North Shore Rescue sees influx of calls as hikers get caught out in the dark

North Shore Rescue (NSR) responded to four calls Saturday evening for hikers stuck on the North Shore’s Grouse Mountain and Black Mountain, and Vancouver Island’s Mount Arrowsmith.

“Things got a little crazy last night,” NSR search manager Stan Sovdat told CityNews.

Sovdat is expecting a busy Thanksgiving Sunday for the North Vancouver-based search and rescue team.

Two of the four calls for help Saturday came from the BCMC trail on Grouse Mountain, which Sovdat says is patrolled every evening by a group called “Friends of the Grind” to help reduce the number of searches the rescue team has to conduct on the mountain.

One of the calls for the BCMC trail ended with a helicopter extraction of a hiker, while the other call ended in NSR assisting a hiker in getting down the trail. All four calls were successful rescues.

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Sovdat says while NSR’s attention was turned to Grouse, the call for Black Mountain came in.

He says two hikers got lost near the Baden Powell trail on the mountain after stopping at the top to watch the sunset and attempting to navigate coming down in the dark. Despite having flashlights on their phones, Sovdat says they didn’t have headlamps and had run out of water.

“They underestimated the time that the sun went down,” he said. “They had hiked about a month ago and days then were quite long compared to now.”

Sovdat says the team told the hikers to stay put and not use up their phone batteries by using their flashlights. Eventually, the team located them, walked them down to safety and dropped them off at the Seabus.

As the days get shorter, Sovdat says this type of incident isn’t uncommon.

“Some of our great tragedies happen during the fall,” he said.

“Especially around daylight saving time. On that day specifically, we’ve had people disappear into the mountains because they just forget about that extra hour that they don’t have.”

As the sun sets, Sovdat says unexpected storms, snow and ice can roll in very rapidly and anyone caught unprepared can end up in a dangerous situation.

He recommends hikers heading out this fall bring lights, good footwear, extra fluids, snacks, electrolytes, extra clothing and a navigational device like a GPS.