Life in the balance

The first miracle was the tree.

A 3-foot-high sapling was all that stopped Glenn Mowbray’s free fall down a sheer slope on New Year’s Day.

Mowbray spent hours with his heels dug in to the roots of the puny pine, staring down the boulder-strewn precipice that he knew would kill him if he lost his grip.

“All the times I’ve laughed about being a tree-hugger, I take it all back,” said Mowbray, 52. “This was a dress rehearsal for my death.”

The second miracle: An off-duty ranger had watched him skitter off the Devil’s Slide Trail on Tahquitz Peak and summoned help. But as the sun set, and the temperature dropped, he clung to the tree, unable to move to keep himself warm.

Mowbray didn’t bargain with God, but he did issue a prayer for help. He thought about the fragility of life, about his childhood fear of heights. He realized he wasn’t as scared as he thought he might be. And he waited.

In less than a month, search and rescue teams have been called out more than a dozen times to the glistening mountains that ring the Southland. Officials blame treacherous ice for the back-to-back calls for help. The bodies of seven, all experienced hikers, have been recovered. Six more, including Mowbray, have been plucked out alive.

“It’s a phenomenally tragic start to the year,” said Mike Leum, chief of mountain rescue for Los Angeles County search and rescue teams. “And we’re just getting into the winter now.”

Leum is one of hundreds of volunteers trained to perform rescues in alpine conditions who spent cold days and nights searching for lost hikers in Southern California’s mountains last month.

“It boggles my mind,” said Lt. Preston Leslie of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, who oversees a rescue team. “What really bothers me is these people are not the local day hikers. These are people who are experienced in these forests, who love the area.”

In a season marked by mountain lion maulings and fatal mudslides, the most maddening losses for rescuers are the hikers hurtling off icy mountainsides because of simple, deadly errors.

“They all knew better,” said Leum. “That’s the bottom line.... Most of these individuals are very driven, and they enjoy a challenge. I can appreciate that because I have some of those tendencies.”

But experts say intrepid winter hikers should follow the rules and use the right equipment if they want to survive.

“You forget one of these items and it’s not like a reality TV show where you get voted off the island,” Leum said. “This is it -- you’re dead.”

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The rules

The cardinal rule is the one most often disobeyed by veterans: Don’t hike alone. Five of the seven who died set out solo. So did Mowbray, and he says he’ll do it again.

“I will always hike alone, because part of what makes hiking worthwhile with me is being alone,” he said. “I’m a psychotherapist and I work very intensively with people.... I need time to kind of clear my head.”

Authorities understand the lure, but say that attitude can create problems.

“There’s something different going on this year,” said Leslie. “Conditions are very hazardous.... It’s not just affecting them, but their families. And us.”

Second rule: Stay put if you’re injured or lost.

Chung Hun “Charles” Koh didn’t go alone. But searchers say he may have tried to move after sliding about 100 feet down a steep ice chute while descending Mt. Baldy. By the time his friend led rescuers to the spot where he thought Koh had fallen, he could not be spotted. His body was later found about 900 feet below where he had last been seen.

Six of the dead have barreled down ice chutes -- natural slides formed in ravines or rock slide channels where snow melts and then freezes, coating both sides with treacherous ice.

Third rule: Make a plan and stick to it.

Ronald Barbour, 69, of La Crescenta had planned a 21-mile, three-day hike from the Cajon Pass up to Wrightwood, leaving his bicycle at one end and his truck at the other. Rescuers still don’t know why he left both bike and truck near the snowy top.

“He had a habit of changing his itinerary,” said San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Sgt. Patrick Dailey, who oversaw the grueling search. “It made our search area extremely large.”

Barbour left a detailed plan in his car, said his widow, Marjorie, but it was not discovered until days later.

When worried relatives first called 911, rescuers had to set out after dark at both ends of the rugged 21-mile route. Barbour was probably dead even then. His body was discovered by a hiker 10 days later.

“From what we determined, he came down an ice chute, hit a boulder, and it catapulted him face first into rocks,” said Dailey. There was no blood, said Dailey. Barbour’s heart had stopped instantly.

Rule four: Have the right equipment -- and use it.

Neither Barbour nor the hiker who found him had crampons, the metal spikes that are attached to boots to grip ice.

Ali Aminian, 51, of Newbury Park had crampons and an ice ax in his pack when he plummeted 500 feet off a Mt. Baldy trail to his death. Eugene Kumm, 25, of Seal Beach received crampons as a Christmas gift, but had not used them before he set off up Mt. San Gorgonio. He was killed after apparently sliding about 400 feet down an icy chute.

Mowbray knows a combination of miracles kept him alive; he had made the same mistakes.

A picture he snapped of himself near the summit of 8,800-foot Mt. Tahquitz shows a smiling hiker striking a jaunty pose with his ski poles. He had hiked the Devil’s Slide Trail a dozen times in the last decade. Absent in the shot are crampons, helmet and ice ax.

“The plan was to get to the top, smoke a cigar, come down and drive home,” he said.

Minutes after he shot the photo, Mowbray plunged down the icy mountainside.

“It happened so fast,” he said. “I had been on packed snow all day. It didn’t look any different. When I put my foot down, of course it felt different. But by then it was too late.”

Mowbray estimates he traveled 140 feet in two seconds, crashing over trees and boulders before he hit the tiny tree.

“As soon as I hit I hear this voice say, ‘Sir, are you OK?’ I look up, and there’s this woman I had not seen,” he said.

The ranger was descending the summit when she saw Mowbray go over. Once she phoned for help, she told Mowbray, as he lay pinioned, that for her own safety she was going to have to leave.

“I understood,” he said stoically. “She was very concerned about hypothermia because it was late in the day, it was 28 degrees, and it was going to get colder.”

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And so he waits

The sun sank. He realized if help didn’t reach him soon, he would not only be marooned for the night, he would also perish.

“I couldn’t stamp my feet because if I moved, I would slide,” he said. But without the ability to warm himself, he would become hypothermic and die.

The noise of the blades reached him before he saw the Riverside County sheriff’s helicopter thumping toward him. It halted midair, a door opened, and a figure dangled out on a long rope while a second stood on the skids outside the cockpit.

“The pilot was God, the man with the rope was Jesus, and the guy on the skids was the Holy Ghost, urging him on,” he said.

He thinks the reasons for the string of deaths are simple.

“A lot of people in a quasi-spiritual way want to start the new year with a mountaintop experience, and we just have a lot of plain old ice up there. Not snow, ice.”

On Jan. 2, the day after he was rescued, he bought crampons.

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Janet Wilson is a Times staff writer. She can be reached at janet.wilson@latimes.com.