The chance to see how Canada's search and rescue teams work was too good to resist for Rotorua police Detective Sergeant John Wilson.
During a family holiday to British Columbia Mr Wilson took the opportunity to see how that province carried out its search and rescue work and met Dave Brewer,
former president of the British Columbia Search and Rescue Association, and Tom Chesley of the Abbotsford police who took Mr Wilson and his wife Sonia out to observe a search for a missing hiker.
They were searching for Tyler Wright, who had set off on a week-long tramp on August 10 to do a five-day solo hike from east of Squamish to the Coquitlam area where he would meet up with family and friends.
He was reported missing when he was three days overdue and the search began on August 18.
"We were at the search base on the sixth day of the search," Mr Wilson said. The resources available for the search were impressive, he said.
"The day we were there they had three helicopters, one fixed-wing aircraft and the family were paying for another helicopter which was searching using a high-resolution video camera."
At the end of each day the video footage was uploaded to a website which family and friends of the missing man could search through.
"Their resourcing was impressive. They had two mobile command posts on-site. The day we were there, there was something like 30 teams in the field.
"By New Zealand standards it was a massive search. For them it was bigger than average.
"The scale of it is just so big. They might drive for a day to get to where they're going to search."
The search and rescue team used mobile search units equipped with touch screens which enabled the team to view aerial maps of the area and overlay searched tracks on the maps.
"The day before we got there they had found a footprint. They found a track and found some other marks where he'd slid down a bank. But they were two weeks behind him," Mr Wilson said.
The searchers covered 21 different routes in 12 days before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and search and rescue called off the search, although Mr Wright's family and friends continue to look for him.
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