Parks Canada's search-and-rescue program

Edmonton Journal feature writer Ed Struzik spent four months this summer trekking through Canada's national parks, from the High Arctic to Point Pelee, Pacific Rim to Gros Morne. He found a parks system adored by Canadians, yet crumbling due to neglect. Over eight weeks in the Edmonton Sunday Reader, Struzik explores the mounting challenges the parks face.

Search and rescue: Paying for others' mistakes

Who'll save the rescuers?: Every time an adventurer gets lost on the tundra or a backcountry hiker fractures an ankle, it's a bad break for Parks Canada's tight budget and aging search-and-rescue staff

Heading home after a two-day shore patrol along the fabled West Coast Trail, warden Rick
Holmes spots three hikers at a campsite waving their arms, pointing to a man who is hobbling about with a walking stick.

Unable to land their big, rigid-hulled Zodiac safely on the rocky shores while powerful
tides are moving in, Holmes sends his partners, Danielle Bellefleur and Michelle Theberge,
in on a small inflatable raft to see if the injured man needs to be evacuated.

It's early June. The search-and-rescue season is just beginning for this Port Renfrew-based
unit, which keeps tabs on adventurers exploring the spectacular sandstone cliffs, caves and
waterfalls along this rugged rainforest trail in Pacific Rim National Park.

Already there has been one fatality and 13 evacuations.

"Everyone, it seems, wants to do the West Coast Trail at some point in their lives," says
Holmes.

"Unfortunately, many of them are first-time or fair-weather hikers who don't realize how
tough the going can get when you're carrying a 50-pound pack up a 20-foot vertical ladder in a rainstorm. They get themselves into these so-called pits of despair. They get hurt or they can't get out and we go in and rescue them."

Parks Canada's search-and-rescue program was born more than a half century ago when
mountaineering accidents in the Rockies highlighted the need to develop a team of specially
trained wardens who could respond to emergencies. Since then, it has expanded to deal with people who get in trouble on the water or on backcountry trails like this one on Vancouver Island.

Up to 1,600 times a year in Canada, wardens are called in to cope with everything from
hikers with broken ankles to climbers who fall off mountaintops and backcountry skiers who
get buried in avalanches.

"We get between 88 and 133 potentially life-threatening situations and 16 to 40 fatalities
in our national parks each year," says Michel Villeneuve, Parks Canada's public safety
specialist in Ottawa.

"Some of the deaths are the result of car accidents. But others, like the guy who fell off
Gros Morne mountain in Newfoundland this year, or the one who drowned crossing a river in
Auyuittuq on Baffin Island, are related to higher-risk backcountry travel.

"The numbers may sound high," says Villeneuve, but consider that the national parks draw 25 million visitors each year.

BUDGET CUTS HOBBLE RECRUITING TO REPLACE RETIRING STAFF

While Parks Canada search-and-rescue teams rank with the world's best, the system largely depends on a dedicated group of individuals who are getting old and creaky.

Not only is the cash-strapped agency finding it increasingly tough to recruit new talent, it
is also facing new challenges, like changing weather patterns that are increasing the
avalanche risk in the mountains and the growing popularity of extreme sports that put more
people in harm's way.

The fact that avalanche casualty rates in the Rocky Mountain parks have actually declined
while snowboarding and ice climbing have taken off in a big way is a testament to how Parks Canada, along with the Canadian Avalanche Centre, has been managing the situation.

What worries Banff chief park warden Ian Syme more than daredevils, however, is his rapidly aging workforce. For example, Tim Auger and Scott Ward, two of the most talented rescue specialists in Banff, retired this year.

Another search-and-rescue expert, Mike Wynn of Jasper, died in an avalanche two years ago.

With tight budgets, "the warden service is shrinking, we're not bringing in any new people,"
says Syme. "Most of my seasonal wardens here in Banff are over 45 or 50 years old. And
almost all of my permanent staff are over 45.

"It takes a lot of time and money to train someone in the art of search and rescue. At some
point, we're going to be hitting the wall."

Syme says the Rocky Mountain parks have considered other ways of financing search and rescue so it doesn't dig so deeply into their budgets.

The old idea of making people pay for search and rescues surfaced again this fall when a
Calgary hiker went missing in Banff park for five days.

It took more than a dozen wardens, three dogs and a helicopter to search for the experienced hiker who had the incredible bad luck of losing his tent in strong winds, his stove when a pack dog disappeared, and his way on the trail when a snowstorm hit.

That search cost about $40,000, says Syme. "The helicopter was flying for eight hours a day for five days. Had he been out there for one more day, I don't think we would have brought him out alive."

But setting up the bureaucracy to recover what Parks Canada spends on rescues isn't fair to
people who get into trouble through no fault of their own, Syme says. And it might cost more than the agency could ever hope to collect.

"Here in the Banff and Lake Louise field units, the cost of the 120 or so search and rescues
we do each year amounts to about five cents of the price of admission we get from the three million people who come here each year," he says.

"It really doesn't eat into our operating budget the way it would for parks in the North
that have so few visitors and much bigger challenges rescuing people in the more remote
corners of their parks."

To be sure, most of Canada's northern parks attract only a couple of hundred people each
year. But a search and rescue in a place like Ivvavik National Park in the Yukon can cost 50
times more than the price of pulling a climber off a mountain in Banff or Jasper.

Two summers ago, for example, a couple of Ontario men showed up at the Ivvavik office in
Inuvik with last-minute plans to fly to the park and hike from one end of it to the other.

After the junior warden convinced them their plan was unrealistic, they settled on a
compromise trip to the Arctic coast.

On a warm summer day, the coastal plain of Ivvavik can seem like heaven on Earth to veteran hikers seeking something pristine and off the beaten path. But if sheets of Siberian fog roll in with freezing rain or snow, it looks more like the last Ice Age.

Bush pilot Willard Hagen was the first person to learn the two hikers were in trouble.

"They called me in the middle of the night on their satellite phone asking that I come in
and fly them back," he recalls. "But there was nothing I could do. There was fog and
freezing rain between here and the park. It would have been suicide had I attempted to go
out.

"So I told them to calm down, get in their tent and stay warm in their sleeping bags. I
thought they'd be all right as long as they were dry."

A few hours later, however, their call to a Parks Canada warden suggested the situation had
gotten much worse. Worried that at least one of them was hypothermic, chief park warden Ron Larsen dispatched a colleague in a helicopter to see if they could be brought in.

The risky flight ended up costing the agency nearly $6,000.

As it stands now, Parks Canada does not seek to recover money spent for search and rescues like this. Some within the agency, however, wonder whether this policy should be
reconsidered when the agency is forced to rescue hikers who were unprepared or incompetent.

Others argue adventurers should have to post a bond before their trips.

ILL-FATED CLIMBING TRIP TEACHES A COSTLY LESSON

Last summer's rescue of a climbing party of Koreans in Baffin Island's Auyuittuq National
Park certainly revived the debate.

Mt. Tirokwa is a remote peak that is becoming increasingly popular with big-wall climbers.
While it's not the most technical of climbs, it does pose considerable challenges.

The Koreans, however, never found out. They ended up exhausting themselves during the first week of their month-long expedition, hauling gear from the Overlord warden station to Windy Lake.

Parks Canada had no idea the Koreans were in trouble until it received a report that one
member of the party had gone missing for three days.

The call came "literally five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon," says Pete Smillie, the
acting manager for Auyuittuq. "We sent in a helicopter to search for the missing climber and
found him walking through an area with a lot of rock."

Bizarre as it sounds, the climber apparently had no intention of being rescued. Once the
Parks Canada team got on the ground, and found no sign of him, they came to realize he was likely hiding.

Smillie says he still isn't sure what exactly happened, with the language barrier hampering
things once the entire party was transported to Pangnirtung for medical treatment and
debriefing.

But in light of the fact only one of the Koreans had first aid training, another had an
irregular pulse and the team had shown such poor judgment up to this point, the agency
revoked their permits.

Not a penny of the more than $10,000 spent on the rescue was ever recovered.

Hypothermic hikers and climbers who get in over their heads are not the only challenge
facing public safety officials in Canada's North.

Three summers ago, Larsen was forced to close off a section of the Firth River along the
Alaska border in Ivvavik park after 19 grizzlies converged on a canyon to feed on more than 20 caribou that had drowned trying to cross in high water.

Some paddlers who were already making their way downstream on the Firth had to be airlifted out. "Moving those three groups that were immediately above the canyon and notifying everyone else upstream that they should take their time getting down the river took a lot of flying time," says Larsen.

"So did the helicopter sweep we did to make sure the area was free of bears. In the end, it
cost us somewhere around $40,000, money that we could have used for other purposes."

In the future, Parks Canada's biggest problem in the North may be bears of another colour.

Although no one has been killed by a polar bear in the parks, the number of close calls has
been increasing.

A few years ago, Yukon guide Jill Pangman and a small group of paddlers were camped at
Nunaluk Spit, a sliver of land jutting into the Beaufort Sea in Ivvavik National Park.
Slipping out of her tent early one morning to go to the bathroom, Pangman met the stare of a polar bear.

"He had just got out of the ocean and he was dripping wet," she recalls. "He was maybe 15
feet away. I was so tired I couldn't focus. At first, I thought I was dreaming. I kept
blinking but this vision wouldn't go away. Then I thought, 'I'd better get the bear spray'."

Unfortunately, the tired paddlers had left the bear spray canisters in the unpacked boats.
Pangman retreated into her tent, not realizing she was only inviting the animal to follow
her.

For several minutes, she and her tent mate huddled in terror as the bear padded around just outside. "After awhile, I poked my head out to see what it was doing. That's when I saw the bear pushing up against the tent next to ours.

"I thought to myself 'Don't wake up. Don't scream.' Then I heard them call out and unzip the tent. At that point, the bear drove its whole head right through their nylon screen door,
forcing them to squash up into a bundle on the other side.

"I got a picture of the hole and all of the bear slobber to prove it."

As it turned out, the bear moved far enough away to give the paddlers time to pack up their
tents and sleeping bags and push off into the Beaufort Sea towards the safety of Herschel
Island.

"We were very lucky there was no big water on the sea that day," says Pangman. "It was dead calm, a perfect day for paddling and rowing."

Ian Stirling, an Environment Canada scientist and one of the world's leading experts on
polar bears, believes Parks Canada is wrong to allow unarmed people into Arctic coastal
areas. Properly trained or knowledgeable people should be able to carry guns, Stirling says.

"Sooner or later, they are going to have a disaster with a polar bear encounter, and frankly
I am amazed it hasn't happened already.

"Polar bears are different from black and brown bears. They have evolved to be predators and they are pretty good at it.

"Look at the number of bears killed in Nunavut every year in protection of life and
property. I would not personally go on a hike in coastal polar bear country without a
firearm, and I would send any employee of mine south on the first plane if they went for a
hike ... without a firearm."

'KILLING A BEAR IS STILL A LAST RESORT'

Stirling say guns wouldn't necessarily lead to more dead bears.

"Killing a bear is still a last resort because you can still fire warning shots and cracker
shells when a bear is some distance away, which in most cases will deter them."

The fact that polar bears are relatively rare in the northern parks is no reason for Parks
Canada to be complacent, Stirling says.

"What it does mean is there is a greater chance the bears that do turn up are more likely to
be younger ones looking for a new home. Those are the bears that are more likely to be
thinner, hungrier and potentially more dangerous. In those cases, either the bear or the
person is going to end up dead."

The increasing risk of conflict between polar bears and adventurers in the North, and
emerging new challenges of climate change and extreme sports in southern parks, have people like Clare Israelson concerned about the future.

Israelson worked for Parks Canada for 26 years before becoming head of the Canadian
Avalanche Centre, based in Field, B.C. He worries that years of budget cuts will undermine
the agency's ability to maintain a search-and-rescue program that can adapt to the new
demands.

"The fact is Parks Canada has been the beneficiary of a group of people who have, in many
cases, acted beyond the call of duty, and risked their lives in some cases to save people,"
says Israelson.

"Unless something is done to support these very good troops, the public safety that the
agency is renowned for will be seriously compromised. The status quo is not going to do it
for much longer."

estruzik@thejournal.canwest.com