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Backcountry skier rescued from North Shore avalanche terrain

A backcountry skier was spared a potentially deadly night in an avalanche-prone mountain gully thanks to North Shore Rescue Sunday. The man had gotten off trail between Hollyburn Mountain and Mount Strachan around 1:30 p.m.
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A backcountry skier was spared a potentially deadly night in an avalanche-prone mountain gully thanks to North Shore Rescue Sunday.

The man had gotten off trail between Hollyburn Mountain and Mount Strachan around 1:30 p.m., although North Shore Rescue wasn’t called in until the subject’s family alerted Cypress Mountain staff after dark.

Before his phone battery died, cell tower data suggested the skier was somewhere on the east side of Hollyburn, making for a very risky rescue, according to Mike Danks, North Shore Rescue team leader.

“The avalanche danger was high last night because there’s been quite a lot of accumulation up there,” he said.

Search managers sent in rescue teams on foot with parachute flares but, fortunately, the missing man found his way to a North Shore Rescue cache strategically placed in a gully known for “sucking in” lost skiers and hikers “…which is quite a ways so he took a bit of a thrashing getting down there,” Danks said. “They basically get funnelled right in there.”

The team had received reports of avalanches in the area at the outset of the search that thankfully missed their rescue subject, but Danks said, future out-of-bounds skiers might not be so lucky.

“The challenge for us is, when we have considerable to high avalanche danger, we’re not going to put our members at risk to go into these gully areas. They’re basically a terrain trap,” he said.

The man was able to warm himself with a blanket and hot soup thanks to supplies stored in the cache while he waited for rescuers to arrive.

“That’s a kudos to Tim (Jones). It was Tim’s idea to put that cache in there and you know what? It’s saved many lives,” Danks said of the late team leader.

The skier had an avalanche beacon although it would have been of little help had he been caught in a slide as he was travelling solo, something NSR strongly discourages.