Hikers Join Search for Man

A small band of hikers scoured the snowy slopes of Mt. Baldy on Monday, a day after authorities called off the official ground search for an Orange County hiker who tumbled off a ridge on New Year’s Day.

Charles Koh, 53, of Buena Park fell while hiking. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had up to 80 rescue workers, plus helicopters and dogs, hunting for Koh over the weekend.

Officials called off the ground search Sunday but continued to look for him with two helicopters Monday afternoon.

No sign of Koh was found Monday, intensifying fears that the hiker -- who was dressed only for a daytime hike -- succumbed after four nights of temperatures well below freezing.

“Maybe, I think he’s dead,” said Wan Bong Lee, 61, one of five members of the Korean Alpine Club of Southern California who continued the ground search Monday. Conditions near the 10,064-foot peak where Koh fell “are very difficult,” Lee said.

Koh’s wife and teenage son waited in a Sierra Club hut at the 8,200-foot level while the search continued. The family also has a teenage daughter.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokesman Chip Patterson said search and rescue teams combed the area where Koh fell and where he could have walked to seek shelter from the cold.

Patterson said the ground search was suspended because the immediate area was considered thoroughly covered and search crews -- some of whom participated in the search for flash flood victims in Waterman Canyon a week earlier -- had become exhausted.

Richard Wingate, a fireman at Mount Baldy Village fire station who has searched for Koh since Thursday, said searchers found drops of blood, Koh’s walking sticks and footprints near the fall site. The footprints wander in a “disoriented pattern,” according to a Mt. Baldy ski patrol member who declined to give his name.

Robin Ives, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Mt. Baldy group, said Koh fell from a spot that is “quite slippery, where rocks above you can come down. It’s quite ordinary to get lost up there, and hypothermia would be a real problem overnight. He could be in real trouble.”

Esther Kim, an employee at Mega Express, the small Buena Park shipping company co-owned by Koh, said her boss “was very healthy.”

“In the almost eight years I’ve worked with him, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sick,” Kim said in Korean. “If he got a cold, it was over in a day. He loved hiking. He hiked every weekend. He said it is really good for your health.”

Kim, one of two employees, said Koh immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s.

“We are all in shock,” Kim said. “I cried because I couldn’t believe that he is missing. We are all praying for him.”

Mt. Baldy, whose official name is Mt. San Antonio, is a popular weekend destination for Korean Americans, especially first-generation immigrants, who come from a mountainous country where climbing and hiking is a national pastime.