An old local rescue story

[AlanK]

Since we've been talking here about rescues, survivors, and joining SAR teams...

Life and Death on Mt. Baldy
The Los Angeles Times
Jan 16, 2000
Shane Dubow

Someone is lost, and Cindy Moyneur of the San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team is searching, traversing down a wooded canyon chute, leaving behind a thin line of tracks in the gathering snow on the San Gabriel Mountains. This is avalanche country, and storm country, a transitional region where as often as not the weather rushes in unannounced. The temperature on this February morning is down in the 20s. And a heavy two feet of snow--atop ice particles known as graupel--has fallen since yesterday when Jeff Thornton, a 14-year- old snowboarder from Brawley, went missing off the backside of the New Mountain High Ski Resort.

Cindy is bundled in layers. With her ice ax, she probes drifts for buried things. With her ski goggles, she scans the wilderness for dips where she could imagine seeking refuge and for dusted-over humps where she could imagine a husky ninth-grader lying hurt. Or worse. During the night, 70 mph winds and whiteout conditions forced rescue mountaineers and dog team handlers to pack it in. A sheriff's helicopter, loaded with heat-sensing search equipment, had to stay on its pad. Now, though, the sky is new, and Cindy has forgone Sunday church services to speed in from Anaheim for this first-light response. She wears spiked crampons on her boots and a palm-sized avalanche beacon--basically a radio homing device--on her body. Her pack bulges with redundant extras, just in case, and she shoulders it unbuckled so it won't drag her down in a snow slide, leaving her submerged, mouth and throat packed with white. Already the worry among her fellow volunteers is that their mission may have changed from rescue to recovery, a slight semantic shift with grim connotations.

The 5-foot-6, 120-pound Moyneur--a full-time physical therapist-- is carrying some 50 additional pounds of essentials. Pistachios and chocolate kisses for energy. A two-piece shovel for digging snow. A hand-held GPS unit that, via satellite, can give her location within 100 feet. She's got a topographical map and a compass, a pair of snowshoes and a military-style packaged meal. She's got water- purifying iodine tablets, 50 feet of climbing rope, a quart-sized nalgene bottle, a headlamp with spare batteries and a multichannel radio good for six hours of use. Because she has now put in more than five years of training and service, she's also got the hybrid skills of an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), a wilderness tracker, a mountaineer and a fully armed, fully deputized peace officer.

She knows better than most what Jeff Thornton might be going through. She knows what it is to struggle for faith when nothing looks familiar and daylight fades, what it's like to suffer through high-altitude dehydration and to feel the tingling, numbing creep of frostbite and the apathy of hypothermia as the body shuts down. She places one battered Koflach snow boot before the other, shifts her weight and trudges on, shouting Jeff's name and never forgetting that this is a place she's been before.

It was the day after Thanksgiving, 1991, and the ascent stretched at a pitch that made Cindy remember she had calves. The air smelled of conifers and brooding weather. The altitude and exertion caused deep breaths to bite in her chest. It was a gray day, a mild 50 degrees, and Cindy, then 36, had rendezvoused with friend Chris Jordan, a surgeon, for their third annual day-hike up Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the region, just a few forested miles from where Jeff Thornton later would disappear. Forecasters had predicted storms, but not for several days, and so the twosome, along with Jordan's two daughters, nephew Ryan McIntosh and a friend of one of the daughters, caught the ski lift over the muddy slopes to 7,500 feet, where they set out for the summit three miles off and 2,500 feet up. The children, ages 11 to 13, were strung out between them.

The trail narrowed, twisting through sharp scree and dense clumps of manzanita scrub, interrupted by spiky yucca and ragged stands of cedar, juniper and pine. When they got hungry, they lunched on turkey sandwiches and discovered that once they'd stopped, the air bore a chill. They reached a battered ridge known as Devil's Backbone, significant for its yawning drop-offs and exposure to winds that, by now, had climbed an octave and begun to do bad things to the tops of trees. They pushed on to the Mt. Harwood trail on the east side of Mt. Baldy, but the girls grew weary and Jordan volunteered to take them back. Cindy and Ryan took one of the two day packs and pushed on. It was about 1:30 p.m. The lift down would close in 2 1/2 hours, but they could summit and return in less than two. Cindy wore biker's shorts, a T-shirt, a Windbreaker and Koflachs. Ryan wore jeans, a T- shirt, a Windbreaker and leather high-tops. They both wore light gloves.

The forest thinned. The path flattened. They began the last chest- squeezing ascent through the spotty snow and bare boulder fields that first lent Mt. San Antonio its unofficial name. The mountain, with its popular views and proximity to urban sprawl, likely has drawn more visitors than any other Western peak not reachable by car. Accordingly, it also may have claimed more lives, though records are hard to come by. In any event, Cindy had no knowledge of all the unfortunates before her who had never come back. She had never considered search and rescue, had no knowledge of such innocents as Mike Pilotti, Tim Pines, Charles Prior, Diana Furry and Iskander Toubia, all of whom would perish here or on mountains nearby in the coming years. All Cindy knew was that summiting seemed something that both sapped you and filled you up, left you panting and prideful and, supposedly, more alive.

By the time she and Ryan reached the top, snow-cap torn free by the wind was stinging their cheeks. They leaned into the gusts and squinted. They hollered to be heard. They did a quick high-five, made brief chitchat with an older couple just descending, and then hustled back. On the wrong path. Into a storm that, at lower elevations, would kick up enough grit to cause a 105-car collision on Interstate 5.

It came from over the ocean--a heavy, low-pressure cold front carrying moisture that would fall as snow when it slugged into the chill air above the range. It was the sort of preseason wallop that catches even experienced alpinists off guard. Happens all the time, rescuers will tell you. Some bad business blows in. And it exploits the presumptions of all in its way. This is how trouble starts. People enter the country inexperienced or under-equipped, naive to danger or determined to court it. They make one innocently bad decision that leads to another, and another, until they find themselves in irreversibly dire straits. Each year, it seems, more and more people are getting into trouble. Observers like George Duffy, a 30-year search and rescue veteran, say the worst of it comes from the presumption of safety that gear fetishism, new technology and the general "taming of wild spaces" have engendered among "people who dabble" in the outdoors. Today's dabbler might seek safety in a four-season super tent rather than in its sober placement, or in a fancy swath of Gore-Tex rather than the good sense to avoid prolonged wet, or in the now-ubiquitous cell phone and the growing sentiment that rescue is just a call away.

Cindy Moyneur, circa 1991, had no such phone. She knew something was wrong when, after 20 minutes of extreme, pebble-sliding descent, they came to a wooded area that should have been bare. And then, where the trail should have plunged on, it began, sickeningly, to rise. "This isn't right," Cindy murmured. "We need to climb back and start again." Ryan made a face. At age 11, he weighed only 70 pounds, and the climb had worn him out. "I can't make it," he said, panting. "No more going up."

Cindy scanned the incoming fog for landmark peaks. Finding none, she tried cutting off-trail at an angle that would, she estimated, right their course without much ascent. But five minutes into the trees, she felt her bearings begin to slip, and so she led Ryan, now a little teary, back to the path. "I guess we'll just wait here then," Cindy said, forcing a grin, knowing that she had the endurance to hike out but that she could neither carry Ryan nor leave him behind. "I guess we'll just have an adventure and wait to be found," she said. "C'mon, we'll build a fire. We'll get warm. It'll be fun."

It was after 4:30. The last lift had swung down without them and the light had begun to fade. At the lodge, Chris Jordan was on the phone telling authorities all he could about his two missing persons- -how they were outfitted, where they were headed, what they might do based on who they were. Lost persons, veteran rescuers know, tend to act out predictable behaviors, like seeking shelter or wandering downhill. The specifics vary by individual: risk taker or pragmatist, sage survivalist or novice.

As the initial two hours ticked by and hordes of clanking, gear- loaded searchers arrived at the lodge, they learned that Cindy was athletic, a trim single woman with little outdoor training, no foul- weather gear and no provisions. In parochial school, she'd been a cheerleader. As an adult, a dedicated runner. Throughout, an easygoing Christian. She was, to those friends and family members asked to convey her psychological traits, a woman who'd gravitated toward physical therapy in part as a response to childhood scoliosis; a woman who might vacation one year on the back of Harley, the next at a Cancun beach resort, the next in a cramped pup tent on Mt. Shasta. A woman who'd trekked the globe and taken flying lessons, who lived in her grandmother's former home and sowed flower beds, collected stuffed animals and stayed close with her parents in Yorba Linda. What are the chances, Jordan was asked, that this woman might sit down and quit? "She'd never do that," he said. "She'd never give up unless Ryan was dead."

On an incline, at the base of a large protective rock, Cindy and Ryan crouched to take stock. In the day pack Jordan had provided, they found a whistle and a signal mirror, a garbage bag and an orange safety vest, a small first-aid kit, a space blanket (shredded) and a box containing three wax-coated matches. Three. The fire, thank God, started quickly. They scoured the area for more wood and used it to build a waist-high windbreak. The pair hunkered close and stamped their feet as the sky darkened.
Out on Devil's Backbone, night air roaring along at 100 mph was forcing searchers to crawl for low profile while their faces chaffed and grew rimy. The chill factor crept toward 20 below.

Several teeth-chattering hours later, Ryan pointed into the uncertain distance and said, "Cindy, I see a light." What it was, they couldn't tell. Still, Cindy figured, where there was light there might be rescue, so she fed their precious windbreak wood--all of it- -into the fire. It sprang into a tree-high inferno. The heat was intense. They huffed on their whistle and stared out, fixating on the impenetrable blackness until their eyes watered and their blaze dulled to embers and they remained unfound.

Then the snow began zipping in horizontally. Cindy became aware, in a surprisingly matter- of-fact way, that they could die. When does the brain first contemplate terminal thoughts? For some, it is when the body reaches exhaustion, a physical wall. For others, the wall may be geographic, an impassable waterway, rockslide or cliff. Cindy knew they needed heat. She knew that it was important to keep awake. For Ryan's benefit, she tried to sound calm when she asked him to "feel around in that pack for anything that might burn" so she could rekindle the fire. He handed her a roll of gauze and a few dollar bills. She managed to coax back a flame. But how to gather more wood and distract Ryan from ominous thoughts? She invented a game: For every three sticks she gathered, Ryan, tending the coals, would burn one.

Neither of them slept. Both prayed; the familiar intonations--"Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers," mostly--lent comfort. During Cindy's forays for wood, manzanita scrub bloodied her bare legs. Her thirst grew desperate despite the occasional suck of snow that would, unbeknownst to her, drop her core temperature. As the night wore on, her windpipe turned raspy and she supposed she was dying, and her thoughts turned to favorite clients and the grief she'd cause her family if her life ended here. Back at the fire, for comfort now and then, she squeezed Ryan's hand. And still it snowed.

By 4 a.m. more than 100 volunteers had been paged. One team had spotted a tantalizingly unreachable bonfire but was forced to return when one of the fully outfitted members got too cold.

Day Two dawned to thumping rotors--a lone helicopter braving gusts and 1,000-foot drops to reach the area where the bonfire had been seen, up on Dawson Peak, to the north side of Mt. Baldy. Hundreds of feet below, in a partial clearing, Cindy and Ryan yelled
and waved and flashed their signal mirror at the shredded space blanket they'd spread on the ground. The helicopter seemed to hover as if triangulating their location, then it careened away. Cindy squeezed out a few tears of relief and let their fire smolder. She was fatigued and thirsty, so thirsty. Her throat burned. Her shins were too messy to look at. What she wanted first, she told Ryan, was lemonade, a hot bath and the Stephen King book she was reading. What he wanted, he said, was French toast. "We'll go right to breakfast then," she said, "and you can tell everyone how you watched the fire for us all night." Ryan grinned. "My sister probably won't believe it." "Well, she better, because you'll have me there to say it's all true."

They passed the time. Too much time. Shouldn't the helicopter have dropped supplies if rescuers couldn't get here quickly? After all, Cindy thought, they'd wasted hours staying put like you're supposed to once spotted. Yet nothing had changed, except for Ryan, who, Cindy observed, had started to answer questions a bit more slowly, as if struggling to return from some far-off place. Among winter's many hazards, hypothermia and frostbite are two of the worst. Often they go hand in hand. Frostbite is essentially the demise of tissue due to diminished blood flow and the cell- rupturing, oxygen-robbing formation of ice in one's veins. It typically appears a good bit after exposure. Hypothermia is the condition that tends to dispatch people in the wilds. The symptoms begin with prolonged shivering as the body fights to warm. If the shivering proves ineffective, the body circles the wagons around core vitals--heart, lungs, kidneys, brain--and cuts circulation to the extremities, which brings on the numbing of digits and limbs. From there, if the core still cools, the symptoms grow more observable: People get goofy, hallucinate, lose motor skills, fall asleep. Eventually, the shivering stops, and the heart stops, too.

So it was not a good sign, Cindy thought, when Ryan claimed to see a cabin, a phone booth, a wood-burning stove and a statue of the Virgin Mary. And then, sometime later, his eyes widened and went glassy and he turned to Cindy and asked, "Who are you?" At that, she got them walking--on their stump legs. If she waited much longer, she figured, Ryan might forget her, and come to fear her, and bolt. She headed for what she reckoned was Devil's Backbone. To her surprise, Ryan proved physically strong. They'd made it into some trees when two more helicopters appeared. Cindy and Ryan scrambled toward the relative clearing of their old spot, but the helicopters shot past. The sky edged toward dusk. And Cindy felt a strange peace come over her--not knowing that 300 yards up the trail, grizzled searcher George Duffy was turning back, limping on a freshly sprained knee. He'd been borne aloft by winds that made standing next to impossible.

Another night, this one without a fire. The other two matches were wet. Cindy and Ryan squeezed into a rotted-out pine log, scrunching in an awkward sitting position, knees bent, with Cindy wrapped around Ryan from behind. Ryan dozed. Cindy kept awake, coming to grips with the idea that she felt motherly toward a boy she hardly knew. When the gusts came, they came like bombs, shrill whistles preceding impact. Somehow the night passed.

By morning they'd gone without shelter, food or water for 44 shivering hours. At the lodge, rescuers gauged the second-night survival odds as less then probable. Ryan's parents, Jon and Barbara McIntosh, teary and drained of illusion, left to get away from the crush of media, to sleep and speak to one another about their son, "the best of both of us." For Cindy, day three began in a semiconscious blur, an interminable half hour spent wiggling free of the log and amassing the wherewithal to inch to a patch of sun. "Come here, Ryan," she said, patting the earth. "Come lean against me, OK, over here where it's warm." Her back ached. She was nauseous and dizzy. Her core temperature had dropped to an alarming 89 degrees. Neither she nor Ryan could feel their feet. So when they heard the crackle of a radio in the distance and yelled, and the four men with the delicious water and soggy pb&js, searching for the source of that bonfire two days earlier, showed up saying things like "hey, you're alive," it seemed to Cindy a part of some complicated dream. And it linked her, via helicopter airlift, to a new, profoundly grateful way of life.

It began in San Antonio Community Hospital, where she learned that Ryan had told some reporter that she, Cindy Moyneur, was "pretty cool." A doctor took a stiff brush to her shins--more pain than she thought possible. In the ensuing weeks, both she and Ryan would take their blackening feet into the hyperbaric chamber, where blood, and the oxygen it carries, could be forced back into their dying cells. Eventually they both would lose toes. Eventually Ryan would return to surfing, despite friends who'd say, "Dude, hang eight."

Eventually she'd find an answer to the question of why she'd survived. It came from a new physical therapy client of hers, Rick Buhite, who, it turned out, had participated in her search, and who would say the words that inspired her to join in rescue operations: "I want to thank you for restoring my commitment to this, because your rescue's really the one that reminded me never to give up and to always have hope because, I mean, with you, we all thought there was no chance."
*
It's late in the day now on this February Sunday, and Cindy has been ordered to give up her search for Jeff Thornton, to stop calling his name, to board a helicopter before the flurries thicken and the pilot loses visibility. Back at her job on Monday, she keeps
checking in with searchers because she can't help thinking that Jeff Thornton might still be alive, waiting like she waited, hoping like she hoped.

The weather doesn't improve, so rescue efforts must be scaled back. For several days it snows. By midweek, Thornton's chances are slim. Still, Cindy plans to spend her weekend searching, if only to recover a body. The call reaches her at work. It's Friday the 13th, 1998, and Jeff Thornton has been found alive by two members of the same team,
Sierra Madre, that found her. The searchers say they came across Thornton in his snow suit, propped against a tree, next to a little stream that gave him water and no doubt kept him alive.

Days pass. The rescue makes national headlines. Jeff is expected to recover. Cindy goes to Foothill Presbyterian Hospital to offer him the support of a fellow survivor. But when she arrives, she learns he has been moved to a hyperbaric chamber. This is not a happy story. Jeff Thornton's condition deteriorates and he dies of unforeseen complications involving a risky medical procedure that inadvertently pierces his heart. Cindy learns the news from television. She slumps on the sofa with her heart in her mouth, face in her hands. She thinks of the boy's family, and her own, because she can't help drawing parallels.

Jeff Thornton's memorial draws national attention. There are clips of his wet-eyed mother thanking rescuers Art Fortini and Randy Katai for giving her son that one last week. Afterward, Cindy continues to attend Sunday services, sometimes sitting head bowed, eyes closed, pager flipped from beep to vibrate so that when she feels the tingling, that next call coming down, she can sprint for her truck, where her pack is already filled with all the things she might need to save a life.

[Cy Kaicener]

Thats was a great story Alan. Here is another. Tell me who it reminds you of.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp//20080215/w ... identitaly

[Hikin_Jim]

Thanks, Alan,

I had heard of Cindy Moyneur before, but I don't think I have read that particularly well written article. Very moving.

Jim

PS Thanks for your article too, Cy, and, yes, it does remind me of a certain blonde who frequents this board.