North Shore Rescue leaders will speak to officials at Cypress Mountain about extending the fence around the ski area after a North Vancouver couple became the fifth group of out-of-bounds snowboarders requiring rescue from the same area in the past 10 days.
The lure of fresh powder beyond the ski area near the top of the Sky Chair has repeatedly drawn snowboarders into dangerous terrain.
While Cypress does a good job of marking out-of-bounds areas, North Shore Rescue search manager Bruce Moffat said the point where the plastic snow fencing ends and the ski areas are marked only by ropes also tends to be the area snowboarders decide to risk heading into the unknown.
“The higher up they can duck the rope, the more serious trouble we can get into,” he said.
The heavy snowfall over the past week just added to the problem, he said.
In the most recent rescue Tuesday night, a North Shore Rescue team trudged down treacherous terrain on snowshoes to get to a man and woman in their 20s who found themselves unable to get out of the Montizambert drainage area several hours after they ducked under the rope in the early afternoon.
The couple kept boarding down the slope, ignoring signs warning them to turn around and hike back up to the resort, ending up in the notoriously steep and dangerous terrain below the Howe Sound Crest Trail.
The pair eventually called for help on their cell phone. By the time North Shore Rescue got the call just before 5 p.m., the light was already fading. Luckily, several members of the rescue crew were already in the area for training.
The team managed to scramble a Talon helicopter to pinpoint the snowboarders’ location. But fading light ruled out a longline helicopter rescue. Instead, rescuers had to snowshoe in to the couple’s position on foot.
When rescuers reached them, “they were very cold,” said Moffat. “They were wet…We would have been concerned if we had not been able to get to them.”
Rescuers gave the pair dry clothes, food and water and walked them back out to safety.
Moffat said the pair was very apologetic. “They had no idea how difficult an afternoon they were going to spend,” he said.
Moffat acknowledged it’s frustrating for the rescue team to keep encountering people who are doing the same things to get themselves in trouble.
Tuesday night’s rescue marked the fifth call to the same area in eight days for out-of-bounds snowboarders.
Moffat the message of not going out of bounds at ski areas is one people need to pay attention to. “If you are going to go into the backcountry, there are places to do that, there’s a time to do that,” he said.
Most people who get lost instinctively start to head down the mountain, he said — which is exactly the wrong decision.
“That’s the most dangerous thing to do,” he said. “They get steeper and there’s cliffs and waterfalls.”
Const. Jeff Palmer, spokesman for the West Vancouver Police Department, echoed that message.
“People just don’t fully appreciated how quickly that terrain becomes terribly, terribly hazardous,” he said. “Suddenly you’re in terrain you can’t recover from.”
