Mountain Rescuers Race Clock, Weather
For mountain rescue teams, all the training and exhausting work--the slogging through blizzards and hauling motorists’ bodies out of canyons--paid off Friday with the crackling of a sheriff’s radio.
“We’ve got tracks!” came the voice of a rescuer, who was deep in the Angeles National Forest looking for a missing mountain biker named Jeremy Galton.
Until then, there had been no sign of the 23-year-old for two days, and no idea of where he might have wandered off the trail in the fog, wind and sleet. Within an hour, a sheriff’s helicopter pilot spotted Galton, who was airlifted to a hospital and found to be in excellent condition.
The rescue provided a glimpse into the perils, limits and triumphs of a system that has long been the safety net for those lost or stranded in the mountains.
Los Angeles County’s eight volunteer search and rescue teams go out on several hundred calls a year in an area that is, in ways, a recipe for disaster. The San Gabriel Mountains are dauntingly rugged and vulnerable to flash floods and avalanches, and abut one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. With hundreds of thousands of visitors every year--many of whom don’t realize they can get woefully lost so close to the city--the rescue teams are busy.
Even so, it is rare to get a rescue as dramatic as that of Galton.
“This was the Super Bowl of rescue operations,” said Jim Edwards, who coordinated the effort for the Montrose Search and Rescue Team. “This is us against Mother Nature, against the elements. This is what we read books about and train for.”
In such harsh weather, time is the enemy. Hypothermia and dehydration take hold. Victims become irrational and do things like removing their clothes, hastening their demise. After 72 hours, rescuers often assume they are looking for a body.
Galton, a La Canada Flintridge resident and avid outdoorsman, had gone mountain biking Wednesday with his older brother on a narrow trail winding from Big Tujunga Canyon to a peak at more than 5,000 feet elevation. Seven miles up the trail, the brothers decided to walk and got separated as a thick fog rolled in. Galton’s brother made it to the bottom and notified authorities that Jeremy was missing.
The call was relayed to the Montrose Search and Rescue Team, which covers 500 square miles of forest. Like the other teams, Montrose is an arm of the Sheriff’s Department; the rescuers are part-time reserve deputies with varying levels of mountaineering experience.
The 25 volunteer members work as everything from insurance salesmen to teachers to aeronautical engineers. Wearing pagers, they respond to rescue calls when work and families permit.
By 6:30 p.m., about eight rescuers were geared up, layered in Gore-Tex and ready to hike the trail to where Galton was last seen.
The strategy of any rescue is to start at the “point last seen” and follow the main trails, ridges and clearings to the places where a missing hiker is most likely to go. After that, searchers begin “busting brush,” fanning out through chaparral and gulleys to more remote, unlikely destinations.
The goal in everyone’s mind is to be the one to find the victim, to hear a quivering voice or spot the faint signs of tracks. “That’s what we’re out there for,” said Edwards. “That’s the psychological income.”
With a blizzard blowing snow sideways Wednesday night, the rescuers divided into two teams and hiked the 10-mile trail, ascending 2,500 feet to Fox Peak. Two members had to turn around because they were soaking wet and freezing. The others made it to the peak, but found no sign of Galton.
The next morning the operations leader, Edwards, a former mayor of La Canada Flintridge, said he made a call seeking assistance from rescue teams countywide, getting responses from Altadena, Santa Clarita and Sierra Madre. Again, the trail was searched. When the weather cleared for the first time, a sheriff’s helicopter scanned the area in grids. But it is very difficult to spot someone from the air. Searchers on the ground had found Galton’s backpack and bike.
Rescuers knew a second night in the cold would make Galton’s chances of survival much slimmer.
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The county’s search and rescue teams date back to civil defense and the Cold War. They came under the Sheriff’s Department jurisdiction in the 1950s. Now, members are required to become reserve deputies and must perform hundreds of hours of patrol to qualify. Critics have claimed that has created a crew of rescuers who are more skilled in law enforcement than mountaineering.
Only the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team, which is known worldwide for its skills, operates independently of the Sheriff’s Department and does not require its members to be reserves.
But proponents of the sheriff’s system say the Angeles National Forest is a place where rescuers must routinely deal with crime scenes and sometimes criminals: from marijuana growers to gang members to methamphetamine manufacturers. Trudging through isolated reaches of forest, rescuers stumble across all sorts of people.
The Montrose team spends a lot of time rappelling off cliffs, looking for bodies of those who drove off the Angeles Crest Highway or were dumped after crimes. In November 1999, the team helped find the body of a Pasadena doctor who was killed and pushed, in her car, off the road.
The teams also help people trapped in floods and rescue those who have climbed up cliffs they cannot get down.
But it’s the days-long searches for people like Galton that put their skills to the test.
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By Friday afternoon, things were looking bleak.
The urgency increased as night approached, and the Montrose team made another call for assistance--this time to teams around the state. Squads from Ventura County and San Bernardino had already joined and were in the field busting brush.
Three teams were descending through the chaparral, covering their own slices of the mountain. Four members from the East Valley Search and Rescue Team of Thousand Oaks were following Fox Creek on the east slope. It is a desolate, rocky canyon with tall sycamores and pines in the bottom.
Edwards said few people ever venture down the creek bed, except rescuers. The Montrose team practices its technical skills there every few years, because it’s good mountain climbing terrain, funneling into a narrow gorge and plummeting over several towering waterfalls.
As the Thousand Oaks crew followed the creek, members diverted up to a ridge to avoid a treacherous plunge, and then descended again to a wide field of rocky debris.
About 2:30 p.m., Scott Wight, an engineer studying to be a federal drug agent, almost stepped on some tracks. The rain had eroded the footprints a little, but they could be nothing else, with a “distinct insole,” officials said.
“We’ve got tracks!” he radioed. “They look relatively fresh.”
At the command post on Big Tujunga Canyon Road, Edwards got the call and alerted a sheriff’s helicopter pilot who was searching above the mountain. The pilot had flown over Fox Creek twice already. But Edwards insisted that Galton would be down there.
The pilot headed downstream from the tracks.
“We’ve got him,” came the next call over the radio.
“How viable is he?” asked Edwards.
“He’s waving.”
Edwards got goose bumps as the command post erupted in excitement.
Galton was standing on a rock waving his jacket. Another helicopter flew to the scene and lifted him into the hold, where he was talkative. The victim later told authorities he got lost when the fog became too thick to see just feet ahead.
He somehow traveled down Fox Creek, burying himself in the mud at night to stay warm, until he reached a cliff he could just not get over on Friday.
Even if he had managed to scale the 60-foot drop, there were two larger cliffs between him and the creek’s outflow in Big Tujunga, officials said. Galton was shivering violently and was certain he would die if he stayed out one more night. He said he slept during the day, but fought to stay awake at night for fear of dying of hypothermia. He drank from a stream, ate nothing and never got a fire going.
He heard the helicopter, jumped up and started waving.
After a few hours of monitoring at Huntington Memorial Hospital, he went home that night with no sign of dehydration or hypothermia. He’s headed back to finish his senior year of college in Philadelphia on Monday, his family said.
On Saturday, his mother was brimming with compliments for his rescuers. “They were so competent, so caring, so unrelenting,” said Grace Galton. “The first thing we want to do is put a plaque on the mountain for them.”
