One person is dead and three others missing after their canoe overturned on Slocan Lake, north of Nelson, B.C., yesterday afternoon.
Slocan Lake RCMP were called At around 5:30 p.m. PT after someone spotted a partially-submerged canoe, with people hanging off it, about 150 metres from shore.
Search and rescue crews, the Slocan Lake Fire Department and the B.C. Ambulance Service rushed to the scene.
Rescuers found a 19-year-old woman unconscious inside the canoe, but no one else nearby.
Investigators determined there had been four people, between the ages of 16 and 21, aboard the canoe.
Crews continued to search for the three missing people until dark.
The 19-year-old woman was taken to hospital in New Denver, where she died overnight.
RCMP Sgt. Darryl Little said it appears the four were trying to row about six kilometres across the lake, from New Denver to Rosebury, but the canoe tipped or somehow became submerged.
It doesn't appear they were wearing life jackets, he said.
Slocan Lake is glacier fed and very cold, and the water where the canoe was found is roughly 75 metres deep.
Little said he is hopeful the others managed to swim to shore.
An RCMP dive team is on its way to the lake today, but Little said police are still considering today's activities a "rescue mission."
Three of the young people are from New Denver, which is on an eastern shore of the lake, and one is from Gibsons, on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast.
Little said the parents of all four have been notified, and grief counsellors have been made available at a New Denver school.
"It devastates the communities when you're losing some young people out of your communities," Little said.
"We're hopeful we'll find them still alive, but again it's very tough on the community because it's so small that everybody knows each other."