Though the North Shore’s peaks may look depressingly free of snow, the backcountry trails still hold many of winter’s dangers.
That’s a lesson five hikers learned on Saturday night when they had to be rescued from a dangerous area in Mount Seymour Provincial Park after becoming lost.
The group of four women in their early 20s and a 10-year-old boy, had planned to hike to Dog Mountain, a relatively easy five-kilometre trail in summer conditions.
On their way back to the Mount Seymour parking lot, they got off trail and wound up on a route to the ominously named Suicide Bluffs trail, a steep, technical path that’s not well marked.
After they had been in the dark for more than an hour, they called 9-1-1 for help.
“They were lucky in that they had four cellphones in this group of five but three of the four were dead and the fourth had only a little bit of battery power left,” said Doug Pope, North Shore Rescue search manager.
North Shore Rescue members coached them into getting their GPS co-ordinates off their one working phone and sent a team in on foot to escort them out.
The five were “quite cold and scared” after the ordeal and long wait for rescuers to arrive but otherwise uninjured, Pope said.
The group were totally unprepared for a hike, he added. They were wearing yoga pants, no socks and toe-shoes.
“I think they were lulled into a false sense of security where it’s almost spring-like conditions in the city here, but up there, the margin for error is a lot less in the winter,” Pope said. “A slip and fall in that steep terrain could definitely have caused injury. Although it’s been a mild winter and we don’t have a lot of snow up there, we’re still dealing with slippery conditions. You’ve got early darkness to contend with and weather on Seymour is notoriously variable.”
