For the third time this month, North Shore Rescue members have pulled an out-of-bounds skier or snowboarder out of a life-and-death situation near Cypress Mountain Resort.
The team was called into action just before 8 p.m. Friday when a man phoned West Vancouver police saying his friend had gotten stuck at a cliff ledge.
North Shore Rescue members placed the man in Montizambert Creek drainage – a treacherous, steep area where many have fallen to their deaths. It’s also a magnet for people going out of bounds in search of fresh powder, but quickly find themselves past the point of no return.
On March 1, they pulled a snowboarder from the site who later issued a public plea for other misguided adventurers to learn from his mistake and stay in bounds. Four days later, the rescue crew was back to Montizambert to extract a skier.
“It’s been crazy and it’s the same kind of thing going on in the sense that it’s 30-something-year-old males. They’re local and they should all know better. They wilfully go out of bounds, ignore the fence and the ropes that Cypress has,” said Doug Pope, search manager.
Pope reached the 35-year-old man on his phone. The gravity of the situation had apparently already sunk in, Pope said.
“He was basically hysterical. He was panicked. He was screaming, crying. He thought he was going to die,” he said.
Pope calmed him down over the phone and told the subject to stay put – advice he probably did not need. “He couldn’t go up and he saw the next step for him was about a 300-foot vertical fall,” he said.
It was too dark to reach the man by helicopter but the avalanche risk was low enough that rescue volunteers could reach the area by foot. It took them until midnight to make voice contact with him.
When they realized exactly where he was, they quickly decided it would be too dangerous to try to rescue him in the dark, Pope said, so the field team opted to camp out for the night slightly above the cliff ledge and lower dry clothes, food and warming vest down to the frightened snowboarder via rope to help ward off hypothermia for the night.
When morning came, they sent a volunteer down to the man’s precarious perch and brought him up the hill with rope to wait for the clouds to clear enough for a Talon helicopter to arrive.
Pope said it is probably time to re-evaluate their strategy for keeping people in-bounds on Cypress. North Shore Rescue has even placed signs closer to the creek with a skull and crossbones “warning basically: Stop Here or Die,” Pope said. “And they still go by them.”
“I think more needs to be done because the status quo isn’t acceptable for us to continue to fetch these people out of life-and-death situations. There needs to be more preventative work on behalf of everyone involved. I think North Shore Rescue, Cypress Resorts and BC Parks need to put our heads together again.”
