It was an extremely close call for North Shore Rescue volunteers who successfully found and saved a missing teen who’d spent more than 36 hours in a backcountry creek bed.
North Vancouver RCMP alerted the public to the 16-year-old’s disappearance on Wednesday after he left home, distraught, at 11 p.m. Tuesday night.
NSR volunteers left their day jobs to join in the search around Princess and Greenwood parks on Thursday, based on some GPS co-ordinates the RCMP and Rogers picked up from the last time the teen’s phone pinged local towers.
When the team got more exact co-ordinates on Thursday afternoon, Danks pulled all the teams out of the field and redirected them to the location in Braemar Park, just above the Baden Powell Trail. Though the search was carried out with urgency, rescuers didn’t have much expectation their subject was still alive.
“Our field teams persisted and they were super keen to find this guy. It was a super important thing for us and when our first team made contact with him, it was incredible. Right away, the (search manager) said. ‘I’m with the subject. He’s alert. He’s OK,’” Danks said. “This wave of relief went over us. I immediately phoned his mom and let her know.”
While awake, the subject was near comatose, unable to walk, soaked and hypothermic, Danks said. His difficult location among tall timber made for a challenging extraction, using a 200-foot long-line harness with just 10 feet of clearance above the trees.
The rescue has additional significance in the wake of the tragic outcome in the search for missing hiker Liang Jin in the Hanes Valley, Danks said.
“It really brought our team together and had such a positive outcome,” he said.
Big thanks are owed to the North Vancouver RCMP and expert Talon Helicopters pilot in the rescue, Danks said.
It was the second search the team had been called out for this week. West Vancouver police started a search for another teen who had gone missing. After word spread via social media, that teen learned of the search and contacted his parents. Danks said social media is an increasingly important tool when it comes to rescues and he encourages residents to follow North Shore Rescue on Facebook and Twitter.
“We reached out to the community for support for any information and the community came back and gave us a lot of information, which was very helpful,” he said. “It took everyone working together on this to make it happen.”
