As a family in Montreal mourned the loss of 44-year-old wife and mother Marie-Josée Fortin, an RCMP corporal in a B.C. town 3,000 kilometres away admitted Thursday his unit failed to strike up a timely search for the missing skier.
Ms. Fortin and husband Gilles Blackburn, 51, got lost on Feb. 15 while skiing out of bounds at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort in Golden, B.C.
The couple traversed 27 kilometres of snowy terrain and kept moving to avoid a pack of wolves they'd seen tracking them. They plodded out at least four SOS signs as they went.
And at least twice before Feb. 22, when Ms. Fortin is said to have died, the signs were seen but not responded to. No one noticed the couple's rental car sitting in an underground parking garage, untouched for nine days.
"There's an error on the part of the RCMP for not initiating a callout on Feb. 21," when the second and third SOS signs were spotted, Golden RCMP Corporal Dan Moskaluk said.
"This is a tragic incident that because of a chain of events that led to limited information being received by several community agencies, including the RCMP, led to some confusion as to initiation and callout of a search-and-rescue effort," the officer said.
Details emerged Thursday about the colossal case of miscommunication that played out among agencies that could have helped — namely the RCMP, Kicking Horse, a local heli-ski company, and the volunteer-run Golden and District Search and Rescue.
On Feb. 15, Mr. Blackburn and Ms. Fortin checked out of their on-hill rented condominium at Kicking Horse, packed up their vehicle, but left it in an underground parking garage before going skiing.
Some time around midday, they took the Stairway to Heaven chairlift to the mountain's peak and popped under the ski boundary rope, clearly marked as out of bounds, Cpl. Moskaluk said.
"They soon realized the terrain was becoming more and more difficult for them and realized they were certainly in distress," he said.
They attempted to get their bearings, following ski tracks that suddenly vanished. They also stamped an SOS in the snow on that first day. They had only the clothes on their backs and two granola bars in their pockets.
At some point, they tried to climb back up toward the resort, but became too tired. They then unknowingly traversed along the backside of the mountain and looped back following their own tracks.
They heard helicopters buzzing overhead, nearly entered Glacier National Park, and came close to an alpine hut used by Purcell Helicopter Skiing Ltd. They followed a riverbed, but Mr. Blackburn broke through the ice and fell knee-deep in frigid water.
Two days after they went missing, their first SOS was spotted by a local skier, who told Purcell, which in turn notified Kicking Horse to check if it had any signs of an overdue skier. The answer was no. Golden and District Search and Rescue heard informally through a volunteer who also works at Kicking Horse, but weren't called out by RCMP, who no one told.
This is where the finger-pointing appears to begin.
Purcell claimed late Thursday night that Kicking Horse had told it that Search and Rescue had been called, and therefore the helicopter company thought the matter to have been dealt with. The resort presumed that since one of its staff volunteered with Search and Rescue, that staff member would in turn inform Search and Rescue, which would then deal with it.
That assumption appears to be contrary to a protocol, confirmed only a month earlier, that RCMP were explicitly required to dispatch Search and Rescue.
"The protocol was if we had identified something was awry, and we were the first to respond to that, we would have phoned the RCMP and Search and Rescue," said Steve Paccagnan, president of the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.
