Three Girls Found Safe After Night in Forest : Rescue: Lost campers are unharmed but shaken after huddling together during a pelting thunderstorm.

Three teen-age girls who got lost while hiking in rugged Angeles National Forest during an Orange church’s camp-out were rescued at daybreak Tuesday, unharmed but shaken from their night of lightning and thunder.

Sgt. Bobby Denham of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Antelope Valley substation said the girls--ages 13, 14 and 15--heard a helicopter at daybreak and hiked to a clearing where they could be seen. The department’s volunteer search and rescue team found the girls at 7:15 a.m. near Inspiration Point, about half a mile from the Angeles Crest Highway.

They were soaked with rain, caked with mud and crying in the clearing in the Big Pines area, said Sgt. Gordon Carn, coordinator of the volunteer Antelope Valley Search and Rescue team.

Although dressed only in T-shirts and shorts, the girls warded off the elements by using survival skills they had learned as part of their Mormon church’s youth group camp-out, authorities said. Temperatures dipped to about 60 degrees Monday night.

“I don’t know how much survival training they’ve had,” Denham said, “but somebody must have known something, because the precautions they took were good ones. They protected themselves from the moisture because when you get wet your body temperature drops. Then they stayed near a clearing so that, when morning came, they could be easily spotted. Through the night they were looking for a clearing, and through the light of the lightning they found it. They didn’t do too much walking after dark.”

“It’s the longest night I’ve ever had,” said Kristen Lawrence, 14, who returned to her Santa Ana Heights home by mid-day. “We learned a pretty good lesson out there: Never go off the trail. Stick to the trail.”

Her friends--Debbie Johnson, 13, and Christina Roberts, 15, both of Orange--decided to stay for the rest of their three-day, annual camp-out, at which the girls of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Orange learn survival skills.

“They’re going for another night,” Leroy Roberts said with a chuckle about his daughter’s spunk.

He said he gave no lectures when his daughter called about her ordeal. “I just hope they don’t go for another night hike,” he said.

A group of 25 to 30 girls, ages 12 to 18, arrived Monday at the Jackson Flat campground about 5 miles past Wrightwood on Angeles Crest Highway for the camp-out.

About 5 p.m., Kristen and her two friends left the campsite bound for Jackson Lake, 1 1/2 miles to the northeast.

“We did a no-no and took a shortcut,” said Kristen, an articulate teen-ager who will be a freshman this fall at Foothill High School. “We walked along the floor, a ravine along the mountains. It started to get dark, and the thunder and lightning came, and it was sprinkling, kind of. We had been leaving markings on the trail--arrows made out of little pieces of rocks and wood. But we couldn’t find them.”

About that time, she said, they realized that they were lost.

Church counselors searched for three hours, then reported the girls missing to the U.S. Forest Service.

Rain pounded the forest about 8 p.m. and left officials especially alarmed about the girls’ safety, Denham said: “There was a real concern that with that amount of rainfall in that short a time, if they’d got in a creekbed down there, it could have washed them all the way down to Jackson Lake.”

But the girls fought off the elements. “We were a little shaken up,” Kristen said. “We went to our knees and held hands and said a prayer, then we went back up another trail, and as the rain got worse, we got to the bottom of a V between two mountains, trying to get to a low point, since lightning strikes at the highest point.

“We were lying straight, flat on our stomachs to keep our insides warm, huddled together, and we put leaves on our legs and back to keep the body heat in. And the rain was just pounding on our backs.”

They got less than two hours of sleep each, she said, but “we managed to occupy ourselves by singing songs and cracking jokes and jiggling around to keep warm.”

Kristen said she and her friends felt bad knowing how worried their counselors would be. But “we just had a peace around us,” she said. “We felt so wonderful.”