An injured hiker with a badly broken ankle had to be airlifted from a popular North Shore mountain peak Saturday.
B.C. Ambulance Service alerted North Shore Rescue around 2 p.m., reporting the subject about 100 metres below the summit of Hollyburn Mountain, and asked for help retrieving him.
The man was wellprepared for the icy hike up to the peak with crampons on his boots, but he slid into trouble on the way back down, according to Doug Pope, NSR search manager.
"In mountaineering terms, he was performing a sitting glissade. In regular terms, that's a butt-slide down the snow. He still had his crampons on and one of the crampons caught on the ice and wrenched and broke his ankle and he wasn't going anywhere," Pope said.
B.C. Parks staff and Cypress Mountain ski patrol members were the first to reach the injured 44-yearold.
"The team that was with him did a really good job. They splinted his ankle, stabilized his leg and then helped him up to the summit area."
With heavy snow threatening the helicopter's ability to land safely at the top, the alternative would have been a long and painful stretcher-carry back to the Cypress Mountain parking lot, Pope said.
"It would have been difficult in the icy conditions and wouldn't have been very comfortable for the patient who was in a lot of pain with this severely broken ankle," he said.
The lesson to be learned from the call is to remove crampons if you are planning to come down a mountain on your rear end, Pope added.
