Rescue officials in British Columbia made a surprising discovery while searching for a missing man on Vancouver's North Shore -- a backpack with tantalizing clues linked to a couple that went missing in the same area 20 years ago.

North Shore Rescue officials were combing the Hanes Valley and Crown Creek area in January for signs of Liang Jin, a Vancouver student who has been missing since he texted family on New Year's Eve to let them know he was going for a hike.

They got excited when they spotted a backpack in the snow, thinking it could belong to the missing student.

"It was partly embedded in the snow and quite a bit of the contents had spilled out and pulled apart," Bruce Moffat, search manager with North Shore Rescue, told CTV British Columbia.

It didn't take searchers long to realize the backpack had been there for some time.

They initially assumed it belonged to Tom Billings, a British tourist who disappeared in the area in December 2013. But after inspecting the contents, which included two film cameras and asthma medication, they realized it was likely much older than that.

"Upon examination, it looked to me like the puffer container, the cartridges that'd been found -- there were two of those that they probably had an expiry date of 1997," Moffat said.

As a result, Moffat said he now believes the backpack belongs to a couple that got lost while hiking to Rice Lake in the mid-1990s.

“It was a tragic case,” Moffat said. “The husband was successfully rescued and the wife unfortunately passed due to exposure.”

The cameras, one of which is broken, have now been given to the Vancouver Police Department in hopes their forensics lab can rescue the undeveloped, never-before-seen film to confirm the ownership of the backpack.

The mysterious find has also highlighted the challenges of searching in the rugged, mountainous areas just outside of urban Vancouver.

Moffat said the backpack was located just a couple hundred metres from North Shore Rescue’s Hanes Valley helipad, the jumping off point for dozens of searches in recent years.

“When you’re looking for someone who’s unresponsive or you’re looking for an object in the bush like that, it can be three feet away and you might not see it because it’s behind some foliage or under some snow,” he said.

“Just glad on that pass they did find it.”