Woman Survives 3 Days in Ravine : Sand Canyon: Immobilized by broken arms, she waited for help after her vehicle plunged 250 feet. She is hospitalized in good condition.

A Canyon Country woman whose pickup plunged 250 feet into a ravine in the Santa Clarita Valley survived for three days on wildflowers, leaves and prayers until a passing hunter heard her faint cries and summoned help.

Christy Moinuddin, 34, swerved off Santa Clara Divide Truck Trail on Thursday night and tumbled into a rocky gully near Sand Canyon. There she remained--immobilized by two broken arms, her overturned truck hidden by dense brush--until a rescue helicopter plucked her from the spot Sunday night.

She was in good condition Monday at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital--dehydrated and in pain, but well aware that she was fortunate to be alive, said her husband, Syed.

“This is one lucky gal,” said Los Angeles County Firefighter Dean Sword, who helped rescue her.

Sword and other rescue workers agreed that Moinuddin’s 74-hour ordeal might not have ended happily had weekend afternoons not been so cool. “If it had been warmer, things might not have turned out so well,” said David Conklin, a U. S. Forest Service ranger who helped place Moinuddin on the litter on which she was lifted to safety.

Moinuddin’s trial began about 6 p.m. Thursday, when she took a drive to mull over problems she was having at her job at Great Western Bank in Chatsworth, her husband said. She headed up into the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, among her favorite spots for weekend hikes and picnics.

Although she does not recall how it happened, Moinuddin lost control of her dark blue GMC Jimmy on a horseshoe curve about a mile from Sand Canyon Road. The vehicle swerved off the right side of the road, rolled down the hillside and wedged itself between jagged rocks near the bottom.

Moinuddin was thrown out the rear window and stuck beneath the vehicle. Both arms were broken near the wrists and her left leg was cut deeply below the knee. “She couldn’t bear any weight without pain,” Conklin said.

When Moinuddin did not return home by early Friday, her husband filed a missing-person report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, then took the day off to search for her himself.

He looked particularly in places where she enjoyed going, and at one point he came so close that she could see him on the road above her, but she was so weak that her feeble shouts could not be heard, he said.

He could not see her because heavy brush hid the wreckage from view. “I saw a reflection down there, but it was so small, I thought it must be a piece of trash or something,” Syed Moinuddin said.

As he hunted back and forth along the road, “She was shouting to me but I couldn’t hear her,” Syed Moinuddin said. So he climbed back into his car and drove away to search elsewhere.

In the ravine below, his wife of six years heard the car door slam, the motor start and the crunch of gravel beneath tires grow gradually more faint, she told him in the hospital. For the next 60 hours or so, Moinuddin was alone.

She told him she remembers little of what followed. Rescue workers said she told them a bear or other large animal foraged within inches of her one night. Her husband said she told him of dreams in which he was at her side, comforting her.

But she remembers making a vow that if she survived she would convert from Catholicism to Islam, his faith, said Syed Moinuddin, a Pakistani. “Her family was not too happy about it,” said the man, adding that he was delighted.

Ravenous, Moinuddin ate the flowers and leaves she could reach. She believed every plane that passed overhead was looking for her. But until hunter Jim Reiner noticed the point where her truck’s tracks veered off the road, no one knew where to look.

Reiner was scouting the area, unarmed, in advance of deer season. When he saw the tracks leading off the road, he stopped to investigate, sighted the wreckage and called out.

Moinuddin responded faintly, her throat dry from three days without water.

Reiner circled back to a nearby ranger station and summoned help. Within an hour, Moinuddin was strapped into a litter by rangers and county firefighters and plucked from the canyon by helicopter. She was met later at the hospital by her husband and 2-year-old son, Salman.

“He missed her,” Syed Moinuddin said of his son. “At first he was scared, but then he gave her a kiss. This morning he was telling me that mommy had some boo-boos.”