Public Eduacation

2006-10-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

So ya,

After my first post I am now addicted to this stuff, and hope to recant as many similar stories as possible as well as add new content. But for now I think I will go on a public education side bar.

I am a member of the education group in Search and Rescue, and have done talks with beaver and cubs groups as well as attend a couple AdventureSmart (www.adventuresmart.ca) workshops. It is North Shore Rescues hope to educate people so that responses as the previous post describes are not necessary.

We provide a couple of types of talks, Hug a Tree (for younger audience), survive outside (for audiences 10 and up), snowsafety (10-14), and talks about North Shore Rescue (who we are, what we do). We have produced two of our own movies (A Great Day for a Hike -available on www.northshorerescue.com and a Winter Video) which we incorporate into our presentations, which are delivered all over the North Shore, Vancouver and Burnaby. The mission of our education group is to educate and prevent incidents from occuring and that is sorta the reason I have started this blog. People can share in the experiences of others without actually having to live through them, to gain the valuable lessons each one presents in order to reduce the risks in outdoor recreation.

Please feel free to drop a comment and initiate conversation.

Grouse Missing Snowboarder

2006-10-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

Location: Grouse Mountain Resorts, North Vancouver, BC
Time: 9:30pm
Date: April 2006

The most vivid memory of the night was riding the Olympic Express chairlift, when my radio blared out the all too familiar call, "41, Peak." The night air was cool and crisp, the chairlift swayed every so softly in the breeze drifting up Mosquito Creek, I was relaxed. The lights of Vancouver twinkled in the corner of my eye amongst the eerily lit snow covered trees on either side of me and I wondered what was awaiting me this night. In the moments before answering this call, I looked out towards the east seeing the ominous massive dark spot in the sparkling star filled heavens; there was a storm coming in.

"Go for 41," I answered, feeling the rush every patroller gets in the anticipation of receiving a call to respond.

"41 could you please come back to Peak Office right away, we may have a missing snowboarder," requested the dispatcher.

"Roger, I'll be there in 2 minutes," I said with a slightly elevated voice as I entered the hum of the unload station at the top and prepared to unload.

Moments later I was straight lining down Peak face, probably unnecessary, but exhilarating none the less. I launched the knoll, skis leaving the ground only momentarily until they reconnected with snow and carried me across the Peak Flats right up to the Peak Office. Nicely executed, I congratulated myself with a slight grin. Walking into peak office, I was greeted by the mountain supervisor; also a ski patroller by chance, handing me a missing persons report.

Now at a ski resort you get a ton of missing persons reports everyday because people get separated, people take the bus home and dont tell anyone, pretty much any number of reasons. So this one was like all the others as far as I was concerned, and a search would only be warranted if he hadn't turned up by the end of our sweep at 10pm, which I had to organize in the next 30 minutes anyways. The friends of the missing snowboarder were waiting at the chalet and the trams were informed about this guy, if he wasn't spotted by end of sweep, we would have to launch a search.

Sweep went perfectly, all runs were closed with no stragglers. I was on a snowmobile as to make tear down for the groomers more expedient, while also keeping my eye out for any sign of our missing snowboarder. While all of this was going on, our mountain supervisor was taking a trip down the backroad to see if he could pick up any tracks; which he did. Once the two chairs were called closed, I went back to Peak Office to see if anything had come up, where my mountain sup was waiting. "I found some tracks of snowboarder walking, he seemed to be confused because every 50 feet or so he would stop and walk to the side as if to try and see the hill. I followed them as far as I could, I think we need to call search and rescue," he said with a sigh of exasperation knowing that we were in for a long night.

Now as a ski patroller and a member of search and rescue, I went to the chalet to interview the friends of our subject, while the dispatcher got in touch with the Search and Rescue Manager who would command this call. By the time I walked through the front doors of the chalet, it was clear that a storm was about to roll in; visibility had dropped, winds were starting to increase, and trace amounts of snow were beginning to fall. I crossed my fingers that "our buddy" was prepared to spend a night out in a storm.

After talking with the informants I quickly came to realize that our missing person was not equipped to be spending any length of time out in the snow. He had left his backpack with personal id, camera, food, and extra clothing in the chalet with his friends and himself was wearing standard snowboarding apparel (Jacket, Pants, Boots, Gloves, Toque...better than jeans and t-shirt). He also had no local terrain knowledge and was an intermediate snowboarder, which meant he could be in serious trouble without some serious common sense. By the time I had developed a good subject profile, the first SAR manager was arriving at the base, and requested the imformants be sent down for interviewing.

With all this completed, it was now time for myself and my mountain sup to begin our search. We loaded up our packs with survival gear, first aid supplies, water, food, snowshoes and blankets. We gased up our snowmobiles and began the decent down the switchbacks leading to the back road. My sup was in front, his headlights casting an eerie glow on the ski runs on either side. Every so often I was jolted out of the trance like trip with the bright red glow of his brake light as he maneuvered over sloping terrain. As we rounded the corner lightning flashes were evident on the horizon, and directly in front was the start of a snowboard track making the curve around Mosquito Creek. I called it in. "North Shore Command this is Grouse 41, we have a snowboard track on mountain highway, we are following it now," I said. This was followed by the standard reply to proceed with caution and keep them informed.

Now to shorten the story a little, I will abbreviate the next portion as to just lead into the remainder of the story.

We followed the track, it turned into a snowboard boot track of the same size our subject was wearing, and it was fresh. We came upon the pit, directly opposite the ski hill on the other side of Mosquito Creek, the track went up and into the pit. So we called in our intentions and followed it up on foot, leaving our snowmobiles on the road. By the time we were on track other Search and Rescue crews were mobilizing and coming in from below. We eventually lost the track as snow turned to dirt, and followed a track which we thought may be a snowboard being dragged, which turned out to be a bike track (a little embarrassment on the radio for us).

Now field teams were in and around our location, one NSR (North Shore Rescue) member got a potential voice return with a loud hailer coming from in Mosquito Creek. At this point in time myself and my mountain sup had gone from the Search Managers quote on quote "gold medal team," to non-ranking and were in a race with the new "gold medal team," to get to the SAR member first and investigate. We got there first and after launching 3 parachute flares (They go up about 1000feet, illuminate a huge area, and drift down over 30 seconds) and multiple call outs with the loud hailer were confident that the SAR member had indeed got a voice contact from the creek, we were excited and began to move up the trail to find an entry point. On a hunch I did another sound blast.

"THIS IS NORTH SHORE RESCUE, CALL OUT IF YOU CAN HEAR ME!" Which was immediately followed by the faint return (very similar to the one we had been hearing all along) replied, "this is north shore rescue, call out if you can hear me." We had been tracking an echo! With the SAR member thoroughly embarrassed, myself and my boss kicking ourselves for our stupidity, and the search manager again revoking our gold medal we were back at square one.

Note while all this is going on another team of patrol staff was searching the blue grouse area of the snowshoe park on my request before they headed home for the night, they found nothing.

At this point in time, thoroughly discouraged from our last few hours of work, we headed to meet up with a NSR team, to tow them on their skis behind our sleds up to the saddle between Grouse Peak and Fromme, for them to begin a search of the area. After a 4x4 ride back up to the snowline (with me and another NSR member sitting on the tailgate) and the walk back to the snowmobiles, we towed the team to their drop off and left them for their search assignment. Me and my boss talked it over, we would continue to search, starting by re-searching the ski area for any tracks going out of bounds, tree wells in plain site; basically whatever little we could accomplish to try and find this guy.

I need to point out that in the case of a night time call, with bad weather and a unprepared person, time is of the essence. If you don't find them quickly, chances are they will expire before morning. So we knew that what we did meant the probable difference between our subjects life and death.

So in tandem, we began to search every part of the ski hill on sleds, keeping out of the way of the massive groomers as they floated in giant clouds of snow on their mission to supply skiers with pristine corduroy the next morning. I got my sled stuck a couple times and had to go through the exhaustive process of getting the sled released from it's snowy entrapment. It was 3 am when we finally pulled back into Peak Office with 100 foot variable visibility, high winds with snow blowing parallel to the ground, and temperatures well below 0.

My boss and I made the decision to try one more place before we called it quits for the night (morning actually). So we loaded our sleds back up and headed into the snowshoe park. The snow was blinding, it was impossible to see much more than 30 feet in front. A path normally well defined was a mass of white. Vertigo began to set in, and I ended up in a snowbank. After freeing the sled, we summited Dam Mountain plateau where we dismounted the sleds. I looked at my boss and I could see his mouth moving as if yelling something, but could hear nothing 10 feet away. The wind was howling, we launched a parachute flare, it rocketed skyward at a 45 degree angle, and was over our head and behind us before it had climbed 1/4 of it's intended altitude. We tried the loud hailer and strained to hear anything; only the howling wind replied.

We jumped back on the sleds, and headed out thunderbird ridge. I tailed my mountain sup, only able to see the flicker of his tail light as we climbed and descended the rolls leading out to the end of the ridge. Navigating slowly from bamboo piece to bamboo piece, we finally reached the end. The conditions were far worse out on the unprotected ridge; I hoped "our guy" had managed to make it onto a lee slope in the trees before dark set in. We fired off our flares; same effect. We made our voice calls, again hearing only wind. The search command could not even hear us on our radios the wind was so loud; it was time to head back.

After an epic ride back to the Peak Office, we dismounted the sleds and rejoiced in the warmth of the office, glad to be out of the storm. At 6am, it was time to get some sleep and prepare for the next day. Now I had a supervisor shift the next night and no one could cover it, so I went home to get enough sleep to function properly. On the way down the tram I waved at the morning crew coming into work on the tram heading the opposite way; watching their confused faces was amusing ("wasn't his shift over 8 hours ago?"). I drove home, tired to the core, cold to the bone, ready for sleep.

In the mean time the weather cleared the sun came up and a helicopter was brought in to search for the missing snowboarder, patrollers were doing a systematic sweep of all the tree wells in bounds, and search teams were searching and researching all the likely areas. The pace of the search was still that of a desperate search for a live person in sever danger of perishing, but deep down no one expected "our guy" to have survived the night.

I woke up, refreshed but still exhausted. I climbed into the shower, got my uniform on and headed up the mountain at around 1pm. When I got up top the search was still in full tilt, and everyone was out looking. The weather was in and out, hampering the helicopter search and the SAR managers were considering sending a team down Drifter Creek (Not a place any sane human being would want to go, with or without ropes, at this time of the year). I quickly got my ski boots on, received the shift change info from the morning 41 (patrol supervisor), and headed out to give the brief on search assignments and hill duties for the PM crew. The talk went as normal, and everyone was stoked to get out there to help, but doubtful of the outcome. I was approaching the point where I was doubting the survival prospects for the missing snowboarder, as I walked into the chalet to grab some paperwork from guest services.

It was at this time something happened that sent a shiver down my spine. A radio call; nothing exciting, just a calm radio call. "Peak 4-14."

"Go ahead," the dispatcher said with the normal professional tone.

"Uh ya peak, I think I have the guy we're looking for with me right now. He just walked up to me by Peak office," the volunteer patroller said over the radio. At this point all pandemonium broke loose, all radio channels were filled with people wanting more info. It took the SAR managers and peak awhile to calm it down, but when it was all clear and through, our subject was alright, just mildly hypothermic and in need of some dry clothes.

After bringing him to the chalet to take him off hill to the waiting friends, press, and ambulance at the base, I determined that he had spent his night on the south west aspect of Dam mountain, very close to where we had been searching. This was from two unidentified hikers, whom had come across him in the morning and pointed him in the direction of the ski hill not knowing this was the guy everyone was looking for. I asked him, "didn't you hear us or see the lights of the flares we launched."

His reply chilled me to the bone worse than the night out in sub zero temperatures. "Yes, I heard you, very close, and I saw the flares. I called out, but you must not have heard me," he said in broken english.

The wind had been blowing in the wrong direction, he could hear us as if he were 10 feet away, but we could hear nothing. After getting him off to the ambulance, and closing the paperwork, I went down to the office and called my mountain supervisor from the night before, to tell him about the outcome. He was relieved, we were all relieved, and amazed at this persons pure luck. Someone must have been looking out for this guy, as we have searched for others who have not made it, in conditions less sever than the previous night. It really made me think.

Always be prepared. Take the ten essentials, they could save your life. Even if your just going for a visit to a local ski hill that you can take public transit to, things can happen which can leave you in a life or death situation. You must be prepared to look after yourself until someone can come get you. Also never go out of bounds, whether avalanche danger our getting lost in hazardous terrain, they can both kill you.

The Ten Essentials
1. Flashlight or a headlamp with extra batteries and light bulb. Green cyalume stick as emergency backup.
2. Whistle (we recommend the Fox 40 whistle with a lanyard )
3. Matches (water proof or in plastic bag) or lighter. We also recommend a firestarter and/or a candle
4. Extra clothes , hat or toque, gloves or mittens, fleece jacket, gortex jacket, polypro underwear, good quality hiking socks and gortex over pants.
5. Pocketknife with quality cutting blade. Can saw (optional)
6. Large orange plastic bag and thermal tarp
7. Water (gatorade crystals recommended) and food (high energy food bars)
8. First-aid kit , should include pocket mask; Sam Splint, bulk dressings, protective gloves, bandage, scissors and blister dressings
9. Navigation:Good quality compass with built in declination adjustment and both topographical and interpretive maps. we also recommend a GPS unit but only as an adjunct to compass and map
10. Communications:We recommend you bring a celtel with 2 fresh batteries and also consider purchasing a 2 way family radio system called FRS.