To the Rescue : Mountain Team Searches Out Lost Hikers, Injured Drivers

On a cold, starry night, a banker, a fireman and a county office worker, all equipped with guns, ropes and hand-held radios, had just disappeared down the face of a remote dam in Malibu Creek State Park when their mock exercise turned into the real thing.

“Looks like we’ve got a real rescue,” said Chuck Pode, a Ventura County official who spends much of his free time climbing up and down the Santa Monica Mountains looking for lost hikers and injured motorists whose cars have run into ravines.

Abandoning the rock-filled backpacks that were to be the mock victims in their practice session, Pode and fellow volunteers Carmel Davis, a Bank of America officer, and Tom Murphy, an off-duty Culver City fireman, hustled back to the dirt road where a park ranger’s truck was waiting for them.

They Are Paid $1 a Year

The three are reserve deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu Mountain Rescue Team, trained in law enforcement and mountaineering and available for emergency duty day or night, all for $1 a year--before taxes.

When the emergency call came in just after 8 p.m. on a Thursday in December, six members of the volunteer group had just finished the first leg of a training mission designed to test their skills in finding a lost or injured hiker in darkness.

Now the test was real, one of nearly 70 rescue operations the 18-member group carried out in 1985.

Tossing their equipment into the open bed of the pickup truck, they sped off at twice the legal speed limit, yellow light flashing and siren screaming, along Mulholland Highway to Kanan-Dume Road.

There, John Karagavoorian, a young man in a T-shirt, said he had left four fellow Pepperdine University seniors somewhere in the hills after their four-wheel-drive vehicle ran into a ditch.

Fasting for Three Days

One of them, a 21-year-old woman who had been fasting for three days, began passing out, so Karagavoorian ran ahead to look for help. All he knew was that he had left the group where a narrow dirt fire road crossed a small stream, and that it had taken him 45 minutes of running and walking to reach the highway.

As he told his story to Highway Patrol Officer Lorin Clark, a county Fire Department helicopter began flying circles overhead, its searchlight probing the dark hillsides.

With Fire Department Capt. Stan Cleveringa in command of the operation, Chuck Poppenger, a Simi Valley electrician and captain of the volunteer squad, coordinated the search on the ground.

He sent two teams in jeeps and one on foot, split up so the less experienced were paired with veteran trackers. Members of the group range in age from 23 to 57, and in experience from one to nine years.

They found the abandoned vehicle about 10 p.m. Trackers later said that leaving the car was the group’s major mistake; had they stayed with the vehicle, they would have been found hours sooner.

Radioing back to the makeshift command post on the highway, the searchers asked what the treads of Karagavoorian’s boots looked like.

Using that description, they located his tracks and followed them to where he had parted company with his friends.

Difficult Job

Then they followed the footsteps--not an easy job because the dirt was hard-packed and tracks showed up only occasionally--until they reached the point where the group made its second mistake: leaving the road.

The footsteps led down a small trail toward distant lights in the Point Dume area, but the hikers had no idea that seven-foot-high brush, thick stands of poison oak and at least four steep ravines blocked their way in the darkness.

Finally, after six hours of following a stream bed and walking in the wrong direction, the hikers had come to yet another stand of chaparral. They did not know it, but farther down there were several 20-foot sheer drops.

This time they were too tired to fight their way through and they stopped.

“They got smart,” said rescue team member Kevin Ryan, a Santa Monica radio store technician and salesman. “We try to train people to stop so we can catch up to them.”

It was near the stream, with the temperature hovering around freezing, that the searchers found the missing party at 3:30 a.m., cold and sore but not seriously hurt. They all walked out before dawn.

“Cutting our way down through those bushes probably wasn’t the best possible move,” recalled Eric Galpine, one of the four, who twisted an ankle and picked up a severe rash. “It was quite a nightmare for us.”

The operation, though longer than most, was typical of the rescue squad’s duties, using techniques that range from those of mountain men and Indian scouts to the latest in radio technology.

They pinpointed the hikers’ location with a “big ear” like those used by the TV networks to listen in on signals during football games.

Earlier that week, members of the team saved the life of a man who drank insecticide and fell down a hillside in Topanga Canyon. The man, suffering from a serious case of hypothermia, was strapped into a litter and carried to an ambulance waiting on the road above, where he was rushed to a hospital.

On the previous weekend, they were called out to rescue a hiker who became stranded on a cliff on an afternoon stroll up Las Flores Canyon.

The hiker had been perched on a narrow ledge for nine hours when his whistles for help alerted a passer-by about midnight.

Team member Roger LeBrun of Camarillo, a General Telephone lineman, clambered down 550 feet on ropes to pull the hiker to safety, just in time. A cloudburst opened up minutes later that could have swept him away.

Three rescues in one week would seem to be a busy pace, but December was a quiet time for the Malibu team.

“During the busy season a couple of months ago we were out 12 times in 15 days,” said Murphy, a resident of Newbury Park in Ventura County whose job with the Culver City Fire Department allows him free time for rescue work during the week.

Last year’s operations involved 79 victims, 11 of which were fatalities.

‘Unfortunate Results’

“People in Los Angeles have a way of mixing drugs and alcohol with the great outdoors, with unfortunate results,” said Timothy Fives, a squad member who works as public information officer for College of the Canyons in Valencia.

Sometimes more than carelessness is involved. Drunk drivers tend to drive off winding canyon roads after a day of guzzling beer at the beach, and sometimes bodies are dumped in the mountains after a murder.

“People kind of have to detach themselves from their feelings while doing body recovery,” said Murphy. “Later it kind of hits you a little bit and it bothers you, but you get through it.”

Perhaps the most memorable rescue of recent years came in 1982, when the burned-out hulk of a car was found on a remote dirt road in Topanga Canyon, apparently abandoned. After a check of the registration, however, it turned out that the driver was missing.

A rock had punctured the gas tank and set the interior of the car on fire. The rescue squad was called out toward evening, several hours after the fire was extinguished.

Combing the area in the dark, searchers found tracks and broken bushes leading to a small stream bed. The driver had tumbled down the hillside after suffering serious burns.

“She was still conscious, but without our ability to follow her tracks, she wouldn’t be alive today,” Ryan said.

Volunteers are not expected to leave their jobs to respond to an emergency call, but the squad has enough members with off-peak working hours to field at least a third of its members whenever their pagers go off.

In a prolonged search, other members of the team show up later to relieve the first ones on the scene.

Short on Sleep

“The most you miss is a little sleep, so you just have to pick it up the next night,” Carmel Davis said.

Members of the team keep their uniforms, along with orange parkas and overalls stitched with a sheriff’s badge, in the back of their trucks or jeeps, along with climbing ropes and a pack or two of rescue gear.

One member is an independent nurseryman, another a self-employed bass player. Among the other members are a painter, an insurance claims adjuster, an attorney, a computer programmer, a mechanical engineer and a crime analyst.

What with routine training, weekend patrols and unpredictable emergency calls that can last all night, the squad requires a commitment that averages 56 hours a month. Why do they do it?

“It’s fun, and when you rescue somebody it gives you a real good feeling,” said Ryan, the team’s radio specialist.

“It gives you a purpose for your extracurricular activities,” said Davis, who lives in Pacific Palisades. “Just hiking wasn’t enough.”

The regimen goes far beyond just hiking. Applicants must pass a grueling selection and training process that eliminates 60% to 70% of them.

They must pass written and oral examinations, health and physical stress tests, a lie detector test and background check identical to the one for regular deputies, and 5 months of a 15-hour-a-week course at the sheriff’s academy in Whittier or in Newhall.

“It was like ‘Police Academy,’ the movie,” Davis said. ‘ “Drop and give me 50 (push-ups).’ It was military-style, with stress-tolerance testing to make sure you don’t do anything untoward. Harassing you for arbitrary things to see if you get angry, to make sure you don’t mouth off or lose control.”

In addition, the training includes homework, target practice and physical workouts, all of which can be useful when the volunteers are called on for crowd control during fires, or, occasionally, to help out in a felony arrest or car chase.

But that is only the beginning. The rescue training starts once the academy is finished. This includes rock-climbing, rappelling, first aid, helicopter tactics and map-reading skills.

Lengthy Training

Many volunteers also take a 125-hour course to be emergency medical technicians.

Veterans say it can take as long as two years before a rookie is seasoned enough to handle all assignments.

Demands are made on more than their time. Although the Sheriff’s Department supplies basic equipment, members of the team, which has incorporated in order to accept donations, have paid for much of their own specialized equipment. An up-to-date walkie-talkie can cost as much as $500.

A squad based in Sylmar requires its members to live within a four-minute drive of the local sheriff’s station, but members of the Malibu squad ruefully admit that none of them can afford to near the Malibu sheriff’s station.

Instead, they are spread out across the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and southern Ventura County, which gives them the advantage of being able to rush to the scene of an emergency from several directions.

The Malibu team recently became affiliated with the Mountain Rescue Assn., a nationwide group, by passing a series of mountaineering tests.

According to Capt. Mark Squiers, commander of the Malibu Sheriff’s station, it would cost about $40,000 a month to field a similar number of deputies for search and rescue duties in the station’s 200-square-mile area.

The team itself is nine years old, which makes it the youngest of eight such groups in the county. The first was founded in Altadena in 1952.

The rescue teams were independent at first, and came under the supervision of the sheriff’s office in 1956. There are now about 145 volunteers on call. They often work together with regular deputies from the sheriff’s emergency services detail.

The symbolic pay of $1 a year means that the volunteers are covered by workers’ compensation for injuries, and that the county is responsible in case of any legal action.

Five-Year Stints

Largely because of the heavy demands on their time, often at the expense of the personal and professional lives, the average term of a rescue team volunteer in Los Angeles County is no more than five years.

“The people have to be willing to break dates and dinner engagements to do rescue work, which doesn’t sit real good with spouses and girlfriends, but they tend to be understanding,” Murphy said.

“These people are really an animal all to themselves,” said Sgt. Ed Chenal, the Sheriff’s Department liaison with the eight teams. “Very few people are willing to devote that kind of time.”

Still, the applications are piled up on Capt. Squiers’ desk and some veterans find it hard to tear away.

“You get such a rush from helping somebody,” said Poppenger, 44, one of the Malibu team’s two remaining founding members.

“It’s like nothing else you’ll ever experience. That’s why I keep doing it. I think I’ll give it a couple more years and then let the younger people really have at it.”