Give a girl the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world. Give her the wrong ones and you may need to call North Shore Rescue.
The volunteer team was out twice Sunday afternoon to airlift hikers out of the backcountry after they suffered ankle injuries, in part, because they were wearing running shoes.
The first call came in around 2:30 p.m. from a group of hikers about four kilometres up the trail headed for Elsay Lake on Mount Seymour. A 33-year-old New Westminster woman injured her ankle to the point she wasn’t able to put any weight on it, said Peter Haigh, search manager.
They called in a Talon helicopter to bring in a rescue team, but with nowhere safe to land, the rescue technicians had to do a hover exit and rig the injured woman into a long-line harness.
Once they safely touched down in the Mt. Seymour parking lot, they handed her over to B.C. Ambulance Service. But before rescue had even wrapped, the team was tasked again for another very similar injury, this time in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park.
A 26-year old North Shore woman was headed to Norvan Falls when she fell. “She’d done her ankle in,” Haigh said. “It was very angulated. It was really quite out of shape and she was in a lot of pain.”
Crews decided to use the long-line again, however this time they strapped their subject into a stretcher. By 4:45 p.m., they’d returned her to the Bone Creek Search and Rescue Station.
In both cases, the women were lucky to get cellphone coverage from where they were injured, Haigh said.But more importantly, they shouldn’t have ventured into the backcountry in running shoes, Haigh added.
“If they’d worn some ankle protection with boots, that would certainly go some way to alleviating these accidents,” he said.
