One-Man Patrol : Crime Is Down in Mountains Since Deputy Took Over

Like some high-country wilderness guide, Bennie Garnes scans the horizon and senses trouble. The weather, at best an unpredictable animal in these mountain parts, seems poised to strike.

The blustery night has brought six inches of new snow to the San Gabriel Mountains--a heavy load that makes driving treacherous. Now the wailing wind and promise of another storm have whipped up fresh concerns in the mind of Los Angeles County’s most isolated deputy sheriff.

Garnes has spent the morning cruising the frozen white-washed roads in his secluded corner of Angeles Highway in and around the town of Wrightwood, looking for tire tracks gone awry, a sure signal of a downed motorist.

For five winters now, Garnes has been the highest cop in Southern California--a lone-patrol deputy whose beat stretches 300 square miles across northern Los Angeles County, rising clear to 8,000 feet, higher than many Colorado ski resorts.

A river--known as Big Rock Creek--runs through this patrol territory, which extends from the San Bernardino County line west to the Vincent Gap, ranging north and south between highways 138 and 2. It is an area of still-wild, often-inhospitable country the size of the San Fernando Valley, a domain dominated by National Forest land.

Near Vincent Gulch Divide, Garnes spies two young hikers, their faces tucked into parkas as they ready for a trek toward the old Big Horn gold mine. Garnes doesn’t trust them any more than he does the weather. He swings the black and white, four-wheel-drive sheriff’s cruiser around and questions the pair like a suspicious night security guard--demanding their estimated time of departure from the woods. His woods.

“Hey, this just isn’t a good day for a winter walk,” he says as the hikers hustle off under cruel, iron-gray skies. “But I can’t stop them from going in there. This is National Forest land, open to the public. My job is to keep an eye on them, make sure they don’t do anything stupid.”

During summer months, Garnes helps patrol a 1,000-square-mile expanse of high desert into the farthest reaches of the Antelope Valley. But--from Thanksgiving to Easter--he becomes a mountain man, a loner.

Indeed, he is the only lawman many residents ever see in this high-country terrain populated not only by commuting big-city professionals and day-trip skiers, but by stately pinion pines, bald eagles, brown bears and mountain lions.

Like a police department’s urban foot soldier, his job is to create a presence throughout this mountain country. Since he began as Wrightwood’s resident sheriff in 1989, crimes such as drug possession and equipment theft at the nearby Mountain High ski resort have plummeted.

He has also played a key role in numerous rescues of hikers and skiers who became lost in an area that is 52 miles away from the nearest L.A. County sheriff’s station.

Day after day, as he patrols the lonely wilderness trails and winding highways, Garnes feels more like a Montana lawman than one working 50 miles north of the nation’s second-largest city.

Over the years, this far-flung patrol has qualified him as the only L.A. County sheriff’s deputy with department-issue snow shoes, foul-weather parka and furry, Moscow cap. “And I’d bet money,” he says, “that I’m the only local deputy who’s ever entertained a high-speed pursuit with a snowmobile.”

The 44-year-old Garnes, who began his law enforcement 20 years ago patrolling the streets of South-Central Los Angeles, came to the mountains following the discovery of a 9-year-old boy who had frozen to death under a foot of snow after wandering away from a church outing.

Sheriff’s authorities soon decided they needed a stronger presence around Wrightwood, which on many winter weekends sees its 2,500 population increase tenfold with skiers, snow-boarders and tumbling tobogganers.

Residents had also complained that deputies summoned during winter storms would show up in their shiny black street shoes, ignorant of the area, worthless as a hound dog with a bad cold.

So Garnes, who had lived in Wrightwood since the mid 1980s, was assigned there, at first just on weekends. His presence was felt within weeks.

Garnes rescued a 16-year-old avalanche victim trapped under four feet of snow for more than 95 minutes--surviving the longest such ordeal in the United States, he says.

Now full-time, Garnes spends his days as a voice of reason for city-folk who rush to the mountains at the first sight of snow, often ignoring the simplest precautions.

On snowy days, he tickets motorists whose cars slip and slide along mountain roads without chains, searches for lost skiers who decide to forge their own trails. He organizes emergency response efforts for sledders with broken backs, hikers with frostbite.

Several weeks ago, Garnes headed the unsuccessful rescue attempt for a woman who drowned after falling through the thin ice of local Jackson Lake.

He calls them flatlanders, the overzealous city-dwellers who see the snow-capped distant mountains and run toward the hills as though on some frenzied gold rush. Many wanderers assume they’re safe just because they can often see the downtown skyline from the mountains.

The resulting high jinks--some of them deadly--make Garnes shake his head.

“Let’s face it, a lot of people who come up here are knuckleheads,” he says. “In altitude, this place is more like Alberta, Canada, than Los Angeles County. I’ve seen too many people in jean jackets and tennis shoes who have no clue about how fast things can change around here, who have no respect for the terrain, the weather or the wilderness.”

Not Garnes. His time in the San Gabriels has taught him a love and respect for this rugged landscape, where avalanches and and rock falls occur almost whimsically, where “icy road” signs mean business, a place where the fat pinion pine cones are among the largest of their kind in the world.

With his thick mustache, Garnes is a walrus of a man resembling Captain Kangaroo. He is soft spoken--a cop who would rather give a warning than a ticket, one who gets a kick out of helping to chase a neighbor’s stray cow down a mountain road.

The steep San Gabriels, he says, are among the most dangerous mountain ranges in the world. Garnes delivers such statements because he knows the land. He knows the secret fishing holes where you can find 14-inch trout and can show you the inspiration points where a person with decent eyesight can see for 150 miles or more.

Over the years, he has come to appreciate the blanketing beauty of the season’s first snowfall. He has sat in his cruiser eyeing a cagey mountain lion or Big Horn sheep pad across the road, a bald eagle soar like a feathered hang-glider, gaining altitude with one flap of its majestic wings.

But he has also come across a more perverse side of these woods--the pornographic movies shot here, covert drug dealing, drunken drivers careening home from a day of skiing. He has chased down escapees from the nearby prison fire camp, arrested suspects in the selfish thievery of everything from trucks to snowboards.

Like a cagey animal, Garnes has taken a bite out of crime in this backcountry. Between 1989 and 1993, ski-theft incidents, for example, fell from 302 to 41.

Acting as his own one-horse patrolman and detective, Garnes has made 76 felony arrests since 1989, collars ranging from narcotics crimes to fraud, robbery and burglary.

Locals like what they see. Thanks to Garnes, Wrightwood is a place where people don’t always bother to lock the front door.

“He just makes us feel safe up here,” said Charlie Koenig, owner of Charlie’s Market in Wrightwood. “Time was, it took a deputy three hours to get here on a call, if they came at all. But Bennie is here within minutes. He’s one of us.”

On the streets of Wrightwood, Garnes is part Andy of Mayberry, part Colombo, part McCloud on horseback, a good-old boy who locals say makes the best chocolate chip and walnut cookies in town.

On slow days, and there are many of them at this altitude, he might stop for a chat with the folks at the U.S. Forest Service station or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory outpost, checking in for a cup of coffee at the Mile High cafe in nearby Valyermo.

At the Mile High, a former stagecoach stop that once had a brothel out back, where chain saws and snow-shoes now hang from the walls and ceilings, talk turns to the time Garnes rousted a 350-pound brown bear that had broken into the place for a late-night bite.

“I used a fire extinguisher to drive him out from under the floorboards,” Garnes recalled. “Man, did he come roaring out of that hole, all right. He was last seen heading south into the mountains with a big ‘ol white butt.”

Animals aren’t the only wildlife around here.

Garnes keeps an eye on a character known as Crazy Jim who’s been known to brandish a weapon, claiming to be an ex-CIA agent. And the hitchhiker who travels each weekend from the San Fernando Valley to stand on street corners, waving at passersby like some smiling Vegas clown.

Then there was the Big Horn mine burglary.

Several gang members were surprised during a trailer break-in there and were being chased by three miners wielding shotguns: “You’ve got to understand that you’re not in the big city up here,” Garnes said. “People take matters into their own hands.”

By the time Garnes caught up with the chase, the miners had collared three of the thieves but had let one slip away. But on this 9-degree day, Garnes wasn’t worried. He just sat in his cruiser with the heater running, his three suspects handcuffed in the back seat.

Then came a tap on the frosted window.

“Are you the guy I’m looking for?” Garnes asked.

“Yeah,” came the reply. “Hurry up, get the cuffs. It’s cold out here.”

Lonely Patrol

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Bennie Garnes patrols some of the most remote and sparsely populated areas in the county. In the winter, he is the only officer patrolling a 300-square-mile area. In summer, he and another deputy cover 1,000 square miles across the San Gabriel Mountains and Antelope Valley.