Hiker rescued after 9 hours stranded in gully on Mt. Seymour

Search and rescue crews had to combat challenging terrain to rescue a hiker early Monday who had been stranded for nine hours overnight in Metro Vancouver's North Shore Mountains.

North Shore Rescue (NSR) said they were called to Mount Seymour at around 7:15 p.m. Sunday, when a group of hikers — who only knew each other through an online hiking group and were together for the first time — called to report that a member of their party had become separated from the group.

The group had gone up Mount Seymour to look at the sunset from Pump Peak, according to NSR, and the lost hiker had left around 15 minutes before the rest of the group. When the rest of the group reached the parking lot and did not find him there, they called 911.

As the missing hiker's phone was dead, and heavy fog made the use of a helicopter impossible, rescuers had to resort to splitting up and traversing the mountain by foot to try to locate the missing man.

They eventually found the man hours later, after he had taken a number of falls down cliffs and waterfalls in the DePencier Gully area near a river. The rescue was complete around 3:30 a.m. Monday, according to NSR.

"This was a group that they put together online, so they were not good friends," said Allan McMordie, an NSR search manager who handled the rescue. "The group dynamic doesn't work as well or ... doesn't exist right off the bat.

"We find this quite a bit where if they don't have a cohesive group, people start splitting off. This is what the [rescue] subject said — he was getting a little frustrated at how slow the other three people were coming down, using their microspikes and how slippery it was."

McMordie said that the man may have been going too fast and took a fall, which his group mates did not see.

"If you're in a group, you have to stay with the group. You have to go with the slowest person," the rescue manager said. "It's almost like signing a contract with the group. If you're going to go out with a group, you've got to stay with the group."

McMordie also said the hiker did not have boots with microspikes and advises potential hikers to be prepared for the conditions every time they go out.

Those preparations should include warm waterproof clothing, sturdy boots with microspikes, a headlamp and navigation equipment, according to the provincial government's online tips.

Icy conditions

McMordie said the lack of GPS and helicopter support meant that rescuers had to rely on their decades of experience to locate the lost hiker in icy conditions.

"It's pretty easy to stay on the trail and be right in the middle of that ridge," said the rescue manager. "But if anybody gets lost, they either get sucked down to the west down Suicide Gully or sucked down to the east down into DePencier Gully."

McMordie directed one team of rescuers to the west and another to the east on the foot, with their only form of aerial support being a thermal imaging drone.

After the rescuers had begun lighting flares and firing bear bangers, they heard a voice yelling off in the distance. The drone, which had been in the Suicide Gully area, eventually went to the other side of the mountain and located a "little dot of heat."

"Our crews are search teams. They needed their ice axes and full-on crampons to travel where they were going," McMordie said of the rescue, with crews having to navigate multiple cliffs and narrow, impassable creek gullies.

North Shore Rescue says that, in addition to the "three Ts" — trip planning, training and taking the essentials — anyone who gets lost in the North Shore mountains should not go downhill, as they will find themselves in steeper terrain and cliffs.

North Vancouver RCMP said in a statement that the hiker suffered minor injuries in the fall, and urged anyone going on a hike to stay put if they get lost, if possible.