The Ice Pack

Nobody gets paid for this, overnight patrol duty in a cold bunk, at a base that smells of bleach to ward off mice, on an unforgiving mountain tucked with deep bowls and back-country ski trails. Not the high school senior, not the 60-year-old college professor--not any of the 33 volunteers for the Southern California Nordic Ski Patrol.

Here, on weekend patrol in Los Padres National Forest, you keep your ski boots on from sunup to sundown--everyone from the grandmother of two to the auto shop owner from Santa Barbara. You lug around a 30-pound backpack with emergency gear including an avalanche beacon, mountaineering crampons, camping stove and chicken soup mix so you can warm someone up good (unless the person is beyond shivering).

It’s tough training here, on Mt. Pinos, tough enough for NATO forces and the Navy SEALS, who go through cold-weather survival exercises with the patrol. Twice this decade, the Mt. Pinos team has been named best ski patrol in the country by its parent organization--the Colorado-based National Ski Patrol, which is the largest winter rescue organization in the world.

On the Mt. Pinos ski patrol, with more than 150 training hours, you know how to build a snow cave alone in the back country and hunker down inside, with a candle and no sleeping bag. You know how to load an injured person on a toboggan and get the victim up a hill with ropes and pulleys, on to a helicopter. You feel ready--and then you get a season like last one.

What sticks with you is the heartache of last year’s search for the missing snowboarder in Wrightwood, in 70-mph winds and blinding snow, where you walked away with the sick certainty that the kid was going to die--and he did, following his rescue, after hanging on for six nights in the woods. All those search parties, all that training, and nothing could save a 14-year-old boy who took a wrong turn on a hill. (Several other volunteer groups participated in the search, such as the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team, a civilian arm of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.)

It tore up patroller Wally Cox something fierce when they had to give up on that snowboarder kid last February. Cox, 60, drove home after the search and called his brother, a ski patroller in Oregon. That didn’t help--his brother had never been on an unsuccessful search.

That night, 54-year-old patroller Rick Stein started thinking in the car on the way down the mountain. Maybe if we had had a dog with us. A search dog maybe could have helped. And every day, Ellen Arrowsmith, a 46-year-old accountant, thinks: Am I ready? Could I go out on an all-night search?

The Wrightwood tragedy got everyone thinking.

So this season, the patrol is starting up units in Wrightwood and Mt. Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. On Mt. Pinos, patrol leaders are also talking about adding a snowboard patroller, someone who’s up on the latest with a sport that chews up the deepest, freshest snow.

And Stein is working with his new dog, Cody, who’s in training for avalanche and rescue work. And Arrowsmith, who broke her leg skiing last year, is still staying off high heels until she’s up to full speed.

And everyone thinks: Am I ready? One Sunday morning, Cox is on fund-raising duty, selling coffee and snacks at a table outside the patrol lodge at the base of Mt. Pinos. He pops an aspirin and sips hot tea to try to shake a headache. In the blinding sun, the white-haired computer science professor is on his feet all day.

Not once does he take off his backpack or ski helmet.

“If we have an incident,” he says, “I’ll be ready.”

Eating Potluck Dinners Peppered With Stories

It’s the weekend after the first big storm of the season on Mt. Pinos, with 3 feet of snow on the 8,831-foot summit.

By 6 a.m., patrol leader Steve Newman is up, checking the news for weather reports, stirring up biscuits and gravy for the team. Three patrollers spent the night at his Frazier Park home, down the mountain, as a break from the freezing patrol lodge.

On weekends with fresh snow, they average 12 to 15 incidents, some of them crazy.

A few weeks ago, a 50ish man tried to walk up Mt. Pinos in tennis shoes on a day when the hills were like sheets of ice. He ended up with a broken ankle, and they had to carry the 230-pound man down the mountain on a toboggan.

You see strange things up here--a woman in street shoes and a plaid, pleated skirt; a shirtless man rolling in the snow; snowboarders who head up the hill with a shovel to pack snow into huge ramps. This day turned out to be slow, but they could tell you stories, and they do, over huge potluck dinners of vegetarian meatloaf, beef stew, cheese bread and other homemade goodies.

This is a tough mountain, with no treeless meadows, groomed trails or chair lifts, with one of the biggest back-country areas in Southern California. Lately, snowboarders and skiers have been heading deeper and deeper into the back country, sometimes to places inaccessible to trained rescue workers other than the ski patrol on cross-country skis.

Neither the U.S. Forest Service nor local law enforcement patrol on skis here. That means, the public usually flags the ski patrol first in an emergency on the weekends, when the base is staffed; otherwise, everyone’s on call during the week.

In January 1998, the ski patrol got word on the mountain about 3 p.m.: A snowboarder couldn’t find his buddy.

Extra patrollers were called in, and Kern County sheriff’s deputies arrived to set up a command post and direct more than two dozen searchers. With headlamps on, patrollers skied the mountain, looking for tracks in the steep bowl where the snowboarder was last seen at 1:30 p.m. It was snowing on and off, about 12 degrees; the 20-year-old snowboarder from Bakersfield had on light snowboard pants and a jacket. Clouds were rolling in, the trees had iced up, and darkness was falling.

Newman, one of the patrol leaders, wasn’t sure the guy was going to make it. But at 12:30 a.m., a search party got lucky: They found him, crouched in the snow under his snowboard, severely hypothermic but otherwise OK. He wouldn’t have made it through the night.

Now that one felt great, says Newman, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant who works in a street gangs unit.

The month before, he had been on another kind of search, on call, as always, to jump in on searches on other mountains.

A female hiker was missing in the Angeles National Forest, 20 miles west of Palmdale. Search parties worked through snow, sleet and heavy winds, with dogs and snowmobiles. But trees heavy with ice had fallen and blocked roads in the area. On a Saturday afternoon, Newman and other patrollers pushed through the storm and skied between the trees to search in areas no one else could cover.

The next morning, rescue workers found the body of the 40-year-old mother of five from Palmdale, less than 5 miles from a command post.

All you can do, Newman says, is be ready for the next one.

A New Headquarters Built by Volunteers

On a sunny Saturday, Cody, the avalanche dog in training, is tethered outside the freshly scrubbed ski base. The bleach messes up his nose.

It’s a simple plywood-sided lodge, in muddy brown, with a wide, covered porch, the ski patrol’s first official headquarters. As a volunteer unit of the Forest Service, and local offshoot of the National Ski Patrol, the Mt. Pinos patrol began 23 years ago in a trailer with picnic benches that doubled as first aid tables and cots for sleeping. The door was so narrow you had to turn a stretcher sideways to get it through.

In October 1998, the patrol opened the new lodge, built by volunteers and paid for by donations and fund-raisers, along with help from the Forest Service. There’s bunk space for six, solar power, a propane heater, first-aid room, kitchen and dispatch station. Patrollers use the same portable toilets as everyone else, across the parking lot.

They don’t even get free ski perks, since everyone skis for free in the forest. They pay for their own gold patrol jackets, mileage and backpack supplies. Put a plastic support collar on someone’s neck, and you don’t get it back.

Not that they expect to. They get plenty back.

“There’s just something that comes out of [ski patrol] that touches your soul and whole heart and inner being that doesn’t come from anywhere else, not even going to church,” says Arrowsmith, the Antelope Valley accountant. “To know you’re actually, really helping someone or saved somebody’s life. What ultimate thrill beats that?” Later that afternoon, Stein takes Cody into the woods for training, this 9-month-old dog who came out of the Wrightwood incident. Cody is an Australian shepherd, the kind with no tail.

In a second, Stein will unleash him, and Cody will search for Arrowsmith, who’s hiding behind a tree. But first he bends down.

“Wanna work, Cody?” he asks.

Does he wanna work? For this, Cody is not allowed to chase seagulls on the beach or other distractions. For this, on his owner’s dime, Cody spends almost every weekend in training, jumping out of hovering helicopters, sniffing out people who are hiding in the desert at night.

“Find, Cody, go find!”

And Cody leaps over branches in the snow, ranging back and forth between trees, trying to catch her scent, which he does in minutes. He finds her, and runs back to Stein.

He’s ready.