SUN PEAKS - For the past 11 weeks, you've been reading about Ryan Shtuka, the 21-year-old man who went missing from Sun Peaks in February, and you might be wondering how he hasn't been found yet.

You likely haven't seen snow on the ground for a month, now that spring is upon us but this is mountain terrain of a ski resort and snow has has continually blanketed the scene since Ryan Shtuka went missing after leaving a house party in the early morning hours of Feb. 17 on Burfield Drive.

During the winter months, Heather Shtuka, Ryan's mom, said just when she thought the weather would start to warm up, in turn melting the feet of snow across Sun Peaks, it was like someone would shake the snowglobe, and the white stuff would fall all over again, setting them back each time.

But his family and friends who have been frantically searching are undeterred.

“I think people forget, like we’ve been here 10 weeks and we still haven’t found Ryan, that the grief doesn’t actually start for us until that moment happens,” Heather says. “So we still have that whole grieving process the moment we find him it just — it seems unreal, like we’re in this nether place, like we can’t quite feel grief and we can’t quite feel hope. We’re just stuck in this holding pattern until something changes.”

Most of the snow is gone as you enter the village now and some plants are even starting to green up again. But when you get closer to the last place Ryan was confirmed to be seen in the Burfield Drive area, you understand why snow has posed such a challenge to searchers.

The distance between the Burfield Drive home and Ryan's home is about a 10 to 15 minute walk at this time of year. But when Ryan left the party that night, Heather says the temperature was around -26 C and snow was falling hard.

Heather Shtuka has been searching for her son Ryan for nearly 11 weeks, after he went missing following a house party in Sun Peaks on Feb. 17, 2018.

(SHELBY THEVENOT / iNFOnews.ca)

“It was quite cold as well, certainly (he's) not dressed for it... so at what point did Ryan (realize) he’s just not going to be able to walk the entire distance?" Heather says.

Ryan could have walked down Burfield Drive and onto a path just before Sun Peaks Road which led right to his home. The path is in a lightly forested area, and has just barely been hit by sunlight, still leaving piles of snow.

A stream runs through the area between the path and Burfield Drive.

Heather and her husband Scott left their home in Beaumont, Alta. the day after their son was reported missing. He didn’t show up for work that morning, and nobody had seen him since leaving the party on Burfield Drive.

A new potential timeline of when Ryan left the party surfaced last month, and the family began looking into a tip that had been reported early in the investigation. A woman said she saw a man who looked like Ryan at approximately 1:55 a.m. Feb. 17, heading toward the village. The new timeline led to an expanded search area for Ryan, but no more evidence has been found to establish that.

Since he was last seen, volunteers have combed trails and roads throughout the resort town trying to find any sign of Ryan — a hat, a shoe, anything — but there’s been nothing so far. His father has searched all day, every day, since Ryan went missing.

But searching hasn’t been easy.

“We’re realists, we’ve known within the first couple of days the likelihood of finding him alive was slim knowing our son the way we know him,” Heather says. “I don’t know what we do. I didn’t even know we’d have to stay up here, and on Monday, Feb. 19, we’d be on our own, there would be nobody searching. I didn’t know there was a gap in how this worked, I didn’t know we’d have to train people when they came out, I didn’t know what equipment we needed, I didn’t know any of those things and we had to learn that. I don’t know what comes after this if we don’t find him by, let’s say June 1, how do we do that? Do we take that over? Do RCMP take that over? I don’t know.”

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Wikimedia Commons and B.C. RCMP

Heather heads the command centre, where volunteers can go to sign up to search every day. During the week, she says they usually average around 12 daily volunteers, while on weekends there can be up to 31 people. To learn more about how to volunteer, visit the Missing: Ryan Shtuka Facebook page.

Friends and family from Alberta have been making trips to and from Sun Peaks to help over the past two and a half months, including his aunt and uncle Brenda and Kyle Schultz, and family friends Coco Vogel and Leslie Dean.

Search groups have had to deal with piles of snow in the resort town, and now as it melts it is replaced by blooming greenery, which poses yet another challenge and obstruction for searchers.

“We just want to find him and end this nightmare,” Brenda says, as she walks Ryan’s dog along the side of the road heading out of Sun Peaks, stopping to look for anything that could resemble a piece of clothing, a shoe, or a wallet. “We’re just looking for anything.”

While the snow still blankets the trail that leads from the Burfield drive residence to Ryan’s home, searchers scour the road leading out of Sun Peaks, taking any possible scenario into consideration.

Coco scales down the hill when Brenda spots an item, using a tree branch as a walking pole, and makes her way through thorn bushes, but it turns out to be nothing. She, along with everyone else, wants to find Ryan as soon as possible, especially before plants begin to bloom in full again.

After walking the side of the road, Brenda, Coco and a friend pile into a vehicle to meet with the other group of searchers.

About five minutes later, they arrive to Kyle and Leslie who are searching a piece of land that’s covered by hundreds of trees.

“It’s like Groundhog Day,” Kyle says, as in the old time-loop movie where Bill Murray wakes up to the same day over and over again. Every day they look for something new, but every day they come back without Ryan.

The not-knowing is devastating for his parents and the rest of his family, and they’re ready for some concrete answers.

“We also know that when the snow melts, we’ll have a definitive answer in some ways, and it would be easy I suppose to just sit and wait for the snow to melt, but I can’t imagine anybody that’s ever loved anybody would just sit around and wait for snow to melt,” Heather says.

If the snow completely melts and there is still no sign of Ryan, they will know he’s likely not in Sun Peaks and will have to start looking elsewhere, but they won't know until that happens. All they know for sure is they're not going home until he’s found.

“I couldn’t,” Heather says. “We’re his advocates. I’ve always been his advocate. From the time any of my children have been born, that’s what my job is, is to support them, to advocate for them, to stand up for them, and to protect them as much as I can, as much as any parent can. To go home — who else would search? There would be nobody else, and he deserves more than just for us to sit at home and try to pick up these pieces that we’re now left with.”

One of the hardest parts for Heather and Scott has been leaving their two daughters behind in Beaumont. Their oldest is turning 18 next month and graduating high school. Their youngest is 12. Both girls came to Sun Peaks last weekend to visit their parents.

“I know that I’m leaving two girls behind, which is really, really tough because they still need us,” Heather says, as tears well her eyes. “But (Ryan) only needs us for a little while longer right now, and when that’s done, then we’ll go back, and well be able to be with our family and our daughters know that. We do this, but i think that in some respects we fail the two that we have left behind, even though they’re really good about it. I still feel like we’re failing them in some ways. But I can’t go home — I just can’t.”

According to RCMP, the search for Ryan is ongoing and will adapt to changing conditions as required, which means more detailed and enhanced searches could be coming with melting snow and warmer temperatures. The RCMP helicopter and Police Dog Services has also been in the area numerous time over the past few weeks and will continue to do so, police say.

For more of our coverage on this case, go here.

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News from © iNFOnews, 2018