Searchers Comb Mountains for Toddler : Missing: Boy, 3, wandered from his father at a remote cabin in rugged Riverside County community.

Search-and-rescue teams scoured the rugged mountain community of Pinyon Pines for the second day Monday, seeking a toddler who wandered away from an isolated cabin while his father’s back was turned, authorities said.

Three-year-old Travis Zweig of La Quinta disappeared about 10:30 a.m Sunday while his father, Kevin Zweig, was helping a family friend chop wood at the friend’s cabin home, said Riverside County Sheriff’s Detective Henry Sawicki.

Located in the outpost of Pinyon Pines--a community that lies along California 74 in the San Bernardino Mountains between Hemet and Palm Springs--the cabin sits a quarter of a mile down a dirt road from the highway and is framed by scrubby canyons, hillsides and tall pines, Sawicki said.

Always frosty in winter, the area was pelted by freezing rain and snow and whipped by 50-m.p.h. winds Sunday night. Sawicki said the 3-foot, 35-pound child was dressed only in a T-shirt and denim jeans when he disappeared.

The detective said the child had been playing in the cabin yard with the owner’s four pet dogs while his father and the owner readied their chain saws.

“After a short time,” he said, “they noticed that the child and the dogs were missing.”

The dogs returned to the yard within half an hour, Sawicki said, but the child could not be found. After a two-hour search on horseback of the forested canyons surrounding the cabin, the distraught family notified authorities, he said.

By Monday morning, he said, more than 50 rescue workers from a dozen Southern California law enforcement agencies and search- and-rescue teams had combed the area within a one-mile radius of the cabin.

“Hopefully, he found some shelter,” Sawicki said. “The weather here last night was really bad. Temperatures were in the high 20s, and we had everything from rain and sleet to snow.”

The detective said the rains had loosened the steep canyon walls in the area. He said there is no indication of foul play or of an attack by the cabin owner’s dogs.

He added that rescue workers are conducting a door-to-door search in the community, in hopes that the child might have been taken in from the storm by a neighbor or crawled under a porch. It was not immediately clear how close the nearest home is.

“We’re being guardedly optimistic,” Sawicki said. “We have people on foot, people on horseback, people in helicopters, people in cars.” He added that workers planned to continue their search throughout the night.