North Shore Rescue ended a record year of callouts by helping a man and his six-year-old son out of the woods after trail markers were removed.
The team got the rescue call around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday from West Vancouver police, and were dispatched to the Whyte Lake area.
“A man was lost with his six-year-old son and had called 911,” explained search manager Doug Pope. “They had two dogs with them. Apparently, one of the dogs ran off and they were chasing down the dog, and then it starts to get dark and they were lost without a flashlight.”
The father and son had started their hike from the Nelson Creek trailhead – the normal route most people take to reach Whyte Lake, said Pope.
When the dog took off, its owners chased it to a lesser known trail, on the west side of Nelson Creek, referred to by NSR as the old helipad trail where there is “a bit of a rat’s nest of old trails.”
Recently, NSR members had taken it upon themselves to put in some trail markers on the old helipad route, “but like many other places we end up marking trails, somebody pulled the markers down,” said Pope.
Rescuers picked up a ping from the man’s cellphone to track the lost family members who were found “quite west of the trail” on a powerline route overlooking Horseshoe Bay.
Father and son were quite cold, according to Pope, and not dressed for the temperature, which reached freezing levels overnight. They were given heat vests made from the same material as self-activated hand warmers.
“We have vests that are used to treat hypothermic patients,” explained Pope. "It was more like a heat dress for the six-year-old … but helped keep them warm.”
The rescuers and their subjects walked out of the woods, along with the dogs, at 8:30 p.m.
Roundtrip, the five-kilometre “easy” Whyte Lake hike on the main trail should take two hours for the average person. The father-son hiking pair had budgeted an hour and a half.
“That’s maybe a bit optimistic for that route,” said Pope.
The message with this rescue, said Pope, is for hikers to always be prepared with a flashlight and the ten essentials North Shore Rescue recommends, regardless of how many daylight hours are left.
“Before you go on a hike, think: What if something goes wrong? What if I twist my ankle, or a friend does, and we’re delayed – what will we need?” said Pope.
If the dogs have a tendency to wander, then keeping them on a leash would have helped in this case, he added.
Sunday’s mission marked the 142nd callout of the year for North Shore Rescue. The previous record of 139 was set in 2015.
