Dear Editor:
I was saddened to hear of the recent cliff jumping death in Lynn Canyon.
I worked at the District of North Vancouver in 2016 when the 17-year-old boy from Coquitlam died after jumping into the canyon. His body was trapped by a rock shelf underwater for three weeks before it could be safely recovered and sent to his grieving parents. Everyone involved in the rescue turned recovery will remember his name for the rest of our lives.
The public and media were understandably shocked and wanted to know what was being done to prevent further cliff jumping and associated deaths. Staff and elected officials at the district discussed every possibility and idea with our parks staff, our firefighters and the folks at North Shore Rescue. We came to understand that, logistically, there is only so much local government can do that will prevent another death. No matter what barriers are erected or safety warnings are given, people who are determined to cliff jump will still do it.
We met with local high school students to see if there was any action we could take to deter them from cliff jumping. It was a sobering insight into how the local kids think about it. They asked us for a topographical map of the canyon floor so they could decide where the “safest place to jump” might be.
They told us cliff jumping was a North Van high school rite of passage and that the local kids knew the risks and understood when the “safe times” to jump were; that the kids who perished “weren’t locals.” (Just for the record, it is never safe, and locals have died.)
Several said they had first cliff jumped with older relatives when they were younger. They also said, point blank, nothing you say or do will stop us from cliff jumping. This was particularly hard to hear for the first responders in attendance, many of whom are parents themselves.
We launched a social media campaign (the first of its type) and put new signs along the cliff jumping areas that had a different kind of language and messaging. It worked, it seems, for a while. The thing is that before the human brain is completely formed at about age 25, decision-making and self-preservation are in a day-to-day battle with risk-taking and gratification-seeking
behaviours. Add peer pressure to the mix and it’s no wonder we have some kids taking these huge risks in the canyon.
It is important that the community understand that there is no silver bullet solution to this situation. If there was a way to definitively prevent any further deaths from cliff jumping in that park, it would be done. The only way things will change is to modify the culture around cliff jumping, and that takes generations. Think about things that were tolerated a generation or two ago that are considered completely unacceptable now.
If you have high school aged kids in your family and you know they hang out in Lynn Canyon, talk to them about thinking of the others in their lives, and how utterly devastated you would be as their mom or dad, grandparent, aunt or uncle if you got a call one day to say they had jumped and never surfaced.
Mairi Welman
Salt Spring Island
