A 28-year-old Delta man has died after a fall in the North Shore mountains.
It’s the first fatality of the year in the backcountry.
North Shore Rescue members were in the midst of responding to a call for two lost hikers on Crown Mountain around 6:15 p.m. Sunday when a more urgent call reporting an “unconscious collapse” came in from the BC Emergency Coordination Centre.
The man had slipped and hit his head while crossing a shallow section of Norvan Creek, deep in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park.
“He was unconscious and they weren’t able to wake him. Because they were in Lynn Headwaters, there’s no cell signal there. One guy had to run out seven kilometres before he got a signal to call for help,” Danks said.
The team scrambled two Talon helicopters but rescuers still had very little information to go on.
When they tracked down location, they found the subject still partially submerged in Norvan Creek, where two groups of strangers had taken turns doing compressions on him for more than an hour and a half.,
“These people did an amazing job,” Danks said.
With an advanced life support paramedic on the rescue team, members rigged the man, who was not showing any vital signs, to recently donated oxylator and autopulse machines and flew him to a waiting ambulance. He was later pronounced dead at hospital.
“He basically slipped and hit his head significantly enough that it knocked him out. That was probably the catalyst that forced him into cardiac arrest,” Danks said. “This was just a really freak accident, to be honest.”
The incident underscores how satellite phones can be vital in a backcountry emergency, Danks said.
BC Coroners Service is now investigating the death. The name of the deceased has not yet been released.
