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Injured hiker assisted
Times Colonist24 April 2012p. A12Times ColonistJDF SAR era
Times Colonist. “Injured hiker assisted”, Times Colonist, p. A12, 24 April 2012 ref-only
Summary
About 20 Juan de Fuca Search and Rescue members made the trek into the Sooke Hills on the Sunday to help an injured hiker who had severely injured her ankle. A group of four or five hikers had spent the morning in the forested area in and around Sooke Mountain Provincial Park. One of the women, thought to be in her early 20s, injured her ankle and was unable to walk out. Initially outside cellphone range, several of her friends hiked out in a bid to find cellular reception; they found a canoe on Shields Lake and paddled across, and there met another couple hiking and asked them for help, search and rescue officials said. The hikers walked out to cell range and called for help around 2 p.m., said Bill Meikle, assistant search and rescue manager. Search and rescue officials arrived, assessed the woman's injuries and helped the hikers leave. "They would have been walking in a pretty rough area with rocky terrain and fairly slippery in spots," Meikle said. "They were up there most of the day before we got the call, so they were happy to get down, get out and to be gone."
Details
| Headline | “Injured hiker assisted” |
|---|---|
| Publication | Times Colonist |
| Date | 24 April 2012 |
| Page | A12 |
| Section | The Capital / The Island |
| Byline | Times Colonist |
| Era | JDF SAR era |
| Document type | news report |
| Original article | ProQuest — the scanned page in the Times Colonist digital archive ↗ |
| Source | ProQuest Digital Times Colonist via GVPL (bulk export 2026-07-16) |
| Accessed | 2026-07-16 |
| Licensing | ref-only |
| Record confidence | confirmed |
Archivist's note
Two things this short item settles. It gives Bill Meikle's title in 2012 as assistant search and rescue manager — he is a search manager in the 2006 and 2007 articles and a founding member in the 2012 Jubilee Medal coverage, so this is the only record of him in a deputy role. And it puts a rescue at Shields Lake, the same water INCIDENT_INDEX.csv names for the September 1980 lost-hunter search, thirty-two years apart. The friends paddling a found canoe across the lake to reach cellphone range is the most vivid instance in the archive of the communications problem that runs through this whole collection.
The clipping
