmberWind finally swung NW this morning — first mature buck on the trail cam all season. Anybody else seeing movement pick up with this cold front?
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DMDana M.Same over here. Grunt call working better than the bleat this week.
What Ember does when you don’t come out.
The whole safety net, line by line: what fires, who gets told, and what we keep. Every line is stamped with whether it’s in the app today or still coming, so nothing here is a promise dressed up as a feature.
In short
If you don’t check out after a hunt, Ember escalates automatically: a push to you first, then a text and an automated call, then voice calls to your emergency contacts and a push to your club’s admins. SOS calls and texts your contacts in one tap. The whole chain is free on every plan, with one emergency contact (Pro: three).
Updated September 2026
It’s rarely the fall you planned for.
Stand falls get the attention, and they should: most of them happen in the evening, on the way down.2 But the calls that strand hunters are just as often the ordinary kind. Any of them, alone and out of signal, becomes an emergency. Here is what the record says.
- A fall on the climb down
- A rolled ankle a mile from the truck
- Chest pain in the cold
- Heat, dehydration, hypothermia
- Turned around after dark
80%
of emergency-room visits for hunting-stand injuries were falls, in a six-year national sample: about 6,400 visits a year.
1 in 6
of those visits was a strain or sprain, not a fracture. A rolled ankle twenty feet up is still a rescue.
22of 25
hunters in a cardiac study pushed past 85% of their maximum heart rate while deer hunting. Several showed heart strain on the monitor.
<30min
is how long someone hanging in a harness may stay conscious, per OSHA. A timer that fires an hour later is too late. That is what SOS is for.
36%
of rural Americans had no baseline 5G coverage where they live as of late 2022. Your alert has to wait for a bar, then send.
92%
of Maine’s searches are resolved within twelve hours. The Warden Service credits phone location data for shortening rescues.
Sources
- Loder RT. Epidemiology of hunting stand injuries presenting to US emergency departments, 2008–2013. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine (CPSC NEISS data), 2015.
- VanWormer JJ et al.. Epidemiology of tree stand falls among deer hunters in Wisconsin. Injury, with the Wisconsin DNR, 2016.
- Haapaniemi S, Franklin BA et al.. Electrocardiographic responses to deer hunting activities in men with and without coronary artery disease. American Journal of Cardiology, 2007.
- US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Suspension trauma / orthostatic intolerance. Safety and Health Information Bulletin 03-24-2004, 2004.
- Federal Communications Commission. 2024 Section 706 Report (5G-NR deployment as of December 2022). FCC, 2024.
- Maine Warden Service. Search & Rescue Report 2019–2020. Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, 2020.
No hunter-specific figure exists for dehydration or heat illness, so we name them and don’t put a number on them. We also left out the widely repeated “300 to 500 stand-fall deaths a year” and “1 in 3 hunters will fall” because neither traces to a primary source.
In the app
Miss your checkout time, and Ember starts working the list.
Check in on the walk to the stand, check out on the way home. Your crew sets a checkout time, 8:00 PM out of the box. Past it with no check-out, Ember escalates on the schedule below, with nothing left to memory.
+0 min
A push to your own phone
The first nudge goes to you, not your family. Most misses are a hunter who forgot to tap out.
Are you still out there? You are past your checkout time. Open Ember to check out or extend your hunt.
+30 min
A text and an automated call to you
If the push didn’t land, your phone gets a text and an automated call.
Jesse, you are past the checkout time for Blackhills Lease. Open Ember to check out or extend your hunt.
+60 min
A call to your emergency contacts, a push to your crew’s admins
Every contact you named gets a voice call, word for word as shown on the right. The crew’s owners and admins get a push saying you missed checkout and haven’t responded.
On the hour. Ember runs this check once an hour, so a step can fire up to an hour after the offset shown. Set your checkout time with that in mind.
Hunting alone? Make a group of one. The ladder is identical, and the people it calls are whoever you named.
Down in a hollow? Check-ins and check-outs queue on your phone and send the moment it finds a bar. Your checkout time doesn’t move; the check-in is stamped with the moment you tapped it, not the moment it sent.
Overdue · Blackhills Lease
Jesse hasn’t checked out.
Checkout time was 8:00p. Checked in at Stand 2-1.
8:00p — push to Jesse
8:30p — text + automated call to Jesse
9:00p — calling Jesse’s contacts · push to admins
The call, word for word
Hello Dana Miller. This is an automated safety alert from Ember. Jesse Miller has not checked out from Blackhills Lease by their hunting club’s checkout deadline. Please try to reach them directly. If you cannot reach them and believe they may need help, consider contacting local authorities. Goodbye.
In the app
When you can’t wait for a timer.
A fall, chest pain, a bad cut: you don’t want a ladder, you want everyone now. SOS is one tap, and it works with or without a crew.
On tap
Your position, or the best we have
Ember tries for a live GPS fix for eight seconds. Failing that it uses your phone’s last fix, then the stand you checked into, then where your hunt session started, and it says which one it used. It never calls a stale spot “current.”
Then
Your emergency contacts get a call and a text
Every contact you named gets an automated voice call and the text shown here. Both, because a text can be filtered and a ringing phone can’t.
Also
Your crew gets a push
The crew’s owners and admins, plus anyone checked in on the same property, are told. They can tap “I’m responding,” and you see who’s coming and how many were reached.
No bars
It queues and keeps trying
The alert waits on your phone and retries for 24 hours. After a minute stuck, Ember offers to send a plain text instead.
Any time
Test it on yourself
A test SOS goes only to your own phone, with the exact words a real one would use. Try it before opening day so nobody at home meets it cold.
The text, as sent
Jesse Miller — SOS. last known near Stand 2‑1 · ±30 m · 12 min old
In the app
What we hold, and what we never keep.
Location is the data we guard hardest. The rule is short: your position leaves your phone only when you ask for help or log something yourself, and an alert’s position goes only to the people coming to get you.
We hold
- Which stand you checked into, and when.Your crew sees it on the shared map while you’re checked in.
- The one position an SOS sends.It stays on that alert’s record so the people who answered can find you again.
- A hunt session’s starting point, if you log one.That’s what the Breakdown scores against.
- Harvests and sightings you choose to log, with their spots.Yours, in your journal — private unless you flip “Share with group.”
We never keep
- A live track of where you walk.There is no breadcrumb table. Nothing to keep, nothing to leak.
- Your position while nothing is happening.The map’s blue dot is drawn on the phone and never leaves it.
- An SOS location for anyone it didn’t reach.While the alert is open, only you and the people it went to can see it. Once it closes, it’s hidden from everyone else.
- A sale of any of it.Not to advertisers, not to a data broker, not to anyone.
Coming
Two controls we’re building.
No dates yet, and we won’t invent one. Until they ship, neither is on the ledger as done.
- Choose who sees your locationYour emergency contacts only, your crew only, or both, set per person.Coming
- Turn sharing off, keep checking inA switch inside Ember, separate from the phone’s permission, that keeps check-ins and the ladder working while your stand stays private.Coming
For the person at home.
You don’t need the app, an account, or a club to be on the list. If your hunter names you as an emergency contact, yours is the phone that rings, at the hour and in the words shown above. The family page walks through what you’ll see and when, from your side of it.
Know they made it out
The Camp
Ask the camp how they set their checkout time.
How do other crews run check-ins, and who do they name as contacts? Trade notes with other hunters in the Ember Hunt Camp on Facebook.
Safety chain · Free for everyone
The safety chain isn’t a tier.
The whole safety chain — check-in, location sharing, SOS, auto sign-out, and the missed-checkout escalation — ships free with every account, solo hunter or fifty-member club, no card required. Free includes one emergency contact; Pro raises that to three.
01SOS, check-in, location sharing, and the missed-checkout escalation are free for everyone, always.
02Free covers one emergency contact; Pro covers up to three.
03The same ladder runs for every member of a club, on any plan.
The basics are never an upsell.
The plans
Start free
14 days of the whole app, no credit card — then keep a free plan or upgrade.
- Free$0
- ProMost popular$99.99/yr
- Season Pass$49.99
- Clubfrom $199.99/yr
Get the app
14 days free · No credit card · Cancel anytime
Plans are purchased in the app, billed by the App Store or Google Play. The full safety chain — check-in, SOS, location sharing, and missed-checkout alerts — is free for everyone. See full pricing for what each plan includes.
Questions about hunting safety with Ember
How do Ember’s safety check-ins work?
Check in on the walk to the stand, check out on the way home. Your crew sets a checkout time — 8:00 PM out of the box, and a solo hunter is a crew of one. Past it with no check-out, Ember escalates: a push to you, then a text and an automated call to you, then a voice call to your emergency contacts and a push to your crew’s admins. It checks once an hour, so each step can fire up to an hour after its offset.
What does the SOS button do?
SOS is one tap and works with or without a crew. Ember tries for a live GPS fix for eight seconds, then falls back to your last fix, the stand you checked into, or where your hunt session started. Every emergency contact you named gets an automated voice call and a text, and the alert retries for 24 hours.
Does the safety chain cost anything?
No. The whole safety chain — check-in, location sharing, SOS, auto sign-out, and the missed-checkout escalation — ships free with every account, solo hunter or fifty-member club, no card required. Free includes one emergency contact; Pro raises that to three.
Set your checkout time before you set your alarm.
The whole safety chain is free for everyone, including the automated alerts that ring a real phone. Pro adds the Breakdown, the maps, and more emergency contacts — $99.99 a year, 14 days free.
Every line on this page was checked against the app on September 7, 2026.