Every year, somewhere past the edge of the city, someone fails to come back. A hunter who misjudged the light. A mushroom picker who wandered off a familiar trail. A teenager who left a path near Frame Lake. When that happens in the Yellowknife area, the RCMP's phone calls go out to a small, unpaid group of people who have agreed to drop what they are doing and walk into the bush in the dark.
Yellowknife Search and Rescue, known as YKSAR, has been that group since 1999. It is a non-profit organization of trained volunteers who provide search and rescue services to the city and the surrounding wilderness. It charges nothing for its services. As a non-profit, it relies on grants and organizational supporters to fund its operations and maintain critical equipment.
Now YKSAR is inviting residents to sign up for the training that turns an ordinary member of the public into a searcher. The Fall 2026 Basic Searcher Course is a 70-hour combined classroom and field program built to the Canadian Standards Association's requirements for Basic Searcher certification, and it is the gateway into the team.
The course runs in two parts. The classroom session takes place October 30 to November 1 at Arctic Response in Yellowknife: Friday evening from 7 to 10, Saturday in two blocks from 9 to 4 and 6 to 10, and Sunday from 9 to 4. The field session follows the next weekend, November 6 to 8, and involves two overnights at Camp Connections, a camp on the Yellowknife River reached by driving the Ingraham Trail out of the city.
What gets taught in those hours is less about heroics than about discipline. The curriculum covers search categories in the Northwest Territories and the roles of the various government agencies involved, an overview of search management, and land navigation by compass, by map, and by the two together. Participants learn about packs and clothing, predator awareness, helicopter safety and hypothermia. They study lost person behaviour, including probability zones and behaviour profiles, and how those profiles get applied to an actual search. They practise ground search techniques, from the formal Type I through Type IV searches to clue awareness and scanning. And they learn communications, which in this part of the country means not just radios but satellite phones, cell phones, SPOT devices and InReach units, because the further you get from Yellowknife the more likely it is that nothing else works.
The course is only available to YKSAR members, and the cost is included in YKSAR membership. No prior experience is required. Participants must be at least 18 years old and physically capable of taking part in outdoor activity. The organization's own FAQ is blunt about what joining actually asks of a person: not that you be available all the time, but that you keep a basic searcher pack ready to go, tell your employer and your family that you may be called away suddenly, have a plan for children or pets, and make an effort to attend the monthly training drills that keep skills fresh.
The course is capped at 12 participants, and the membership application process, including an RCMP criminal record check, has to be completed before registering for the training. YKSAR typically runs the course twice a year, in spring and fall.
Arctic Response, the classroom host, is a Canadian health, safety and rescue training company that has been working in the North and across Canada for more than 20 years, specializing in mobile training delivered in everything from major cities to remote communities.
The case for the course is not abstract in a place like Yellowknife. The city sits on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, the capital and largest community in the Northwest Territories and the only city in the territory, and it is ringed by wilderness that people use constantly for hunting, fishing, berry picking and camping. Searches here have drawn in RCMP officers, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association and YKSAR volunteers together, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes with aircraft sweeping the area below. The volunteers who do that work are the people who took this course.
YKSAR's pitch to prospective members is that the skills on offer are not only useful in an emergency but make a person safer and more aware in their own outdoor life. That is the quieter argument for signing up: a weekend in a classroom and two nights at a camp on the Yellowknife River, learning to read a compass and a map and a lost person's likely path, in a territory where the bush starts at the end of the street.