A hiker was found alive this week in the remote wilderness of northwestern Canada, where he had been lost for more than six weeks, authorities said.
Sam Benastick was initially reported missing on Oct. 19 after he failed to return from a backcountry trip in Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park, an isolated landscape known for its alpine tundra and stark mountain scenery in British Columbia’s northern Rockies. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, two men spotted Benastick on Tuesday on their way to the park’s Redfern Lake trail for work. They recognized him as the missing hiker and took Benastick to a hospital.
Benastick told police that at the start of his backcountry journey, he sat in his car for a few days before walking to a mountain creek and camping there for 10 to 15 days, the RCMP said. At that point, the hiker said he moved to another location further down the valley and built a camp and shelter in a dried-out creek bed. Benastick eventually found his way to where he encountered the Redfern Lake trail staff, more than six weeks after he first set out on the trip.
“Finding Sam alive is absolutely the best outcome. After all the time he was missing, it was feared this would not be the outcome,” Corporal Madonna Saunderson, spokesperson for the RCMP in British Columbia, said in a statement.
Benastick, 20, survived extremely harsh conditions. When he was found, the hiker was using two walking sticks to support himself and had cut his temporal spine to wrap fabric around his legs for warmth, Canadian broadcaster CBC News reported. Temperatures in the park were frigid while he was missing, sometimes dropping to -20 degrees Celsius, or -4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to BBC News, a CBS News affiliate.
‘These are very difficult circumstances for everyone to survive in [with] limited supplies, equipment and food,” Adam Hawkins, search manager for Prince George Search and Rescue, told the BBC.
Mike Reid, the general manager of the inn near Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park where Benastick’s family was staying when the searches began in October, told CBC News that Benastick was “in bad shape” on Tuesday. But he is expected to recover.
Authorities launched a massive search for Benastick when he was reported missing, but the search was called off in late October, BBC News reported. Police said they plan to gather more information about what happened to the hiker and why he remained missing for so long once Benastick’s health improves.
