The Sunshine Coast was meant to be a pit-stop for Michael MacKown.
He was delivering a boat to Selma Park in March 1971 and then was bound for Alaska to fish the Bering Sea with a friend. But he ended up house sitting and attended a dance in Egmont where he met his wife. “And the rest is history.”
The fateful dance was a stroke of luck for the many of those MacKown has helped over the decades. Earlier this month, MacKown was honoured with a pin for 45 years of service by Sunshine Coast Search and Rescue (ground SAR).
“He's fabulous,” said Alec Tebbutt, SAR manager, who has known MacKown since joining SAR himself 25 years ago and describes MacKown as reliable and unflappable. “He's just always there and really keeps calm and deals with stuff, and he's also very observant and watches things just wonderfully.”
“We’ve got so much technology now, but you know, people don't get found unless we’ve got boots on the ground,” said Tebbutt, adding that MacKown is also a field team leader. “He just pays attention to his team, makes sure they're safe, makes sure they're doing everything the way they need to, getting the job done and keeping everybody safe.”
SAR is a way of giving back to his community said MacKown, sitting down with Coast Reporter last month, “To be there for members of the community, as I would want people to be there for me and my family.”
Four decades, hundreds of searches
Over the decades MacKown estimates he’s done about 250 searches. In the early days, they were mainly called out for locals –– salal and mushroom pickers, people harvesting cedar boughs –– lost for reason or another.
Between MacKown and his wife, who taught at Elphinstone Secondary School for 32 years (and who Tebbutt says sends along the best Ponderosa cakes), they know a lot of people in the community. “It's wholly different than doing search and rescue in a larger community, because until very, very recently, the likelihood that we would know who we were being called on to look for was really quite great,” MacKown shared.
As the years passed and population grew, so did the variety of callouts. “As this place became more of a mecca for people hiking and biking, again, our callouts escalated,” he said. Back when SAR started, they could go years without a callout. “And it was hard to keep people involved.” Nowadays they average 20 or so callouts a year.
The majority of MacKown’s searches have turned out well, some just by the skin of their teeth. Like the time two preteens were separated from their hiking group on Keats Island. “By the time [the group] got back to camp and realized they were missing two boys, it was starting to be evening,” MacKown recalled. “Luckily, [the boys] stopped, because they were wandering around and they were found perched on a ledge where they could have easily come to harm.”
There have been comical callouts, one time when the whole neighbourhood was turned out to search Granthams Landing, and the subjects were found to be playing video games in a basement.
Another time, SAR searched from Pender Harbour to West Sechelt and the woman in question turned up in B.C.’s Interior.
One fellow found searchers instead of the other way around after spotting the drone they had sent up to scour the clear cuts and forested area. SAR didn’t see the subject in drone footage, but the fellow saw the drone go up the hill. “He figured, ‘They must be up there.’ So he found us.”
“He'd been out overnight, and he was in pretty rough shape, he was glad to see us,” said MacKown.
But there are the tragedies: the kids who would never get another day older, people who are found at the bottom of cliffs, and locals, whose families remain in the community.
There can be a cost, in how you make peace with unpleasant outcomes, said MacKown.
“And sometimes it’s really great. When you and your partner go down the road and you see the person, and he says, ‘that’s totally her man.’”
But successful rescues can also be tempered by how life turns out. MacKown remembers a young man who went missing from a beach party and got lost. It was the early days of cellphones and the young man called his mom, trying to describe what he was seeing, “no lights or anything, nothing.”
“His mom went driving around looking for him, and the RCMP went driving around looking for him, and they called us out, and I heard the description of what he had described, and in my head, I went, ‘I know where that is.’”
When MacKown spotted the youth, wearing black and brown among the leaves and salmon berries, he wouldn’t have lasted more than another hour or two, said MacKown. Searchers radioed in, got an ambulance and got the youth to hospital.
“It's tempered because he died five years later in a single vehicle accident.”
Sitting in Gibsons Public Market, MacKown is careful, treading through his memories, asking some stories be omitted from this piece. “I don't want to over dramatize things. But life plays tricks sometimes.”
Technology changes
Forty-five years ago, callouts came via phone tree –– the RCMP called one person and they called two people and on down the line, each sharing the meeting place. Then came the alphanumeric pagers, which received strings of numbers telling responders where, when, what and who was in charge. “They were always jumping off your belt, getting lost,” said MacKown. “I was never so glad to get rid of a piece of equipment –– except the bag phone.” Bulky early cellphones replaced the pagers. All that’s evolved to today where pages go out to email, text, and calls to cell and landlines. “It’s so much more sophisticated.”
Out on the land, technology has also evolved.
“We just started out with basic, I mean basic, tools,” recalled MacKown –– a boy scout compass and topographical maps that would be printed out in sections for searchers. Volunteers trained in map reading, compass work and first aid and received Motorola radios “that were good for line of sight.”
Now, through the phone app CalTopo, not only can searchers access maps, but all the search information and the locations of other teams are plotted on the map and shared with base. “That way we can verify the coverage of an area and we can say, like we're 95 per cent sure the person is not there.”
That’s not to say there aren’t still challenges, “Communication has always been a problem because of the terrain, all of the crenellations that you don't see under the forest canopy,” said MacKown,
Today, there are repeaters to boost signal and searchers carry satellite phones and inReach devices. “There's so many more ways of getting in touch, but still, it's all-terrain driven,” said MacKown. There are still places on the Coast where searchers have to rely on text to communicate, he said.
‘The best kind of people’
At 78, MacKown is the last of the original SAR crew. Family and age have tempered his participation in recent years, and the fact that there are enthusiastic young members.
“That's the thing that I'm so happy about, is that this is something that's going to go on for as long as there's a need for it on the Sunshine Coast.
“And there will always be a need for it, whether it's mountain biking accidents or snowshoers getting lost in the tetrahedron or on the Dakota Ridge or whatever, people are always going to get into trouble, not generally because they've done anything foolish, but just because sometimes luck is a big factor, whether you turn your ankle or fall down and break your arm.”
“At some point, I'll back away from it,” he said. “I'm reluctant, because it keeps me in touch with the best kind of people,” he said.
“You can't find a better group of individuals. There’s no financial reward. Callouts generally don’t go on nice sunny days or nice moonlit nights.”
And how do you avoid requiring a visit from MacKown and his colleauges? MacKown’s biggest advice is to be prepared. “The most important thing is to have the right clothing, the right footwear,” he said. Have a light source other than your cellphone, because you’ll need that to communicate –– there are lots of nice, lightweight headlamps out there, which leave your hands free to break a fall. Bring water and some form of sustenance, an energy bar or the like.
“Know when to quit, throw in the towel and when to call for help. If you've called for help. Don't move around because you're not helping us,” said MacKown.
And always, tell someone where you’re going.
