North Shore Rescue is joining the North Vancouver RCMP and Vancouver Police Department in trying to solve a mystery buried in the backcountry for two decades.
Search volunteers happened upon a backpack during last month’s search for Liang Jin, the hiker who NSR believes went missing in the Hanes Valley on New Year’s Eve. The bag turned up about 200 metres from the helipad the team uses as a launching point for backcountry searches.
“They called it in and we dealt with it quite meticulously. We were thinking it could have been a clue,” said Doug Pope, North Shore Rescue search manager.
The bag was too old and deteriorated to belong to Jin, leading rescuers to wonder if it had been dropped by Tom Billings, another hiker thought to have disappeared in that area in 2013.
When they opened the bag and saw its contents — two 35-millimetre film cameras and asthma inhalers expired in 1997, they realized they were dealing with a much older mystery.
“One of the key tasks (investigators) are going to try and do is develop the film to see if that gives us further clues who that bag belongs to,” Pope said.
Though there’s no indication what happened to the bag’s owners, its discovery is bringing back memories of a difficult rescue effort, Pope said
“Longer-term members on our team remember a rescue we did in Hanes Valley about that era in the mid-1990s for a husband and wife that were lost in there. The husband was rescued but the lady died of exposure,” he said.
