North Shore Rescue members say an injured hiker is extremely lucky to be alive after a serious fall on Mount Seymour.
The team scrambled at 3 p.m. Saturday after a 9-1-1 dispatch alerted them to a critically injured 61-year-old man. The victim was hiking just north of Seymour's second pump when he lost his footing at the edge of a gully, leaving him alone with a spinal injury and barely more than an hour of daylight left.
"He'd taken a 50-metre fall. It was a 45-degree slope that he had slid down. It's a long way," said Mike Danks, North Shore Rescue team leader. "This guy was hiking by himself, which we do not recommend at all."
Luckily, another group of hikers was not far behind on the same trail. When they happened by the scene of the fall, they noticed the snow had been disturbed and went in for a closer look.
"It was just something different that triggered them to investigate it. When they looked over, they saw this guy at the very bottom and it was quite apparent that he had taken a significant fall," Danks said.
They were able to make their way down to the immobilized hiker and call for help. North Shore Rescue sent in a team on foot and a team by air that included one volunteer who is also an ER doctor. Had the other group not spotted him, the man wouldn't have survived the night, Danks said.
"Because of the conditions at the time, it was very icy out. It was also very cold. We knew that he was seriously injured and he wasn't in adequate clothing for the condition. Our biggest fear was his injuries but also him suffering from hypothermia as well," Danks said.
When rescuers arrived and saw the subject was too injured even to be loaded into the helicopter, they arranged for a long-line rescue team to package him up on a spine
board and airlift him back to a waiting ambulance - all with less than 45 minutes of daylight left. Danks credits the training pushed by the late North Shore Rescue team leader Tim Jones with the successful rescue.
"This is exactly the call that he kept drilling into us to be prepared for - this time-compressed medical rescue. It saved this guy's life and there's no other way to put it," he said. "I was just so proud of how all the team members pulled together. everybody stayed calm.
They knew their roles and they did it with purpose." Appropriately, the second pump is now in the process of being renamed Tim Jones Peak as a tribute to the late North Shore Rescue team leader.
