5 Ski Off Beaten Path, Rescued by Helicopter After 15-Hour Ordeal : Survival: Wet and cold, men spend night huddled together in a shelter they built with snow and a fallen log.

A search team rescued five skiers in the San Gabriel Mountains Friday morning after the men strayed out of a designated ski area, got lost and survived a cold night by huddling together in a makeshift snow shelter.

“We huddled, we hugged, we breathed on each other,” said Phillippe Hartley, 36, a businessman from North Hollywood. “There was a lot of cheerleading going on. But every once in a while you’d hear a sigh of real desperation.”

Rescuers on snowshoes found Hartley and the four other men in good condition at about 4:20 a.m. Friday in a remote canyon near the Mt. Waterman ski area in the San Gabriel Mountains, about 34 miles north of Azusa. A helicopter airlifted the skiers to safety.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Mills said the Altadena sheriff station’s mountain search-and-rescue team found the skiers by following their tracks in the snow. Mills, the search team leader, said the men were “extremely cold and wet” when he first saw them.

In interviews Friday morning, Hartley and Kristan Marvell, 38, a sculptor from Elysian Heights, said they and the others got lost after trying to ski down Mt. Waterman in an area outside the designated ski slopes. They said the nearly 15-hour ordeal, during which temperatures dropped to 10 degrees, was particularly miserable because they did not have coats and their sweat from an attempt to hike to safety turned to ice as it got dark.

“We were very poorly prepared,” said Marvell. “I had a sweater and no hat. I was sopping wet.”

Hartley said the men spent a claustrophobic night trying to conserve body heat in a shelter they built with snow and a fallen log.

The other skiers were Charles Fine, 39, of Santa Monica; Eric Jussen, 39, of Venice, and Charles Bridgeman, 44, of Topanga.

Hartley said he first met the other four men on the Mt. Waterman ski slopes at about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, an hour before he was to rejoin a friend who was also skiing in the area. On impulse, he said, he decided to join them when they said they planned to ski down a run of fresh powder on the south face of the mountain.

“It’s kind of a skier’s overwhelming temptation to go where no one has gone and carve some tracks in beautiful untouched snow,” he said.

Marvell said he and his friends intended to take a route they had skied before to a forest road, where a friend was waiting in a car. They became disoriented because geographical markers they usually follow were covered by snow from this week’s storms, he said.

“We knew it was out of bounds skiing but we’ve skied it before,” he said. “There’s a small margin of error once you go off the wrong ridge. We take the responsibility of ending up there.”

Within half an hour, the men knew they were lost. They tried to hike out of a steep canyon, working up a heavy sweat. As darkness approached and the cold increased, they decided to take shelter.

The Sheriff’s Department was alerted by a friend of the skiers about their disappearance at about 6:30 p.m. A veteran eight-man search team of deputies and volunteers using snowshoes and four-wheel drive vehicles was dispatched. They spotted the ski tracks and followed them to an area known as Devil’s Canyon, where their shouts were heard by the men in the snow shelter, Mills said.

“We heard the screams of the rescue squad to our absolute amazement,” Hartley said. “We thought we were hallucinating. We were tremendously impressed that they didn’t wait for daylight to start searching.”

Despite the cold, the lost skiers benefited from a clear night without snow or strong winds, Mills said.

Sheriff’s Lt. Robert Flores said the team often rescues lost hikers in the snow, but said this was the first search for lost skiers he could remember in his eight years at the Altadena station.

“It’s not a place where you want to go off the beaten path,” he said. “You get down in that canyon, you can’t get back out.”