Two drones got a climber off the Stawamus Chief on the night of September 10, one holding a floodlight on the granite while the other flew him a rope. He had been standing on a ledge roughly ten inches (25 cm) wide, 250 feet (76 meters) above the ground, clipped to an anchor with no rope long enough to descend.
Squamish Search and Rescue took the call after 10 P.M. The climber had been working up Alaska Highway, a five-pitch 5.11d on the Chief’s face north of Vancouver, and his two partners had already made it down safely. Drone program coordinator Dustin Wales and five other rescuers met them. Darkness, rockfall exposure and the sheer size of the terrain made the usual answers, a rope team from above or a helicopter, both slow and dangerous.
I have been writing up drone gear drops in mountain rescues for years, and they almost always deliver comfort: a blanket or a phone. This is the first one I have seen where the drone delivered the means of descent.
Two aircraft split the lighting from the delivery
Squamish Search and Rescue flew two drones on the same mission with separate jobs. One hovered with a floodlight to illuminate the wall and give rescuers a view of the ledge. The second carried a lightweight messenger line up to the stranded climber.
The first flight went up with a pilot line tethered to the aircraft. Once the climber had hold of it, the ground crew tied on a jacket and a headlamp and he hauled them up, which bought him warmth and light while the rest of the plan came together. Rescuers then used the drone’s laser rangefinder to measure the distance from his ledge to the ground, because the entire operation depended on knowing whether a rope would reach.
It did. The larger aircraft moved in and held station with its light on him, and the smaller one flew a 300-foot (91-meter) pilot line, thin-gauge high-strength Dyneema, spooled out between a ground operator and the drone. The climber caught the line out of the air, pulled up the climbing rope attached to it, tied into his harness and the anchor, and rappelled off.
The whole approach was two years in the making without ever being used. “We just hadn’t had the opportunity to put this in action,” Wales told Outside, whose account is the most detailed one published. The team’s own debrief was blunter about the alternative, saying “a traditional rope rescue would have presented considerable challenges.”
Squamish Search and Rescue has not said which drones flew
No published account names the aircraft. Outside describes a smaller drone for the line and a larger one for the light, and the team’s own debrief refers to two aircraft without models. The equipment Squamish Search and Rescue has access to is documented elsewhere.
At a British Columbia search-and-rescue drone summit that Squamish hosted in December 2025, Wales called the DJI M30T his team’s workhorse, an airframe carrying thermal and zoom sensors. Separately, Draganfly announced in August 2024 that it had delivered a Commander 3XL and a precision delivery system to the team, with training built around scenarios that explicitly included delivery of critical goods. Draganfly rates the 3XL for drop and winch payloads up to 24 pounds (11 kg).
One detail points toward the M30T. Outside says rescuers measured the distance to the ground with lasers and a rangefinder, and the M30T carries a laser rangefinder as standard equipment, which is a large part of why it turns up in so many first-responder fleets and why we put it through a search-and-rescue workflow ourselves. DJI sells no payload release for the M30 series, so line delivery on that airframe runs through the aircraft’s PSDK port and a third-party dropper, a small market that exists precisely because public safety teams keep asking for one.
So the honest version is this: these are the two platforms the team is known to operate, and it seems likely they are what flew, but nobody has confirmed it. The role split reported by Outside also runs the other way from what you would expect, with the smaller aircraft carrying the line and the larger one carrying the light, when the 3XL is both the bigger airframe and the one bought for delivery. Either the floodlight rode on the Draganfly, or a third aircraft is in this story.
Gear delivery has moved from novelty to standard practice
Flying supplies to a stranded person used to be the part of a rescue that made the local news. It is now routine enough that teams train for it, and the interesting question has shifted from whether a drone can carry something to what it should carry.
Summit County, Colorado rescuers dropped a flashlight within 100 feet of a stranded 19-year-old on Quandary Peak in darkness and snow, then spent the following months building it into a program that talks hikers down through lightning storms. In Phoenix, a DJI drone delivered a phone and a blanket to a hiker facing a night out in the 40s. Scottish mountain rescue teams were floodlighting cliff faces to plan rope lines as far back as 2022. Even the canyoneer pulled out of the Seven Teacups in California last year was found by a drone and then extracted by helicopter.
Squamish is different in one respect. Every one of those flights delivered something that helped a person survive until rescuers arrived. This one delivered the thing that let him rescue himself, and then everyone went home.
DroneXL’s Take
Squamish Search and Rescue is a Canadian team, so nothing about this flight touches American drone policy directly. It still says something American legislators should hear.
Look at what that team had available. A Chinese-made enterprise airframe that is the backbone of public safety flying worldwide, and a Canadian-built delivery platform bought for exactly this kind of payload work, both on the shelf, both trained on, and the crew free to pick whichever one fit the problem in front of them at ten o’clock at night. That is what a well-run program looks like. Every US bill that draws the line by country of origin rather than by capability takes one of those options off the table for an American team facing the same cliff.
The concession is real and worth making: the drones did not perform this rescue. The climber rappelled himself, on his own gear, after telling rescuers he was confident to come down. On a different night, with an injured subject, this becomes a rope team or a long-line helicopter operation and no amount of clever flying changes that. What the aircraft bought was the one thing a rope team could not deliver quickly, which was a rope, from below, without putting anyone else on the wall.
My read is that the people writing procurement bans have never had to make that choice under time pressure, and that the cost of the bans lands on volunteers rather than on Shenzhen.
Watch what Squamish does with it. The team hosted the first-of-its-kind British Columbia drone summit last December, bringing together nine volunteer teams plus Emergency Management BC specifically to standardize how drone programs operate across the South Coast. A technique that works once is a story. A technique that turns into a written procedure across nine teams is a capability, and that is the thing to track over the next year.
Sources: Outside, The Canadian Press, Gripped Magazine, The Squamish Chief, Draganfly
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
