In the event of an avalanche, a banana is probably not going to save you.
North Vancouver’s Sandra Riches, a longtime outdoor enthusiast and safety advocate, has seen a lot of eye-opening things in her time working in the adventure industry, but one particular image sticks out. It’s not near as gruesome as many tales that emerge from the North Shore mountains, but it is just as instructive.
In the 1990s Riches worked as a provincial park ranger, and one winter joined a team tasked with setting the backcountry access route on Mount Seymour. As her crew went about the arduous work of finding the safest routes, marking paths with bamboo poles and assessing the avalanche risk of each new slope, a group walked by headed deep into the backcountry. They were armed with the following items: snowboards, video camera, banana.
Riches has since become one of the country’s foremost authorities on search and rescue prevention, but even in those days when she was relatively new to the field, she knew this key piece of information about backcountry preparedness: “You’re going to need more than a banana.”
It was encounters like this one that helped set Riches on the path that saw her become the founding co-ordinator and executive director of BC AdventureSmart, a program devoted to giving people the tools they need to safely play outdoors in the vast wilderness of British Columbia.
The program targets the entire province, although the North Shore is of particular interest given the easy wilderness access it provides to the massive population of the Lower Mainland. There are 80 volunteer search and rescue teams across B.C. that carry out approximately 1,600 rescues each year, more calls than the rest of the country combined. North Shore Rescue handles around 130 of those call each year. Trouble can arrive in painfully easy ways. You can drive up to the top of Mount Seymour, or simply pay for a ticket up the Grouse Mountain Skyride, and walk just a few hundred metres to find yourself in the backcountry.
That very thing happened a month ago, on Halloween night, when a tourist from Quebec struck out from the Grouse Mountain Chalet, walking right past a new sign declaring that section of backcountry closed.
North Shore Rescue members spent a week looking for him, hoping to somehow find him alive. They’re still looking, in fact, rejoining the search with Metro Vancouver parks employees and Talon Helicopters just this past Tuesday. So far they’ve found nothing.
It’s those types of calls – not only tragic for the victims, but also exhausting and dangerous for rescuers – that Sandra Riches wants to put an end to. In fact, if she had her way, Riches would happily put North Shore Rescue right out of business.
“That’s my goal!” she says. “They’re too busy. And if people could just try to be more prepared, we could help keep those guys and girls at home.”
• • •
Two friends spend a magical day at Florencia Bay near Tofino on Vancouver Island. As the afternoon wears on they decide to start a hike along a rocky trail from one beach to another. The sun is setting as the waves crash below them. It’s breathtakingly beautiful.
The navigator of the expedition is following a trail marked on Google Maps. Or at least, he thinks it’s a trail. Quite quickly the sun sets, leaving the pair stuck well short of their destination, thick brush on one side and waves, now emerging out of near darkness, crashing into the slippery rocks on the other. They have one cellphone, but it’s serving triple duty as light, map and the only form of communication they could use to call for help. And with all those functions running, that battery won’t last for long.
A beautiful day at the beach has turned deadly serious. What do they do?
• • •
AdventureSmart outreach educator Kelly Uren unfurls a shiny silver blanket and flaps it around, drawing ahhhs from the class at the North Shore Multicultural Society. The adult ESL students may not understand every word she’s saying, but the cool gear she brings along has gotten their attention.
They don’t need to take in every word, Uren says before the class, as long as they learn at least one or two key messages about outdoor safety. New Canadians and visitors to the country are two of the main target demographics for AdventureSmart.
Uren, who grew up in Deep Cove surrounded by ocean, forest and mountains, wants to make sure newcomers can experience the beauty of this land without adding to North Shore Rescue’s running tally.
AdventureSmart outreach educator Kelly Uren shows off some equipment to North Shore Multicultural Society students Yuta Monzen and Chang Hong Yin. photo Mike Wakefield, North Shore News
“Being in the outdoors is such a part of the culture in Canada, especially in B.C. and on the coast, if we can get them out and enjoying the outdoor culture, then I think that’s pretty important too,” says Uren. She’s hoping that participants in any of her presentations will at least remember the Three Ts: Trip planning, Training, and Taking the essentials. That’s AdventureSmart’s holy trinity of education tips, encompassing the advice they hope will help reduce the number and severity of SAR incidents in British Columbia. According to AdventureSmart’s data, an increasing number of rescue calls come from those groups, tourists and new Canadians who venture out into the wild not knowing what they are getting themselves into.
“It’s not Disneyland out there,” says Uren. “All of it is very new to them. … It’s a lot of information that we give them, but it’s all very crucial as well. If they remember just a small bit of what we tell them, it could very well save their lives.”
As she starts her presentation Uren speaks very slowly and clearly, pausing when she senses that the class is not understanding what she is saying.
“What does ‘essentials’ mean?” a student asks.
“In the morning,” replies Uren, “coffee is ESSENTIAL for me.” This draw a big laugh.
Uren keeps it simple, explaining some of the basics of the search and rescue procedures in the province.
“If you’re hiking and you break your ankle, you DON’T have to pay for a rescue,” she says, drawing an appreciative gasp from the students.
Those engaging in high risk adventures or venturing into unfamiliar territory may be most at risk, but in all of her presentations Uren stresses that incidents can happen to anyone at any time. Even her.
She was one of those two explorers stuck on a craggy beach outside of Tofino. She’d been counting on her friend to navigate, and as the sun was disappearing they discovered that what they’d been following on Google Maps was not a trail at all but rather a topographical line. That was one mistake among many. Their first mistake occurred before they even set out for the day.
“I’m pretty sure nobody knew where we were,” Uren says. “So that was also a mistake that we had made – not telling anyone where we were going.”
Faced with rocks and open ocean on one side and seemingly impenetrable bush on the other, they opted for the bush.
“We decided to do that rather than go skirting around the slippery rocks above the ocean in the dark,” she says. “It took about an hour and a half to go 400 metres, through the salal and really soft ground. We’re lucky that it ended as it did. It could have been much worse.”
She sometimes tells that story during her presentations as a reminder: “it could happen to anyone at any moment.”
Back at the multicultural society Uren told another, even more harrowing story of survival. Seizing on a recent headline, she told the students about dog walker Annette Poitras. The 56-year-old was rescued after a three-day search on Coquitlam’s Burke Mountain. Poitras said her ordeal started when she slipped on a log and became injured and disoriented.
“Think about Annette,” Uren tells the students. “She was only walking her dogs.”
• • •
There’s an odd opening to the story of how Sandra Riches became an outdoor safety crusader. Growing up in St. Catherines, Ont., she barely ever ventured into the wilderness.
“Absolutely not,” she says with a laugh when asked if she was an outdoorsy kid. “I didn’t do anything. My parents weren’t, and are not. We didn’t go to the park, we didn’t camp, we didn’t do anything.”
She did develop a love of skiing at age 10, however, and that is part of what brought her out to British Columbia in her early 20s. She ended up working in the repair and rental shops on Grouse Mountain.
“That’s where everybody goes to start,” she says with a laugh. Looking for a way to turn her newfound passion for the outdoors into a full-time career, Riches enrolled in the outdoor recreation program at Capilano University (then known as Capilano College).
“When I found the program at Cap U, when I came out to B.C., I kind of felt like I just came home,” she says. “It was a really weird feeling for me. It was a feeling somewhat of validation of what I was interested in when I came here, realizing that I could do them for play and work. I was so excited. … I felt like a massive door opened up for me, and I just fell in love with everything about outdoor rec.”
As a park ranger Riches saw both sides of the prevention and rescue business, helping educate the public while also assisting in some backcountry calls in the North Shore Mountains. She recalls acting as a guide for a North Shore Rescue team headed by the legendary team leader Tim Jones, tasked with guiding the crew to one of the old cabins on Mount Seymour where an old adventurer was in medical distress.
“I knew where they all (the cabins) were and I knew the shortcuts to get to them,” she says. They found the man, alive, and got him to safety. Working with Tim Jones, who died of a heart attack while hiking on Mount Seymour in 2014, made a big impression on her.
“He was a good friend of mine,” she says.
Since her park ranger days her career has moved to the prevention side of the search and rescue equation, trying to make life easier for the volunteers who can be called out at a moment’s notice, yanked away from work, soccer games, even Christmas dinners to go trudging into the bush to look for someone who has been unlucky, unwise or both.
Riches’ position is that anyone can be unlucky, but you can make things much easier for yourself and rescuers if you are wise.
AdventureSmart, affiliated with the governmental organization Emergency Management BC and the BC Search and Rescue Association, was created in late-2004 with Riches as its first co-ordinator. She’s held the position ever since, growing the program to include a handful of full-time and seasonal employees who do presentations and also train a small army of volunteers to carry the AdventureSmart message to the masses.
AdventureSmart urges anyone heading into the wilderness for any length of time to adhere to the 3 Ts of preparation: trip planning, training, and take the essentials. photo Mike Wakefield, North Shore News
“We really try to clear up some mud for the public so that the public knows that there are resources available for them to practice better habits,” she says, adding that the world is watching what they are doing. “We’re a busy province, and we’re looked at internationally both for our response and prevention efforts with search and rescue.”
And though progress has been slow, Riches says she’s seen changes for the better in outdoor knowledge and preparation from the public since her encounters with that backcountry banana back in the 90s.
The AdventureSmart program has taken off since 2016 when the provincial government awarded $15 million in extra funding to the BC SAR community, money which was split between the 80 teams around the province as well as with AdventureSmart.
“We’ve really ramped up since 2016 in a better format,” says Riches, adding that in just the next couple of months they’ll start training new presenters at a session hosted by North Shore Rescue, hold a backcountry preparedness session on Mount Seymour, guide a snowshoe tour on Grouse Mountain and present at Parks Canada, among many other things.
“The growth has been exponential,” says Riches. “I have to say from 13 years ago to now, it’s a new ball game. … We’re very busy, and it’s an exciting time. It’s a big wave that we’re riding and we want to continue to surf it.”
People may be more prepared, but Riches knows that she’ll never completely accomplish her goal of putting all the search and rescue teams out of business. It’s a sheer numbers game: more and more people are heading out into the wilderness – that much is clear when you see the parking lots of any North Shore backcountry access point on a sunny Saturday afternoon – increasing the odds that someone is going to need help getting out.
“We have a very healthy, active province, but people still need to be more prepared than they are. It’s not rocket science,” she says. “You have to think of the what-ifs every single time. What if I twist my ankle? What if I get cold? What if I get hurt? What if I get sick? What if I need my medication? … It’s great we have such easy access to beautiful backcountry. But you still need to trip plan, train, and take essentials before you head out there. It’s pretty simple, actually.”
Simple, but vitally important to protect yourself and anyone who may end up looking for you. AdventureSmart, which expanded from a B.C. provincial program to a national platform in 2009, has all of their tips laid out on the website adventruesmart.ca. If you have any doubts about your wilderness preparation, you should give it a read. Anything less would just be bananas.
