Just a few hours before a 40-year-old snowboarder was found dead on Cypress Mountain Saturday, he stopped with a female friend for a photo in the fresh powder snow. A sign hung in the nearby trees. It said Danger. Do Not Go Beyond This Point. Turn Back Now.
The snowboarders were already well out of bounds of the resort skiing area. But at this point, they decided to separate. The woman turned back and the 40-year-old Surrey man continued on, past the warning. It was a decision that cost him his life.
The body of the missing snowboarder was recovered by North Shore Rescue Saturday in the Montizambert drainage area.
“This is a really, really tragic ending. Not what we anticipate on these calls but I think it really shows the consequences that can happen,” said North Shore Rescue team leader Mike Danks.
“It’s hard for me to rationalize why people are doing it,” said Danks on the perennial issue of skiers and snowboarders who deliberately go out of bounds and quickly find themselves in hazardous terrain.
“On the other side of that boundary rope there’s fresh powder. That draws people in. I think he was very naïve to the dangers.”
The pair separated around noon on upper Mount Strachan with a plan to meet up again at 2:30 p.m. It took the female snowboarder 90 minutes to get out of the trail and return to the ski area. When the man didn’t show up, the woman called Cypress ski patrol.
The ski patrol found a snowboard track heading down a steep slope beyond the boundary line. Police immediately called in North Shore Rescue.
“We got on it right away,” said Danks, adding there was considerable avalanche danger at that time.
About 20 searchers set out to look for the snowboarder, with some members following the tracks down while others worked their way up from the Sea to Sky Highway below.
Danks said the tracks led searchers to conclude the snowboarder wasn’t experienced travelling in hazardous terrain. “The way he was descending through the terrain was very dangerous,” he said. “He was travelling through terrain that is very risky,” heading down steep slippery slopes “with a very thin layer of snow on it.”
The search continued into the night until around 2 a.m. Saturday when teams came to a spot where it appeared the man had gone over a cliff.
There was no response to shouting or parachute flares.
The search was called off until first light Saturday morning, when a helicopter team spotted the snowboarder at the base of the cliff during a quick reconnaissance of the area.
The team had to wait a few more hours for the weather to clear enough to send members in by helicopter long line around noon Saturday. They confirmed the snowboarder was dead.
Preliminary indications are the snowboarder died of traumatic injuries after falling off the steep cliff.
The snowboarder’s body has since been recovered and his family has been notified.
The Montizambert Creek area on the west side of Mount Strachan where the snowboarder died is a notoriously dangerous area. It is the area where snowboarder Sebastien Boucher was rescued after surviving three days in bone-chilling temperatures in December of 2012.
Two years ago, North Shore Rescue retrieved five groups of snowboarders who had gone out of bounds in the area within eight days.
Incredibly, as searchers were setting out to find the snowboarder Friday, they came across two lost skiers in the area who could have easily met with a similar fate.
Those skiers had also gone out of bounds earlier in the day off the Sky Chair and missed the Howe Sound Crest Trail that would have taken them back to the ski hill. They had begun a long climb back out when they were picked out by an RCMP helicopter around 9 p.m.
A search team heading in from Bowen Lookout took an hour to reach the skiers in often thigh-deep snow, and escort them back to safety.
Danks said that in the case of the lost snowboarder, searchers did all that they could.
“Gullies are inherently dangerous,” he said.
“A lot of the slopes these guys want to ski (out of bounds) are 25 degrees or steeper. Which is prime avalanche terrain.”
Once skiers start heading downhill in that area, it is easy to get trapped in waterfalls and creeks or encounter sudden cliffs and drop offs.
He urged those who are tempted to go out of bounds to reconsider.
“All the local mountains here do an excellent job of marking their boundaries. You have to physically lift the ropes to go beyond the boundary, and it’s just such an unfortunate circumstance that happened,” said Danks.
Anyone travelling in the backcountry should be knowledgeable about hazards, he said, and carry proper equipment including a satellite phone to call for help. “We need to put a stop to this,” said Danks. “That waterfall has claimed numerous lives.”
- with files from Rosalind Duane
