TWO hikers had to be airlifted out of Lynn Headwaters Regional Park Thursday after spending the night trapped on a rocky cliff ledge.
The couple, both in their 20s, were headed for the Mt. Burwell, just west of Seymour Lake Wednesday afternoon, when the woman dropped her pack, and it rolled down the steep rock face near the Needles mountain peaks.
The pair retrieved the pack by rappelling down to a cliff ledge but found themselves stuck and without the right equipment to continue rappelling down to the base, according to Tim Jones, North Shore Rescue team leader.
Losing light, the climbers hunkered down for the night, planning to reassess their situation in the morning. That proved to be a smart move, said Jones.
"They made the right decision," he said. "They did not have enough rope to rappel, and they did not have the right equipment, and I don't think they were at a skill level where they felt comfortable going any farther. They were stuck."
The man and woman called for help and texted their approximate location to searchers. North Shore Rescue volunteers flew to the spot by helicopter and quickly spotted them.
NSR used 45-metre ropes to longline rescuers in, harness the stranded hikers and fly them, one by one, back to the rescue staging area.
Dropping the backpack may have been a blessing in disguise, said Jones. Had they continued into the northern part of the Needles, they would have lost cell coverage and been much harder to find.
"There's a silver lining in all of this," he said. "Maybe it stopped further misadventure."
The couple left a detailed itinerary with loved ones before their hike, though it likely wouldn't have been until Saturday that rescuers would have learned the couple were missing, said Jones.
"It would have required anywhere from 20 to 40 members . . . probably going a full day into darkness," he said.
The incident follows a busy summer for North Shore Rescue. On July 7 and 8, the volunteers responded to two calls of lost hikers on Grouse Mountain's BCMC trail and were called in to help a stranded woman near Black Mountain.
The following Sunday, they responded to two separate incidents in the snowfields between Unnecessary Mountain and the Lions, and during the week of Aug. 9, rescuers walked three distraught tourists from New York out of Hanes Valley and were about to launch another search for two lost Vancouver men when the pair walked out of the bush on their own.
