Hikers, tubers safe in two Metro Vancouver overnight rescues

COQUITLAM (NEWS 1130) – A trio of hikers are thanking social media for helping search and rescue crews find them near Buntzen Lake, while seven more people were cold and wet but safe after being pulled from the Capilano River overnight.

Three men, all in their twenties and from the Tri Cities area, set off on a hike near Buntzen Lake around noon on Sunday, but got lost on the way down from Eagle Ridge. As it became dark, they called family, who eventually called Coquitlam Search and Rescue (CSAR) around 11:30 p.m.

By then, all the men’s phones had died and the family didn’t know what trail they were on.

“We had to do quite a bit of sleuthing,” Michael Coyle with CSAR said. “Only by calling one of their friends we found (one of the men) they had posted photos on Snapchat and that’s how we figured out what trail they were on. What they’d done is post them in something called a story and so they posted a photo of the trail head and then a number of times throughout the hike they posted photos.”

Crews were eventually able to determine the men were on the Swan Falls trail and set out to find them. All three were safely escorted out around 2 a.m.

Meanwhile, seven people were pulled from the Capilano River after they became stranded on a tubing trip. The group set out in the early evening, but the river wasn’t moving as fast as they anticipated, according to District of North Vancouver assistant fire Chief Brian Hutchinson.

“They got into an area of the river where they were not comfortable proceeding down the river and they weren’t comfortable going back up due to the darkness,” Hutchinson said.

Firefighters used an inflatable boat to move the group up river to an access point to pull them up around 1 a.m. All of them were checked out by BC Ambulance. One person went to the hospital for fatigue, but otherwise everyone was unhurt.

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