Squamish resident Mike Nasu said he and his daughter narrowly escaped a potentially fatal head-on collision with a wrong-way driver on Highway 99. The incident occurred around 11:04 p.m. as Nasu was driving northbound toward Squamish after returning from a wrestling tournament in Washington.
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His daughter, who normally sits in the back seat, was in the front passenger seat because they were giving other wrestlers a ride home.
“Near Kelvin Grove Way, I saw these lights coming towards me,” Nasu said in an interview. “At first, I thought maybe I was in the wrong lane. But at the very last second, I realized this is head-on.” Nasu said the other driver made no attempt to move his car while coming towards him. “In retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t swerve. If he had, I would have swerved too.”
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The near-miss happened just before the Kelvin Grove on-ramp, near Lions Bay. Nasu believes the other driver likely entered the highway going the wrong direction. “My guess is that person came down that on-ramp the wrong way – either a drunk driver or someone who was completely confused,” he said.
Nasu did not call police immediately after the incident, saying he was too shaken and unsure what officers could do at that point. “I was pretty shaken up for the first ten minutes after,” he said.
He said the experience was especially terrifying because his daughter was sitting beside him. “I was literally half a second from being dead with my daughter,” Nasu said. “If she’d been in the back seat, maybe she would have been okay.”
Nasu said he’s aware of other wrong-way driving incidents and believes more can be done to prevent them. “It can get quite dark there,” he said, adding that people travelling on the Sea to Sky Highway who are unfamiliar with the road can tend to go the wrong-way.
“There has to be some sort of signage, saying ‘wrong-way, do not enter,” he said.
He also expressed frustration after sharing his experience on a local Facebook group, saying some commenters blamed him for the incident. “People were saying I should have stayed in the right lane or that I was at fault,” he said. “Either they didn’t realize it’s a divided highway, or they just wanted to troll.”
Nasu said he’s grateful he reacted quick enough to avoid a collision. “I can see why there are fatalities because it’s pretty easy to freeze up.”
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