‘Tom saved a life’: U.K. man’s death on B.C. mountain leaves rescue legacy

Tom Billings vanished while hiking in November 2013, kicking off a massive search effort. In 2016, the 22-year-old's remains were finally located on Cypress Mountain.

The family of a British tourist who died on the North Shore Mountains more than a decade ago says they’re proud their son’s legacy is helping to prevent similar tragedies.

“It’s the best possible outcome from the situation that we had,” Martin Billings told Global News. “We would prefer that (my son) Tom had never got into the situation he did and that he hadn’t died in that place. But we can’t change that, so the ability to contribute towards the possibility of positives happening is fantastic.”

Tom Billings vanished while hiking in November 2013, kicking off a massive search effort. In 2016, the 22-year-old’s remains were finally located on Cypress Mountain.

To honour both their son and the work of the volunteers who poured more than 2,000 hours into the search for him, the Billings family later donated the funds to build a helipad and emergency cache on the mountain.

The site is located in a gully just above a 60-metre (200-foot) cliff on Montizambert Creek, and is equipped with a motion-sensor camera.

On Wednesday, that camera clicked into action when it detected an out-of-bounds skier and alerted North Shore Rescue.

“He almost went down over the waterfall, was in the gully, and saw some of our signs strung up across the gully and the creek that said stop and climb up,” North Shore Rescue air operations coordinator John Blown told Global News on Wednesday. “Had he gone down probably another 30 feet, he would have been over a 200-foot cliff and that would have been it.”

This is the second life potentially saved by the helipad cache.