Lost Snowboarder, 14, Is Rescued

He hung on through 70-mph winds, when the driving snow made it impossible to see. He hung on through deep black nights of subfreezing cold, lost at 5,600 feet in the San Gabriel Mountains. He hung on long after he had lost track of time, through miles of aimless wandering, through days of snowfall so heavy and hopeless that rescue teams stayed home.

And on Friday the 13th, after six days and nights in the steep, forested canyons near Wrightwood, 14-year-old Jeff Thornton came out alive.

“I’m not sure if there has ever been a more amazing rescue than this one,” said Jon Inskeep, operations leader for the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team. Two of the team’s members finally found the 5-foot-9, 215-pound ninth-grader, hungry and disoriented, his left eye blackened, his left boot missing. He was seated at the bottom of a treeless ravine two miles south of the New Mountain High ski resort.

Thrilled searchers could scarcely believe it. Most had assumed they would recover a body.

“The conditions have been so unbelievably deplorable I didn’t think he could survive one night, let alone six,” said paramedic Darrel Airhart of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “He was young, inexperienced and probably easily frightened. I’m shocked and amazed.”

Thornton, an avid snowboarder and high school football player from the Imperial Valley farm town of Brawley, had disappeared during a snowboarding trip last Saturday. He was found about 2:30 p.m. Friday after rescuers followed his tracks into an icy “chute,” a ravine so steep it appeared almost impossible to walk out. A helicopter flew him to Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora, where friends and family rejoiced. He was listed in guarded condition in intensive care, suffering from frostbite.

“He came in alert and talking with good vital signs and temperature [93.4 degrees] well above what we expected,” said John Dimare, Foothill’s medical director.

The improbable story--a testimony not only to Thornton’s pluck, but also to the persistence of rescuers--began at the top of the New Mountain High resort last week, when Thornton and his uncle, Marc Shapiro, got off a chairlift at the crest of a snowboarding run. Shapiro, 30, who had been like a father after Thornton’s own dad died years ago, recalled trying to direct the teenager toward the right slope before beginning the course himself.

“I went, ‘Jeff, thataway,’ ” Shapiro said. It was a little past 2:30 p.m. Thornton was just a short distance behind his uncle. The air was getting foggy, but the slopes were not yet hardened with ice.

Shapiro said they were snowboarding in the trees because of the better snow found there--even though tree skiing and snowboarding are considered particularly dangerous. U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono’s death this year occurred while he was skiing among trees.

“When I lost sight of him, I didn’t know where he was,” Shapiro said of his nephew. “I thought he was down at the bottom [in the lodge], eating pizza.”

Thornton was not at the bottom. His uncle reported him missing a short while after arriving there, even as bad weather began to move onto the mountain. That night, the winds up on the mountain reached up to 70 mph, whipping snow and ice.

“The winds were howling; there was a white-out--we could only see 5 or 10 feet,” paramedic Airhart said. “That really hampered our rescue effort. We were concerned about an avalanche. Even after the first night, we were worried we would only find his body.”

But there was nothing. The teenager’s uncle and his mother, Lori Thornton, waited, staying in touch with searchers. His friends waited, passing the word among themselves.

Thornton’s disappearance had a profound effect on the town of Brawley, near the Salton Sea, where the stout, quiet, easygoing youngster lifted weights, played center on Brawley Union High’s freshman football team and sometimes attended youth-group meetings at First Presbyterian Church.

“We heard Sunday morning that he was missing, and a number of the churches heard, and we all prayed for him Sunday morning during [church],” said First Presbyterian’s pastor, Scott Peterson.

Sunday passed, then Monday, Tuesday. The weather cleared briefly and worsened again. Rescuers were forced to sit by while heavy clouds dumped nearly three feet of snow on the summit.

Anxious classmates fashioned blue ribbons and pins, all bearing the emblem, “In Hope of Jeff Thornton.” Each morning they met outside the school, 30 or 40 students, to pray.

“There were a lot of tears, both from girls and guys,” Peterson said. “Each day that passed, it was like the candle of hope was getting dimmer and dimmer.”

No one knows what Thornton was going through up on the mountain. Even after being rescued, the battered Thornton would tell doctors and family members that he could remember nothing from the time he began snowboarding until he heard the roar of the rescue choppers.

From the tracks he left, he must have walked many aimless hours in the heavy snow, searchers surmised.

A person can live up to three weeks without food, but water is essential. Thornton consumed snow and creek water. He probably was able to survive the numbing cold in part because of his heavy build, rescuers said.

Two searchers, Art Fortini and Randy Katai, finally spotted Thornton’s tracks and followed them for an hour before reaching the icy chute where Thornton, caked with mud, was holed up.

“We saw him sitting on the bank of the creek, and he was just as surprised to see us as we were to see him,” Katai said. “He didn’t believe we were real.”

Thornton thought it was Tuesday or Wednesday--not Friday.

Rumors of the rescue swept through the high school. His mother and uncle rushed to meet the boy at the hospital.

“We’re absolutely ecstatic,” family friend Dorothy Graham said late Friday. “We feel very blessed that he’s been found.”

Shapiro, who visited his nephew in the intensive care ward, said the last thing Thornton remembered was hitting a rock while on his snowboard. Shapiro thinks the teenager may have been knocked out before he began wandering on the hillsides. When they were reunited at Thornton’s hospital bed, the boy joked and said, “Hey, you left me.”

“But I guess he’s not upset,” Shapiro said. “He knows that he went the wrong way.”

Times staff writer David Ferrell and correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.