EXCLUSIVE: Carson Hadwin recounts hours spent lost and alone at Sun Peaks

On Sunday morning (Feb. 2), the 14-year-old took the shuttle from Kamloops to Sun Peaks for a day of snowboarding, something he has done many times in the past.

Carson knows the mountain well, but at around 11:30 a.m. he made a wrong turn on a run he has been on before.

“I went down and I took a right instead of a left,” he said. “It was an accident. Worst part about it is Sun Peaks doesn’t have any signage for Gils (ski area).”

Carson realized he was lost about an hour later and attempted to dig his way into a shed. “After that, I gave up and just went down more and then I heard snowmobiles so I kind of went in the direction I heard them. Then I saw them, but they were at least 300-to-400 metres (away), so they couldn’t see me.”

Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

When Carson didn’t make it onto the 4:00 p.m. shuttle, his father Brian was notified by the shuttle company.

“I know my son,” Brian said. “His communication with me is top-notch and I hadn’t heard from him in a little bit and he would never miss that shuttle home, and if he did he would call me. He just wouldn’t miss it.”

Unfortunately for Carson, the Bell cellular network was down.

“The whole entire ski hill was shut down,” Brian said. “That was a problem, big time.”

It wasn’t long before search teams and RCMP converged on Sun Peaks. By morning, Carson got a glimmer of hope.

Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

“I saw the spotting plane,” he said. “That’s the first thing I saw, which I was extremely happy (about). That was around 7:30 a.m. when it was pretty bright.”

Several hours later, Carson was spotted by search volunteers.

“We heard from police that they were saying, ‘We’re pretty sure we got him, we’ve got a responsive young man,'” Brian said, “and honestly who else is missing on the mountain that same time, right?”

“They had found my snowboard, like my track from my snowboard dragging, and they had been chasing me down for an hour and a half and they had found me in a meadow,” Carson said. “So then they gave me food, took one of my long sleeves off, took my coat off, gave me their facemask to warm me up.”

Carson says by the end of the ordeal, he was nowhere near the shed he had found the previous day. He had nearly made it to a road when he was loaded into a helicopter and brought to the Sun Peaks Community Health Centre, where he was treated for frostbite.

Image Credit: CFJC Today / Jill Sperling

The Hadwin family is grateful for the hard work of the search and rescue teams, friends and complete strangers who volunteered to search the mountain.

“Thank-you to everyone that helped,” Carson said. “I don’t think they would have found me without that.”

by Jill Sperling

EXCLUSIVE: Carson Hadwin recounts hours spent lost and alone at Sun Peaks

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