Elizabeth Myers of San Diego, California, carves her snowboard down a run on the Cloudchaser chairlift at Mt. Bachelor ski area Wednesday, Feb. 1. 

MT. BACHELOR — When the Mt. Bachelor ski patrol responded to the location of a 911 call on Jan. 31, the emergency team discovered something that is becoming less and less surprising: No one was there.

It happened again that same day, with the same outcome. And again on Wednesday.

These weren’t prank calls. They came from an artificial intelligence getting a bit too ambitious.

New features on iPhones and Apple watches make automatic emergency calls if the technology senses a crash or sudden change of speed. It’s designed to automatically request help during emergencies like car wrecks, quickly bringing first responders. The feature switches on an alarm and displays an alert if it senses a crash. If a person doesn’t respond after 20 seconds, then the device automatically calls emergency services.

At Oregon’s largest ski resorts in the snowcapped Cascade mountain range, however, some of these calls are stemming from skiers and snowboarders stopping suddenly or landing jumps — not from a crash.

The technology is also spurring a trend in faulty calls from ski mountains across the country. It’s raising concerns in some regions about the burden this can place on dispatch or emergency medical services that could be using their resources to respond to other, legitimate emergencies.

Since December, dispatchers with Deschutes County 911 Service District have fielded at least 30 of these automatic calls from skiers and snowboarders on Mt. Bachelor. Two involved injured people, said Chris Perry, operations manager for the district.

Perry said in an email that the district has received “a half-dozen or so” automatic calls for car crashes in Deschutes County since December, “which is what the technology was originally designed for.”

But sometimes, dispatchers take calls from ski resorts and find no one on the other end. When dispatchers call back, they often find an embarrassed skier picks up and apologizes for the inconvenience, according to local dispatch officials. However, if dispatchers call back and no one answers, they are required to contact the mountain’s ski patrol.

In Colorado, at least five counties with some of the nation’s busiest ski resorts “are fielding record numbers of the automated calls from skiers’ Apple phones and watches, tying up emergency response resources,” The Colorado Sun reported in December. One county fielded 71 calls from skiers’ iPhones and Apple watches in a single weekend, but none involved an emergency.

Dave Thomas, Mt. Bachelor’s patrol director, said his team typically responds to one faulty call stemming from the crash-detection technology each day. When patrollers show up, they find the person has either skied away, or they’re just resting on the mountain, sometimes waiting for friends.

While this has become somewhat of a nuisance, Thomas said it has not spread the team thin in its response to mountain emergencies, but he said that’s a “theoretical concern.”

“At this point, we’ll take the extra ski lap even if it’s nothing, if it means that somebody’s OK,” Thomas said.

Kimberly Webb, spokesperson for Clackamas County, said dispatchers have also received faulty calls from ski resorts around Mt. Hood. “However, it’s not severely affecting our ability to respond to people calling 911,” Webb said.

Webb said the county would encourage people to consider turning off their crash-detection feature so faulty calls don’t overburden dispatchers or prevent responses to people with legitimate emergencies.

Sara Crosswhite, director of Deschutes County’s dispatch center, said that people with loved ones skiing at Mt. Bachelor can breathe a bit easier because of the technology, knowing they have at least one more tool toward safety.

“I think in the event that it can save lives it’s great,” she said.

Crosswhite acknowledged that the technology could result in resources being sent to far-flung reaches of the mountain for non emergencies. However, she said: “If we can reach the caller back and verify that they’re safe, it works as it should.”

But Crosswhite said that pocket dials are already something the district sees all the time and said this issue isn’t getting significantly worse because of the new crash detection technology. She’s reserving judgment over the technological blips until a later date, when the district has more data to adjust how it plans to respond to faulty calls.

“Technology changes in the blink of an eye,” Crosswhite said. “And who knows what’ll be next for us.”

Thomas said he’s fine with people using the feature, adding: “If people feel more secure when they’re taking adventures … then it’s definitely a benefit for them to use this technology.”

But he added that the most reliable way for people to help the ski patrol respond to emergencies is to have a fully charged cellphone, keep their Mt. Bachelor app open and have the phone number for ski patrol saved to their contacts.