A brief break from downpour has enabled the search for an 84-year-old hiker to resume, one week after he first went missing on North Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain. A North Shore Rescue-led search operation got underway last Monday to find Surrey senior Won Kil Kim after he had gone missing while hiking the mountain’s trails the day prior. Weather conditions forced the initial search to come to a halt after three days of extensive backcountry scouring. While unsuccessful in finding Kim, the search had provided some clues as to his last known whereabouts—captured by a CCTV camera on the Dam/Little Goat alpine trail at 12:20 p.m. North Shore Rescue search manager Stan Sovdat says ground and drone teams have returned to the site to comb the areas off the trail that he may have stumbled and fallen into. “All the trails have been searched extremely well, so we’re really focusing on getting into the areas that he could have wandered to if he was disoriented,” he says. With Kim wearing a camouflaged combination of grey jacket and black pair of pants, Sovdat says spotting him among the area’s thick brush is going to be “extremely difficult.” Crews are scouring high probability regions first—thick forested areas where he is most likely to be found—but the task is incredibly tough, even for the highly specialized rescuers. “It’s very difficult terrain, but we’ve instructed the searchers to go further than they would normally go, off the trail and into the bushes, where there are cliffs and really dense vegetation,” he said. “We’ve asked them to move very meticulously and to look at everything, with the understanding that he is going to be very, very difficult to see.” Rescue teams have deployed three drones that are “more capable” than the organization has used in the past—machines that are adept at closing in on cliff bottoms and navigating treetops and tight gullies—while a search group is planned to travel down Thunderbird Ridge on foot. The moderate, roughly two-hour-long hike has been described by Kim’s family as a regular haunt for the hiker. While it is too early to predict the outcome of the search, Sovdat says the recent, stormy weather will have hindered the hiker’s chances of survival. “There’s been snow, there’s been rain. The temperatures are perfect, really, for causing hypothermia,” he said. If Kim is still missing when the day comes to a close, the imminent snowfall atop the popular ski mountain will likely mean the search will be suspended until the spring. “We’re doing our best, but without an indication like a ski pole, a glove, a piece of clothing, indication from animals preying on something, without that information… it’s really hard to continue,” says Sovdat. “We don’t want to injure anybody, with the weather, the risks are just way too high.” Kim is described as being an approximately 5’5” tall Korean man weighing around 140 pounds.
