Somewhere near Cameron Lake, on a dark night, a lost hiker looked up and saw a strobe light flashing in the sky. It was hanging from an Arrowsmith Search and Rescue drone, and the ground team below simply followed it in.
Ken Neden told that story to my Pulse Podcast co-host Dave Graham, who sat down with him at the team’s building on the Qualicum Beach airport lands. Ken joined in 1974 as a teenager, tagging along with his father, one of the group’s first coordinators and search managers. He says he’s still 25 in his mind, so he isn’t sure how the math works out to nearly 52 years.
Last year’s numbers are staggering for a volunteer group. The team logged 82 operational periods in 2025 and more than 4,700 hours, covering ground and inland water from the Cook Creek interchange down toward Lantzville, inland to Mount Arrowsmith, and out to Lasqueti and Jedediah Islands. Ken says rescues now outnumber searches, a shift that began with COVID, when more people headed into the backcountry.
He told Dave that a member from his early days wouldn’t recognize the operation now. A single web-based callout reaches all 56 members in two to three minutes. The M350 drone the community helped fund can zoom 400 times and plot a person’s exact location on a map, and software called Eagle Eyes flags changes in colour and other anomalies a small screen might hide.
None of it comes cheap. The budget this year is half a million dollars, covered by the regional district, provincial gaming grants, and community support Ken is clearly grateful for. The team is taking over the lease on the radio repeater on Mount Cokely, and instead of paying ten times the original price for a new command vehicle, it plans to renovate the one it has.
Dave came back from his tour of the building, talking about a cargo drone so big that, even folded up, it barely squeezes into the back of a pickup truck.
If you’ve ever thought about getting involved, the support team is recruiting now, and the next ground search and rescue intake is planned for early 2027.
You’ll find the full conversation, plus a link to Arrowsmith Search and Rescue, at: https://bit.ly/S3EP03PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/