COLUMN ONE : Forest’s Fatal Toll on Visitors : Public ignorance and government indifference are blamed for accidents in Angeles National Forest. Safety precautions are lacking, but some experts say unprepared visitors are at fault.

On a warm Saturday afternoon in February, five young city dwellers ventured innocently into the Angeles National Forest.

Carrying six packs of beer, they followed a slow-moving mountain stream for about a mile until it emerged from the woods and became Switzer Falls, one of the best spots in the forest for a view and a party.

They were at the top of the falls, which slices through a deep granite gorge in the rugged San Gabriel Mountains. Climbing down a few feet to a small, shallow pool, they waded in, popped open the beer and “started having a good old time,” party-goer Clyde Olivas recalled.

Within minutes one of them was dead. Thomas Grijalva, a 22-year-old street kid making his first visit to the forest, slipped on algae, tumbled down a long granite chute and plunged 50 feet over the falls. He survived but compounded his error by trying to climb back up the cliff. He fell again, fatally.

What happened to Grijalva is not unusual in the Angeles National Forest, Los Angeles’ 652,000-acre back yard. A combination of public ignorance and what critics call government indifference regularly cost lives in the nation’s most popular national forest.

The U.S. Forest Service, which manages Angeles Forest, doesn’t keep track of accidents. The regional office in San Francisco did not have a record of Grijalva’s death. But various sources say a handful of people are killed and dozens more injured in the forest each year in recreation accidents. In 20 years, Switzer Falls, considered the forest’s most dangerous spot, has claimed as many as 100 lives.

Experts say the blame lies to a large extent with the visitors. Many urban Southern Californians prepare for a trip to the woods as if they were going to a city park. They hike in thongs, don’t bring water or maps and fail to carry extra clothes for sudden weather changes. Some lose their footing and fall, or become lost, or die of exposure.

“For a babe in the woods, these mountains are not to be trifled with,” said Sgt. Harry Jones, a member of Air-5, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter team, which made 103 recreation-related rescues in the forest in the first six months of this year.

Critics say the Forest Service has done little to help. The agency, for instance, has refused to post warning signs at danger spots.

“What we have here is a case of mutual disrespect,” said Tom Grubbs, a cinematographer and longtime Angeles Forest hiker. “The public doesn’t respect the forest, and the Forest Service doesn’t respect the public.”

If man’s communion with the forest is not what John Muir had in mind, it’s partly because the forest was never supposed to be a weekend playground for city types. Created by presidential decree in 1892, when Los Angeles’ population was 60,000, the forest was intended as a watershed for the Los Angeles Basin. But handy freeways and a soaring population have turned it into a recreation area visited by 20 million people a year.

Chaotic and crowded on weekends, such high-usage areas as Switzer Falls, Stonyvale Picnic Ground, San Antonio Falls and Chantry Flat have become de facto city parks.

For visitors who push baby carriages along well-maintained trails and stroll peacefully through the woods, that’s fine.

The problems arise when more adventuresome visitors leave the well-tracked areas and get careless. Hazards include rock that can give way as it is being climbed, slippery granite around waterfalls and deceptively shallow natural pools where diving is dangerous.

In June, a 40-year-old Long Beach man was hiking in the Williams Canyon area when he lost his footing on a switchback and fell 250 feet to his death. “He was not an experienced hiker, and he just slipped,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Dearmore.

Two years ago, a 35-year-old Bell Gardens man took his 14-year-old godson hiking in San Gabriel Canyon and did not take a map or a compass. When they failed to return at dusk, a sheriff’s rescue team was dispatched to the area and found them early the next morning, cold but unharmed, nearly four miles from their destination.

“They apparently just got lost,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Daniel Pohl said.

Getting lost can be fatal. On an outing in January, a 12-year-old boy wandered away from a church group. He was discovered the next morning on Table Mountain, frozen to death under a blanket of fresh snow.

Another problem for a tenderfoot: The weather can change quickly. “It’s a nice, sunny day in the flatlands, and people go to the mountains in tennis shoes, T-shirts and shorts,” Sgt. Jones said. “Whammo, they’re in an entirely different environment, become hypothermic, and we have to go in and get them.”

Information about weather and other dangers might help avoid problems. But the Forest Service makes what critics deride as feeble attempts to educate the public. Maps are not posted at trail heads. Warning signs and trail signs are virtually nonexistent. The written material that does exist seldom includes a Spanish translation, even though Latinos are heavy users of the forest.

“The Forest Service is 20 years behind when it comes to safety,” said John Harris, a resource management professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Perhaps no place illustrates the issue of warning signs better than Switzer Falls, 10 miles north of the Foothill Freeway in the La Canada Flintridge area.

Chuck Shamblin, a veteran Forest Service officer, estimates that over the last two decades the falls have been the scene of “60 to 100” accidental deaths and “seven serious accidents a year.” A sheriff’s search-and-rescue team has responded to more than 160 emergencies at the falls in the last 20 years.

Despite the dangers, the only warnings that Thomas Grijalva saw on the day he died were two at the trail head, a mile from the falls. They warn about littering and keeping dogs on a leash. He and his friends, fellow party-goer Olivas says, did not notice two signs 100 feet from the falls. Hardly anybody does. Off to the side of the trail, those signs are made virtually invisible by thick undergrowth. They have also been defaced and make no sense. The signs once said, “18 Accidental Falls Occurred Here Between 1975 and 1977.” They now say, “8 Dental Ills Cured Here Between 5 and 7.”

“It’s a scandal,” Louis Blumberg, a regional official of the Wilderness Society, said of the lack of warnings. He said he is “outraged that the Forest Service isn’t doing more to protect the public.”

At Yosemite National Park in central California, conditions similar to Switzer exist where streams flow over granite before becoming waterfalls. There, however, the National Park Service has embedded signs in the rock that approaching visitors cannot miss.

In August, a federal judge ruling in Los Angeles expressed anger at the Forest Service for its attitude toward Angeles Forest.

“The Angeles National Forest is unlike Tongass National Forest or other remote wilderness areas,” Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote, contrasting Angeles Forest to one in Alaska. “The Forest Service refuses to recognize this inescapable fact of life.”

Tashima was deciding a lawsuit over a paralyzing 1983 accident involving Xavier Soto, a 23-year-old Pacoima auto mechanic. Soto was making his first visit to the popular Stonyvale Picnic Ground, which is near several natural pools about six miles northeast of Foothill Boulevard in Sunland-Tujunga. It attracts 200 or 300 visitors at a time.

Swimming with friends, Soto dived off a bridge into a few feet of murky water, struck the sandy bottom and broke his neck. He is now a quadriplegic.

Judge Tashima found the Forest Service 75% responsible because no warning signs had been posted. It must pay Soto an amount to be determined in another trial.

“To say that the district ranger’s failure to act was in callous disregard of the safety of the national forest-using public is to put it charitably,” Tashima wrote. “The evidence strongly suggests that the district ranger treated the using public with contempt.”

Local Forest Service officials are considering an appeal and would not comment on Tashima’s remarks.

Soto’s victory was unusual. According to Forest Service attorneys, it is “very rare” to beat the government in such a suit, especially in California where the state Recreation Use Statute protects landowners who allow free recreational use of pristine land. They generally cannot be found negligent for failing to post warnings or abate hazards, the law says.

Tashima found in Soto’s favor by declaring the Forest Service had been guilty of “willful and malicious” negligence, defined as knowing about a danger that probably will lead to injury but deliberately failing to try to help people avoid it.

Wayne McClean, who represented Soto and is president of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Assn., said Forest Service personnel “recognized that people were engaged in a dangerous activity. They told us: ‘It’s stupid, it’s crazy, but if they want to do it, let them.’ So they gave out parking tickets but couldn’t care less about people jumping off a bridge.”

Tashima also raised the possibility that racial attitudes influence decisions in the forest.

“Tujunga District personnel testified that they were reluctant to inspect certain areas, ‘to go down there,’ because they found mingling with the public unpleasant,” he wrote. “The district ranger remarked that if signs were to be put up, they would have to be in Spanish and ‘Asian.’

“This racial overtone is unfortunate and, undoubtedly, was a contributing factor in the Forest Service’s failure to carry out its mission in this racially heterogenous metropolis.”

Gray Reynolds, the forest supervisor in Angeles Forest in the early 1980s and now director of land management planning for the agency, said racial bias “doesn’t reflect (the) Forest Service position at all. When I was on the Angeles, we conducted special Spanish-speaking lessons for our patrolmen.”

The Forest Service, which has only 11 law enforcement officers and 36 permanent recreation technicians to cover the 1,000-square-mile forest, maintains that warning signs mean danger--for the agency.

“A sign creates an enormous problem for us,” said Forest Service attorney Russell Mays. “If we recognize there was a need for a sign, it’s evidence that can be used against us if the sign is no longer there. It’s very much a double-edged sword: Put up a sign, you admit there’s a hazard. If it disappears, the court can find you negligent because you didn’t monitor to see that it was there.”

The Forest Service also views signs as ineffective. “If we put up a sign at every place that looked a little hazardous to us, we’d have more signs than brush,” said Terry Ellis, the Arroyo Seco district ranger. Moreover, “as fast as we put up a sign, it gets ripped out.”

Critics say putting up signs would likely protect the agency from lawsuits and would be easy. “It takes 15 seconds with a staple gun to put up a sign,” John Harris said. “Studies we’ve done in recreation show a positive relationship between a person’s behavior and information. When a person understands the rule and it makes sense, he will follow it.”

F. Dale Robertson, Forest Service chief, expressed surprise when asked about the problems in Angeles Forest. “It’s not our policy to treat the public with anything but care and concern,” he said from his office in Washington. “We ought to be warning people if there are dangers they’re not aware of.”

Tips for Tenderfoots in Angeles Forest

Always bring water.

Be prepared for sudden weather changes.

If hiking, use a map and compass.

Wear sensible shoes, not thongs.

If going alone, tell your destination to a friend.

Don’t let children wander off.

Stay on trails.

Do not climb rock faces.

DANGER SPOTS IN ANGELES FOREST How People are hurt at: Stonyvale Picnic Ground: Diving into deceptively shallow water Switzer Falls: falling after slipping on smooth, slick granite Chantry Flat: falling because of decomposing granite Morris Dam: diving off cliffs Barrett-Stoddard Road Bridge: diving into deceptively shallow water San Antonio Falls: falling because of decomposing granite Icehouse Canyon: falling because of decomposing granite