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Unprepared hikers spend cold night on North Vancouver mountain

North Shore Rescue team finds two women below Coliseum Peak
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Two middle-aged women who went for a hike Friday and veered wildly off course spent a cold wet night in the North Shore mountains before being helicoptered out Saturday morning.

“I don’t think they realized what they were getting into at all,” said Don Jardine, a search manager with North Shore Rescue.

The two hikers – one from Richmond and her friend who was visiting from China - had apparently started their hike in Lynn Headwaters that morning, but were high in the mountains and got lost as darkness fell.

They called the RCMP for help with their cell phones around 10:20 p.m. Friday night. It was raining heavily at the time and the hikers said they were lost, cold and wet.

Jardine said the situation was made more complicated by a language barrier – the women only spoke Mandarin, making it difficult for rescuers to ascertain where they were. “Pinging” off the women’s cellphones also proved unreliable – giving an address in Surrey, probably because they were so far up the mountain, the phone signal bounced off a Surrey cell tower, said Jardine.

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A member of North Shore Rescue helps one of the hikers down the mountain early Saturday morning. The team was called out after two women became lost near Coliseum Peak in the rain and dark on Friday night - photo supplied Ian Christie

Eventually a Mandarin-speaking member of the rescue team was able to get the women to use a feature on the phone to pin down their location, at the start of a ridge below Coliseum Peak at about the 1,100-metre mark.

Metro staff were able to give members of North Shore Rescue a ride partway up the Lynn Loop trail in an ATV. Rescuers then continued hiking up the trail in the dark until they were able to reach the women.

Jardine said while the women had brought an umbrella with them, their tennis shoes weren’t up to the job of backcountry hiking.

Rescuers reached the women at about 3 a.m., gave them heated vests and warm clothes to put on and started hiking them back down the mountain. About four and a half hours later, the group had made it to an area near Norvan Creek – where a helicopter was called in to hoist them out.

Jardine said the women were lucky.

Last October, a 24-year-old Quebec man, Carl Couture, went missing while hiking alone in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park. He has not been found.

In late 2014, hiker Liang Jin also disappeared in Hanes Valley. His body was found there several weeks later.