Woman Rescued 3 Days After Truck Plunges Into Ravine

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 the 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 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 load Moinuddin onto the litter on which she was lifted to safety.

Moinuddin’s accident occurred about 6 p.m. Thursday, when she took a drive to mull over problems she was having at work, her husband said. She headed into the mountains of Angeles National Forest, among her favorite places for weekend hikes and picnics.

Although she does not recall how it happened, Moinuddin lost control of her 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 became wedged between jagged rocks near the bottom.

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

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

He looked in places he knew she enjoyed going. Once he came so close that she could see him on the road above her. But heavy brush obscured his view and she was so weak that her calls could not be heard, he said.

“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,” he added. 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 and the motor start. Then the crunch of gravel beneath tires grew gradually faint, she told him in the hospital. For the next 60 hours or so, she was alone.

She told her husband she remembers little of what followed. Rescue workers said she told them that 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.

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 nearly four days without water.

Reiner went 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,” Ryed Moinuddin said of his son. “At first he was scared, but then he gave her a kiss.”