NORTH Shore Rescue crews found themselves in familiar terrain Wednesday when they airlifted a pair of stranded skiers from a notorious Mount Seymour ravine for the third time less than two months.
Police called in the volunteer organization at about 3 p.m. after receiving a 9-1-1 call from two men trapped in a steep area below Seymour's first peak.
The victims, a skier and a snowboarder, both in their 20s, had ventured into the backcountry in the early afternoon, and had become disoriented by bad weather. The men had been making their way back to a groomed area, but had got diverted into the infamously treacherous Suicide Gully.
The victims, equipped with a GPS unit, sent their co-ordinates to the rescuers, but then lost cell contact when they headed farther down the hill.
The volunteers were preparing to go after them on foot when a break in the weather allowed them to send in a helicopter instead. The air team found the victims by following their tracks, harnessed them to a long line and flew them to safety.
The incident comes a little more than a month after two teens were plucked from the precipitous ravine after ducking under a boundary rope, and just eight weeks after an out-of-bounds snowboarder had to be rescued from the same spot after getting trapped at the top of a cliff.
Tim Jones, team leader with North Shore Rescue, was not critical of the men involved in Wednesday's rescue, saying they were reasonably well equipped for backcountry skiing, but noted that descending a slope after calling for a rescue is a bad idea; cell coverage tends to worsen in the deep part of gullies, he said. "stay as high up as you can,
"If you get lost, stay as high up as you can," said Jones.
