Missing hiker found alive after surviving more than 6 weeks in remote Canada wilderness

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 failing to return from a backcountry trip in Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park, an isolated landscape known for its alpine tundra and stark mountainscape in the northern Rockies of British Columbia. Two men spotted Benastick Tuesday on their way to the park’s Redfern Lake trail for work, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Recognizing him as the missing hiker, they took Benastick to a hospital.

Benastick told police he had stayed in his car for a couple of days at the start of his backcountry trip, before walking to a mountainside creek and camping there for 10 or 15 days, the RCMP said. At that point, the hiker said he moved to a different location farther down into the valley and a built a camp and shelter in a dried-out creek bed. Eventually, Benastick found his way to the road where he encountered the Redfern Lake trail employees, well over six weeks after he first set out on his journey.

“Finding Sam alive is the absolute best outcome. After all the time he was missing, it was feared that this was would not be the outcome,” said Corporal Madonna Saunderson, a spokesperson for the RCMP in British Columbia, in a statement.

Benastick, 20, survived extraordinarily harsh conditions. When he was found, the hiker was using two walking sticks to support himself and had cut his sleeping back to wrap the fabric around his legs for warmth, the Canadian broadcaster CBC News reported. Temperatures in the park were frigid while he was missing, at times dropping to -20 degrees Celsius, or -4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to BBC News, a CBS News partner.

“Those are very difficult conditions for really anyone to survive in, especially [with] limited supplies and equipment and food,” Prince George Search and Rescue search manager Adam Hawkins told the BBC.

Mike Reid, the general manager of the inn near Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park where Benastick’s family stayed as search efforts got underway in October, told CBC News that Benastick was in “rough shape” Tuesday. But he is expected to recover.

Authorities initiated a massive search for Benastick when the missing person report for him was filed, but that search was called off at the end of October, BBC News reported. Police said they intend to gather more information about what happened to the hiker and why he remained missing for so long once Benastick’s health has improved.