Keshav Jindal was found after three nights stuck on a cliff edge in a steep drainage. Photos: CTV//SAR
The 25-year-old hiker who was missing for three nights in British Columbia’s Strathcona Park has been rescued. He was pulled from a steep cliff face by rescue crews on the fourth day of his disappearance.
On August 3, Keshav Jindal and his hiking partner set out to climb Mount Albert Edward, a nearly 7,000 foot peak in the park. Strathcona is an enormous place that covers nearly 618,000 acres of rugged wilderness in the middle of Vancouver Island.
Paul Berry, who led the search party for Comox Valley Search & Rescue, told reporters that Jindal was about four hours into a hike that started at the top of Mount Washington, a ski hill about a 100 miles west of Vancouver across the Strait of Georgia.
Jindal decided to call his hike off near a Circlet Lake. His partner continued on, and the pair planned to meet up again to hike down. When the partner returned hours later, however, there was no sign of Jindal.
“We know about 3:15 on Monday he sent a message to another friend (in a) quick video with a lake below saying ‘Hey, I’m going to start my way down to the lake,'” Berry explained. “We’re not sure if it was Moat Lake he was looking at, or Circlet Lake but we don’t believe he took a trail. Every trail has been scoured by air, by ground, by search dogs, with no success.”
For three days, search and rescue crews scoured the area where Jindal went missing, but it wasn’t until the fourth day that they finally found him. An RCMP helicopter spotted the missing hiker perched precariously on a cliff ledge inside a crevasse, presumably to take shelter from the elements. They found him at just after 10 a.m. on Thursday.
Berry thinks that Jindal was likely trying to take a shortcut down the cliff when he found himself stuck.
“We believe that he made a decision to go down to the lake and took a shortcut and the shortcut landed him where he was located,” Berry told CTV News Thursday while the rescue was underway. “This is the area that we have been focusing on with our mountain rescue teams and he was located on a cliff band as we suspected he would be.”
Although Jindal was not prepared for three nights alone in the wilderness, he is alive and well. He was carrying a cell phone, but the battery died shortly after the hikers split up.
“He was not spotted in previous helicopter searches, but this morning — sometimes it’s just the right light, the right angle — he was located,” Berry said from the rescue staging area at Mountain Washington. “The subject is alive and well and we are in the midst of effecting a helicopter hoist rescue to bring him here to Raven Lodge and transfer him to ambulance at this moment.”
