Mother of 5 Found Safe in Mountains

A Garden Grove mother of five who lost her way over the weekend while hiking with her husband in a rugged area of the Angeles National Forest was found Monday when searchers on the ground heard her calling and a sheriff’s helicopter spotted her, authorities said.

Angelina Hoffman, 59, was airlifted to a nearby hospital, then transferred to Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Anaheim, where she was reported in stable condition with a broken left leg and bruises.

She also suffered one or more broken ribs, according to family members. “She’s pretty battered but in good shape,” her husband said.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Lee said Hoffman, 59, was discovered about 3:30 p.m. three mountain ridges away from the ridge where she was hiking.

Shouting Back and Forth

Lee said the two mountain rescue deputies who had been searching Mt. Islip on Monday were shouting back and forth to one another when they became aware of a third voice and realized that it was Hoffman. The missing woman was sprawled on Snow Spar Ridge, 1,000 feet above California 39 highway, two miles from the area where deputies expected her to be.

Paramedics were lowered to the ridge from a helicopter, which hovered about 75 feet over the victim while the medical team treated her.

Hoffman told authorities that once she was separated from her husband, she became disoriented and wandered away from the trail. Authorities said she was wearing pants, a short-sleeve blouse and a lightweight jacket but lost her shoes during one of several falls.

She apparently spent Saturday night in the snow at the 7,000-foot level of Mt. Islip, authorities said.

On Sunday night, her second night out, Lee said that Hoffman, because she was on the west side of the mountain, was partially sheltered from easterly winds gusting to 70 m.p.h.

Heard Helicopters

“She said she was aware a search was going on because she heard the helicopters but couldn’t get her bearings and didn’t know where the sounds were coming from,” Lee said.

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, her happy but tearful husband, Harold, said, “It was quite an ordeal.”

He said his wife, whose only nourishment was the bottle of grapefruit juice she carried in her day pack, told him that she had “terrible, terrible thirst and had to climb over rocks to get snow for something to drink.”

Paramedics found Hoffman in fair condition, deputies said. She was placed in a wire-mesh litter while still on the ledge, then lowered in it by cable to the road. From there a sheriff’s helicopter flew her to Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia.

Missing Since Saturday

“She was talkative and, in the paramedics’ words, a ‘very sturdy woman,’ ” Sheriff’s Deputy Kraig Petersen said.

Hoffman had been missing since 12:30 p.m. Saturday, when she was separated from her husband at the 6,650-foot level of Islip Saddle Trail off California 2, above Crystal Lake. Harold Hoffman told deputies that he searched in vain for his wife for three hours after he turned around and saw she was no longer behind him.

More than two dozen members of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s search and rescue team and members of Hoffman’s family scoured the steep mountain terrain over the weekend and on Monday.

“The whole problem with the search was we didn’t expect her to be where she was,” Lee said.

Harold Hoffman said that during the ordeal, his wife apparently took a fall, slipping down a “chimney chute” of loose, gravelly earth on the western slope of the mountain.

“She said she’s glad to be off that mountain,” said Hoffman, a member of the Sierra Club and a more experienced hiker than his wife of 33 years. “She didn’t think she could have stood another night.”

When told by a reporter that his mother had been found, Victor Hoffman, the couple’s 23-year-old son, cried.

“I feel great now,” he said. “I still can’t believe it. It’s been hell.

“She’s just a homebody,” he said. “She gets cooped up in the house and likes to get out, but nothing ever happened like this before. She’s a great woman. I’m just glad she’s all right.”

Times staff writer Edmund Newton contributed to this story.