Grand Forks Search and Rescue saved a lost hunter over the weekend.
SAR received the call at 1PM Saturday afternoon, and were activated by RCMP, after the hunter had contacted his wife on an In-Reach device from Granby Provincial Park.
Search Manager Grant Burnard says there was no service, so it’s good the hunter came prepared. “I mean it’s accessible by hikers, there’s certain trails that you cant even get an ATV into so it’s definitely out in the wild, it would’ve taken us about a day or day and a half if we were hiking in, that’s why the call was made to send in a helicopter.”
Burnard says although the rescue went smoothly, there was an interesting circumstance. “When we tried to reach the device’s vendor, who actually manufactures the devices and tracks their SOS calls, when we initially spoke to them they said, yes they are completely aware of the missing hunter case in BC, and they gave us coordinates, and we looked at those coordinates and they actually were quite different from what his wife had sent to us.”
They’d actually been given the coordinates of a lost hunter in Hope, BC. The operation was wrapped up by 6:30PM. Burnard adds even if the hunter had told his wife about his whereabouts beforehand, it still could’ve taken upwards of a day to locate him without the appropriate preparation.