Overnight rescue required for lost hiker in North Vancouver

A hiker who got lost on the Hanes Valley trail is likely counting her lucky stars after she was saved by North Shore rescue on Thursday morning.

The woman in her 30s had a plan to hike the Hanes Valley trail from Lynn Headwaters to Grouse Mountain, but she lost her way in the process.

“She was not sure whether she was somewhere behind Goat Mountain or by Lynn Lake – that’s a pretty broad area there,” North Shore Rescue’s Mike Danks tells Daily Hive.

Danks says based on the time of day when the rescue occurred, they only had about half an hour of daylight left to work with, so they asked the RCMP to ping her phone.

“They weren’t able to get a ping back with accurate coordinates. They could only get one tower that she was hitting and that was at 25th Avenue in Vancouver – that gave us a little bit of an idea of where she might be.”

The next priority was getting rescue crews up the mountain in a helicopter to find her before it got dark. They eventually found her near Lynn Lake, where North Shore Rescue happens to have a cache of supplies.

Danks says based on the shoes she had on and the fact that she had been hiking all day, rescuers opted to use the cache and set up camp for the night. The woman was walked out early Thursday morning.

“The challenge with this is she was hiking on her own in a very remote area. She was really, really lucky she got a cell signal to call for help.”

“She’s also really lucky she didn’t get injured by herself, because it could have been quite some time before we found her if that was the case,” says Danks, adding people need to be aware that as the season comes to a close, it gets darker earlier in the day.