I live in extremely dense woods my kids always carried emergency whistles whenever they left the house .my youngest got turned around hiking the creek that had done a bit of re routing after a storm once for about 4 hours, but he kept his witt's and found his way back before I had to go after him with the dog.

I always to keep our groups in sight of each other. Living in the woods I have found that it is very easy to get turned around and lose where you are. There have been several hikers that seem like they are in a competition to get to the destination first for bragging rights and are willing to leave others behind. needless to say they don't get re-invited to hike with us

Great idea

Pretty neat.

You're so right. People get separated. People go out in the woods to explore so it's not surprising they occasionally get lost.
It says something about you that you thought of the whistles and that you pay enough attention to your situations to use them.

All the way back in the 70s the rangers at the Grand Canyon told me a story about a lady who got separated from her group and ran out of water but managed to survive.

According to the story, she picked up a beer bottle from the trail and she also found a seap(sort of a spring). She discovered that if she put the beer bottle under the seap overnight it would fill with water.
She walked every direction she could on a beer bottle's worth of water still making it back to the seap.
It was almost two weeks before they found her.

The rangers said she was in too far. She would have died if she'd tried to walk out on her own. But she was smart enough to stay with the the water and wait to be rescued.
I doubt I'd have been able to do it. I'd have tried to walk out and died.

I always wondered if you carried a signaling device.