The beacon people actually clip on is the one that's free at the trailhead.

The fix costs less than one search

• A cheap tag at the gate. A $10–15 LoRa beacon handed out at the Yosemite entrance or the trailhead like a wristband or an anklet — snap it on, forget it. Boxes at the trailheads hold extras for the whole family. Drop it back in the box at the end, or keep it. Solar on the band: leave it in the sun and it charges itself; the gate hands them out charged either way. Two pings, you get both: a rapid ping every couple of minutes when you're moving or you press the button, a slow ping every fifteen when you're still — so the battery lasts the whole trip and then some, and the map still always knows.
• You take it and you're good. The tag pings every few minutes. Tree nodes along the corridors, the herd's harnesses and the ranger flock all hear it. There is always a last-heard point on the map. You never get lost — you just get late. Unless you lose the tag. And the spare. And the other spare. Then — sorry, man, we tried. (Even then: we still have your track right up to where you dropped it, and that is where the search starts — hours of headway, not days. Literally a life saver.)
• One button: find me. Hold the button on the band for three seconds and it goes to distress: full-power transmit, a ping every few seconds, a priority flag on every node that hears it, and an alert on the ranger screen and your family's tags at once. You don't need a signal bar. You need a thumb. With the pocket node it's a text too: "Oh shit — got hurt. Bear got my arm. I'm here, GPS sent, staying put." The station has the pin before you finish typing, your family sees it, and the drone is already lifting.
• We know where you are — and you can text. The same tag family carries short messages over the mesh, no cell signal needed. "Running late, at the lake, all good" reaches the ranger station and your family's tags: fam to fam, tent to trailhead, hiker to ranger. The pocket node on a lanyard does it with any phone and the free app; the wristband beacon does location only. Hikers warn hikers too: "Bear at the creek crossing, big one, heading north" goes out from your tag and lands on every tag on that trail — with the distance: "bear reported 0.6 mi ahead, 12 minutes ago." Text in the wilderness, where no phone has ever had a bar. Same channel for the good stuff: "Buffalo herd in the meadow below the ridge, 40 head." "Elk at the lake, north shore, right now." Sightings pin to the map with a time, so the family two miles back knows where to go to see them — and the park gets a live wildlife map drawn by its own visitors. And it runs the other way — ranger to people: updates pushed to every tag on a trail. "Bear on the loop ahead, hold here." "Storm over the ridge in forty minutes, turn back." "Trail closed past the falls." "Park shutting down at six, head to the gate." "Concert at the meadow at eight." One message from the station reaches everyone out there at once, no bars, no app store. And the search itself becomes a conversation. The team has your coordinates on the map; they text you back: "We see you. Go down past the big tree, follow the stream, stay on the left bank — we're forty minutes out." You walk toward them instead of away — or, if you're hurt, "Stay put, keep warm, we have you," and the drone is overhead in twenty minutes. Most searches end before they start.
• Drones find the ping. When someone is overdue, a drone with a LoRa receiver flies the corridor and hears the tag from the air — a whole valley in twenty minutes, at night, in weather a helicopter won't fly. Then a thermal camera confirms. No signal at all? The drone flies straight to the last location on the track and scours outward from there — the search radius is a few hundred yards, not a mountain range. One drone flight instead of a hundred boots and a helicopter.
• Small enough to forget. Today's tag is the size of a matchbox on a band. The next one is AirTag-sized: a wristband, an anklet, a necklace, a bag tag, a belt hook, a zipper pull, a dog collar — same radio, same mesh, same map. Wear two or three in different spots — wrist, ankle, pack — so a lost one, a swim or a fall never leaves you dark. Hand a family five at the gate and nobody notices they're wearing them until the day it matters.
• Whole park, for years, cheap. A few thousand tags, a few hundred tree nodes, a ranger drone: less than the price of a single multi-day helicopter search, and it keeps running.