Friends Locate Body of Missing Skier : Search: Second victim who disappeared on Mt. Baldy in February with San Clemente pilot has yet to be found.

The body of one of two Orange County skiers missing on Mt. Baldy since February was found six feet beneath snow Saturday by friends of the men who continued searching every weekend, authorities said.

Charles Prior, a 33-year-old professional pilot from San Clemente, was found in Coldwater Canyon beneath Thunder Mountain about 1 p.m., said Deputy Debra Dorrough of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

The area is the same one in which authorities searched for days after the experienced skiers were reported missing on Feb. 11 during one of the worst storms in years. They were presumed to have died in an avalanche.

Twenty search and rescue workers with the Sheriff’s Department are expected to begin looking in the same area today for Tim Pines, a 31-year-old project manager for Mazda facilities in Irvine, Dorrough said.

Prior’s widow, Ellen, said friends of both families have been going to the mountainside every weekend since the official search by the Sheriff’s Department was called off in February.

Last Sunday, she said, they found a ski pole belonging to Pines, who had 20 years of skiing experience, against a tree in Coldwater Canyon but could not locate his body.

Encouraged, five of his friends returned to the site Saturday, when they dug through the snow and found Prior’s body, she said.

The Feb. 11 trip was the first time Prior and Pines, both triathletes and outdoorsmen, had skied together. They had met as fellow churchgoers at the San Clemente Presbyterian Church.

Though saddened by the discovery of her husband’s body, Ellen Prior gave thanks to the continued efforts of friends, “some of whom had been up there many times before.”