While most of us are planning summer vacations and Canada Day barbecues, North Shore Rescue is still carrying out rescues in winter conditions in the mountains.
The team was called out twice on Sunday to rescue people who wound up stuck in snow.
Around 4:30 p.m., the team was tasked for a woman in her 30s who tried to ascend Christmas Gully on her way back from St. Mark’s Summit on the Howe Sound Crest Trail but didn’t have proper footwear to deal with snow and ice on steep trail.
“She got to a point where she was really stuck. She felt it was too dangerous to go up or come down,” said search manager Paul Markey. “So, she just ended up clinging to a tree basically and then called in 911.”
The woman, who is in her 30s, had travelled from New York specifically to hike in B.C.
Markey sent four members in, accessing Mount Strachan in a Jeep. They then used a harness and ropes to help the woman back to a point on the trail where she could walk to the waiting 4x4.
“By the time she got down to the SAR station, she was quite teary, quite distressed,” Markey said. “She’d scratched her legs up quite a lot but she didn’t require any medical attention.”
The whole process took about four hours.
Markey said he’d only just gotten through the door at home when they were tasked again, this time for a man who was lost on Mount Fromme. He too was visiting B.C.
Somewhere in his trip planning, the man in his 20s has been misinformed that he could catch the Grouse Mountain tram from the top of Mountain Highway. Instead, he ended up following an old access road, hoping to make it to the top, but then got off trail and wound up in a drainage leading to Meech Lake, just west of the summit of Mount Fromme. The whole time, he’d just been wearing street clothes.
“He ended up being soaking wet through and cold and it was getting dark,” Markey said.
Again, it was easy to reach the area with a 4x4 but it took team members another hour to hike in the rest of the way with proper boots and warm clothes for the man.
“He was quite scared as it got dark,” he said. “He was obviously very thankful to have been rescued.”
Every year at this time, North Shore Rescue volunteers are sent after hikers who’ve misjudged the warm weather at sea level and assumed the trails were free of snow. Markey said anyone going into the mountains should be carrying microspikes with them well into July.
“You’ve still got a lot of old rotten snow around,” he said. “Be aware that you can break through the snow quite easily and into creeks or ponds. It’s quite unstable snow at this time of year.”
Both subjects did the right thing by calling for help and staying put while they waited for rescuers, Markey said, but they were also both lacking local knowledge and hiking alone, which North Shore Rescue always advises against.
And Markey added the subjects were lucky to have been in locations with cell reception, which isn’t the case for much of the backcountry.
“It could have been pretty tough if these guys had not been able to call out,” he said.
