Tuesday, November 3, 2015
www.pgcitizen.ca
Lost at Lost Lake
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
I waited all day Monday for a press release from Prince George RCMP saying police and search and rescue members were called out Sunday evening to look for a 53-year-old male who got himself lost in the woods.
They didn’t send one so, as we says in the news business, I’ve decided to get out in front of the issue.
The missing 53-year-old male was me.
I’ve reported on plenty of lost hikers over the years so here’s my story, in full, excruciating and embarrassing detail.
Earlier Sunday, I joined the Caledonia Ramblers on a hike out to Lost Lake (yes, that really is the name) in Beaverly.
Despite the drizzle, it was enjoyable and relatively uneventful, until I discovered that I had dropped my camera somewhere back on the route.
Rather than tell everyone, both out of embarrassment and a reluctance to have everyone backtrack along the trail, I decided to go back out later that day once we had all safely returned to town.
Before I did make the return trip, I went on the internet to find out when the sun was supposed to go down - roughly 5:30 p.m. as it turned out. I figured that gave me a bit of time and, if I’m lucky, I’d find the camera and be back to my car by the time it was dark out.
The plan began to backfire almost as soon as I was back out to the site.
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NIELSEN
At Lost Lake, it’s not so much an organized trail system as spaghetti on a plate. Some routes are flagged, others not and, because it would be a shorter walk, I decided to work backwards and follow the final leg of the loop we took to get back out from the lake.
That only made things more complicated as I took a few wrong turns, wasting valuable time in the process. Fortunately, I had my GPS and was finally able to make it out to the point where we had turned away from Lost Lake for the final stretch home.
From there, I figured, it would just be a matter of retracing the route. But it had also turned dark out and even with a headlamp, visibility was less than ideal, especially when your breath is kicking out a surprisingly thick fog as the temperature cools.
I followed the trail back to where it ended and we had taken a bit of an unmarked diversion through a somewhat swampy section, which
is where I had last pulled out my camera to get a photo of us picking our way through the bog.
I decided I was going to need some daylight and turned back. I tried to retrace my route, mindful that even earlier in the day finding the right trail back out to the road was a little tricky. It was at about that time I discovered my GPS had fallen out of my pocket - evidently, I have trouble holding onto things that aren’t tied to my pack. I tried looking for it, but for the life of me, just could not find it.
By then, it was about 6 p.m. and I knew that, as the crow flies, my car was about 750 metres away.
What’s more, I found the trail we took earlier in the day. Luck was on my side, or so I thought.
I took a left when I was supposed to go right, or I took a right when I was supposed to go left and quickly found myself crawling over blow down and relying on what I hoped was the right direction in general to get me back to civilization.
I worked uphill in the belief that at the top would be the road. But as soon as I got to the top, I found no road but rather another dip into a gully below. And the further I went, the fewer signs there were of trails to follow.
It was a case of crawling through and over a pile of blow down, advancing maybe another 20 metres and then dealing with another thicket of fallen trees.
I finally came to the realization that I was well and truly lost.
It was a dark and very uncomfortable feeling, one I had spent the last hour-and-a-half or so trying to avoid.
— see LESSONS, page 2
RCMP seeks funding for more officers
Charelle EVELYN Citizen staff cevelyn@pgcitizen.ca
Keeping up with everyday policing while also juggling crime-reduction has the Prince George RCMP stretched too thin, according to the officer in charge of the local detachment.
On Monday afternoon,
Supt. Warren Brown pitched a request to city council’s finance and audit committee for funding for seven additional officers over the next three years.
Prince George has a “staggeringly high” crime rate per thousand people, in comparison to other B.C. communities of similar size and demographic, said Brown. And while that’s a consistent trend, it also means the city’s police have less time to spend on crime-reduction activities than the other communities, he said.
Any new initiatives, such as the Car 60 program (which partners with Northern Health to deal with mental health calls), poach personnel from the general duty section, said Brown.
There’s a convoluted trio of numbers that make up the RCMP budget - the quantity of RCMP members the city can have through its contract with the provincial government, the amount of members the city budgets for and the number of RCMP officers that are actually on the payroll.
As it’s been for the past decade, the contracted amount of members is 128, while the city has budgeted for 121 since 2009.
The only time the detachment has met the budgeted amount of
members was in 2010.
Last year, the detachment asked for and received an on-paper increase to the contract amount from 128 to 135 in an attempt to provide enough so-called hard vacancies (actual empty positions, as opposed to positions vacated due to parental leave or injury, or soft vacancies) to fill those 121 spots.
On Monday, Brown presented his detachment’s new request to go up to 143 contracted spots with the hope of filling 128 budgeted positions over the next three years, at a total cost of $1.14 million. The three members in 2016 would replenish the three officers seconded for the downtown safety unit.
“We at one time had 16 members on watch,” said Brown.
“With leaves and whatnot, we’re down to about 10 right now and they’re spending about 100 per cent of their time just responding to calls.”
Two more officers in 2017 would make up for the two members required for the Car 60 program and the last two requested for 2018 would prop up the domestic violence unit (which has gone down to one member from the original two) and to supplement the urban aboriginal constable.
The $500,000 ask for 2016 amounts to a roughly 0.5 per cent increase to the city’s tax levy, if the city decides to accommodate the RCMP’s request.
City council will make a decision on the request during the first budget deliberation meeting on Nov. 25.
Man survives hours adrift
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