Where’s the cancel button?

VERNON – A group of snowmobilers who couldn’t cancel their emergency call drew a full team of rescuers to Hunter's Range over the long weekend.

One of three snowmobilers got himself stuck and separated from his friends Monday afternoon and activated his emergency beacon. Vernon Search and Rescue teams, as well as a helicopter, were dispatched around 3:30 p.m.

Just as 19 rescuers were getting ready to begin searching, the trio of snowmobilers met them in the parking lot. 

“It sort of resolved itself just as we were going to launch ourselves into the snow. The helicopter had arrived to fly them up to the beacon,” search manager Leigh Pearson says, adding self-rescues aren’t common.

The snowmobilers tried to cancel the emergency call, but were unable to. Pearson says some beacons have a cancel option, but not all.

“It would have been nice to cancel it,” Pearson says. “But this guy was legitimately in trouble, lost and thoroughly stuck. He activated his beacon and rightly so.”

Pearson says it’s been a fairly quiet start to 2014, this being the first response in a month. In January, search and rescue assisted a man who crashed his snowmobile in the Silver Star Mountain area. Teams were busy with multiple snowmobiling incidents at Hunter's Range in 2013. 

To contact the reporter for this story, email Charlotte Helston at chelston@infotelnews.ca, call (250)309-5230 or tweet @charhelston.