Spend Some Time with the Heroes of North Shore Rescue

Accidents, even for the most experienced hiker, can lurk just around the corner. A loose rock, an errant stumble and it’s into the void. If one day you find yourself dangling from a cliff over a 1,000-foot drop, who are you going to call?

North Shore Rescue is one of the busiest volunteer rescue organizations in North America. Its over 40 active members are firefighters and doctors, information technology specialists and engineers. They’re ordinary men and women who give their time and expertise to help people enduring the worst moments of their lives.

Their actions are captured in a new documentary series, Search and Rescue: North Shore, airing every Tuesday night on Knowledge Network. The final episode airs Tuesday. If you’re late to the series, you can catch up on Knowledge’s website.

I had a vague sense of what North Shore Rescue did before watching the program. The team pops up regularly on the evening news, plucking hikers off cliffs and searching for lost snowboarders. But that’s really only the beginning.

Filmmaker Grant Baldwin and fellow cinematographer Ian Christie embedded with the rescue team for a year, going out on calls for everything from longline helicopter rescues to searching for avalanche victims.

In the press materials about the challenges of making the series, Baldwin recounted one of his earliest experiences: “I remember straddling the peak of Crown Mountain at 3 a.m. The NSR team and my filming partner Ian were rappelling down below me to secure a fallen climber. I was just clinging to the rock trying to get a stable shot with the massive rotors of a military helicopter washing down around me. I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing up here? Then I remembered that the team doesn’t need to be here either; they volunteered for this. It makes capturing this story more meaningful.”

When Baldwin began production, he’d recently finished his feature documentary This Mountain Life. But the rigours of the NSR shoot required a different approach and a smorgasbord of gear. Things started off a bit bumpy, with some rescue team members not terribly keen on the idea of having a film crew around.

But anything that is extremely hard forges strong bonds between people, and the two groups soon warmed to each other. Given the immersive nature of the show, it’s easy to forget that in every nerve-wracking sequence, there is a camera crew dangling nearby. The filmmakers had to play a game of leapfrog to stay ahead of the rescue team and set up shots to film them as they passed on a mountain trail. Often in the pitch dark and pouring rain.

Originally founded as an urban response team during the Cold War era, North Shore Rescue members were trained to respond to nuclear attacks and civil disasters. Their experience in mountaineering was minimal, and early calls were sometimes comically disastrous. As founding member Dave Brewer states, “This should have been called the North Shore Rescue Stupid Men’s Club.”

But better equipment, new technologies and the sheer force of larger-than-life characters like team leader Tim Jones pushed the organization into the forefront of volunteer rescues groups.

Jones, who died in 2014 after suffering a cardiac arrest outside the team’s cabin on Mount Seymour, lingers in people’s memories. When I told a friend about the show, he immediately wanted to know if they’d gotten to Tim Jones yet.

“He was really instrumental in making the team visible,” says Baldwin. “His personality really pushed things forward.” Mike Danks, who succeeded Jones as the team leader, has a very different style of leadership. “He’s so calm and compassionate,” says Baldwin.

It’s tough to make the cut in North Shore Rescue’s annual intake of new members. In an average year, 100 people apply and only a handful are chosen. As the team has developed over the years, finding people with specific skills, such as medical personnel, has become a priority. “There are way more women on the team now,” adds Baldwin.

Unlike the other rescue team members, who are assigned specific on-call shifts, the film crew remained on call 24-7. If a second season of the show happens, Baldwin wants to train another person to ease the burden on the filmmakers’ families. Given the physical and emotional demands of making the show, this seems like a necessary idea.

Not every call has a good outcome. Tragedy can strike out of the blue even for the most well-prepared and seasoned of alpinists. Despite its proximity to the city, the terrain of the North Shore is unforgiving, with dense forests, steep slopes and unpredictable weather.

A colleague of mine suggested the show be aired on incoming flights to Vancouver as an educational tool about how dangerous it can be to enter the terrain unprepared. The week I started watching the series, a trio of people, one wearing shorts, had to be rescued from Mount Fromme.

Anyone who has spent much time hiking in the North Shore mountains has had their fair share of close calls, and as more people head outside because of the pandemic the volume of incidents requiring the skill of the team is expected to swell.

Humans doing dumb things in the woods invariably brings a slew of harsh commentary from the public. But the team says it’s important for the service to remain accessible and free in order to ensure that people don’t put off calling when they find themselves in dangerous situations.

As Baldwin notes, the North Shore Rescue team isn’t always that aggressive about letting people know they are all volunteers, and sometimes the film crew would remind someone who’d just been pulled off a mountain that the rescuers were giving freely of their time in dangerous conditions.

One of the startling things about the show is the number of cold cases that the team pursue, often for years, seeking answers when day hikers and snowshoers go into the forest and are never seen again.

Like Chun Sek Lam and Roy Tin Hou Lee, who went snowshoeing on Cypress Mountain on a bright, sunny Christmas Day in 2016 and vanished.

That evening, Cypress staff found Lee’s car in the parking lot. An extensive search was undertaken, but extreme weather had obliterated their trail and no trace of the two was found.

A year later, a single boot, a cell phone and a gaiter were discovered. The team has continued to search the area for any further signs of the pair.

Another person who vanished was a young man named Carl Couture, who left his house on Oct. 31, 2017, and was never seen again. Over the years, the rescue team put in more than 1,100 hours, scouring the Hanes Valley, where Couture was supposedly headed, hoping to bring some closure to his family.

“The team is incredulous that they haven’t found him,” Baldwin says. “They’ve combed the area.”

There is something deeply eerie about these kinds of stories, a reminder of the brutal indifference of nature.

Tragedy marks people deeply. When current leader Danks had only been on the team a few years, he was part of a recovery operation for two teenage girls who’d lost their lives after venturing into an out-of-bounds area. When a jacket belonging to one of the young victims was discovered almost 20 years later, Danks says he knew immediately who it belonged to.

“That kind of experience burns in your memory,” he says in the series’ second episode. The impact of having to deal with a body leaves lasting emotional scars, and as Baldwin talks about some of his own experiences it’s clear that many of the events documented on camera linger.

Finding people who are desperate for help is very different from searching for those who don’t want to be found. “People go into the woods to end their lives,” says Baldwin, adding that he was surprised at how common this is. In the episodes that dealt with this difficult subject, the filmmakers met with the families of the deceased, who often simply wanted information about what had happened.

Baldwin says that in recent years the team has implemented strategies to help members cope with trauma and PTSD. “A victims’ services type person would be a good addition, as even something like riding on the long line [beneath a helicopter] can be really traumatizing to people.”

The challenges in making an immersive observational documentary series posed other complexities, Baldwin explains. Constructing a clear and coherent story from sometimes chaotic footage required a firm editorial hand. This herculean task fell to editor Josephine Chan, who was given a writing credit for her efforts.

Since finishing the series, Baldwin has joined the NSR as a resource member. His expertise operating a drone comes in handy. “It’s really hard to search those canyons,” he notes. Drones proved useful not only in navigating harsh terrain, but also offering exact GPS co-ordinates to guide rescuers if objects were spotted from the air.

If there’s one piece of advice that Baldwin would like to offer people watching the series, it’s this: “Always tell someone where you’re going.” If the team has a good indication of where you will be, it makes the job of finding you a little easier.

Even as audiences are clamouring for a second season, Baldwin needs a break. (In addition to filming and directing, he also scored the series.) I can see why people want more. In a time when there is so much human selfishness and bad behaviour on display, the kindness, generosity and compassion demonstrated over and over again by the North Shore Rescue members reaffirms one’s faith in humanity. It’s hard not to be overcome by scenes of the team searching for two young children or rescuing a pair of older women from the dark woods.

After plowing through the series at breakneck speed, I too want to see more of these extraordinary humble and heroic folks.