Montrose Search and Rescue – Kid’s Hike to Mt. Lukens Turns Deadly, Part 1

On a warm and clear winter morning, Dec. 30, 1971, the neighborhood kids from the 3200 block of Henrietta Avenue decided to hike to Mt. Lukens to visit the freshly fallen snow. They had all done the hike many times before, being so close to the mountains, and their parents knew where they were going. The trailhead was just a couple of blocks away in Dunsmore Canyon, today’s Deukmejian Park. Fifteen-year-old Barbara led the group consisting of her brother Ed, 12, along with others from the street: Dan, 12, Chris, 11, and Timmy, 11. With temperatures in the 70s, they wore only jeans, jackets and light tennis shoes.

It was one of those glorious sunny days for hiking, and they passed many other hikers on the trails. They made the summit easily by noon where they stopped to eat a lunch they had brought. At the top of Mt. Lukens the weather was completely different. Icy cold wind roared, and the snow at the top was unexpectedly deep, waist-high in spots. It was suddenly too cold and they needed to get out of the snow. Two teenage boys they met at the top told them that if they needed to get warm, they should go down the Haines Canyon Road towards Tujunga. They said it would get them out of the snow faster.

They took that route, but the snow didn’t end. They walked on and on, pushing their cold feet through the snow. The wind picked up and was blowing snow from the drifts into their faces. They were getting tired now and their feet were completely numb. The sun was going down. Barbara and her brother at some point realized they were no longer wearing shoes, that they had been pulled off their lifeless feet by the deep snow. Timmy, the smallest of the group, was getting too tired to go farther. Barbara tried to carry him, but on her shoeless, numb feet but she didn’t get far. As darkness fell, they could see the lights of the Crescenta Valley below, even pick out their own neighborhood. They decided as a group that one of them had to try to go ahead and get help, so Danny struck out alone. Barbara described what happened next:

“At first we were all right, then I noticed that Timmy was getting sleepy. I had read that you mustn’t fall asleep in the snow, that you never wake up. I told everyone that we had to keep awake, not to go to sleep, so we poked each other and talked. Timmy couldn’t feel the cold after a while and he started to talk to himself. I shouted at him, trying to keep him awake. The wind was so strong that we couldn’t hear each other above its roar. We had stopped behind a large bush. I hoped it would keep the wind off, but it didn’t work.

“All of a sudden I noticed that Timmy wasn’t talking anymore, he was just staring. Chris tried to listen to his heart and he didn’t hear anything. I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. We also tried to hit him on the chest to get his heart going again.

“Then I just thought, he’s probably dead. For awhile we just sat there looking at him. It was like a nightmare. We didn’t think it was real. We got terribly frightened. I decided we couldn’t stay there any longer or the same thing would happen to us. So we got up and again tried to get down below the snow level. I just knew that we had to do something.”

The trio only made it a short distance before the wind became so strong they couldn’t stand upright. They found a small outcrop that gave them a little shelter from the icy wind. There they huddled, and began to fade from consciousness.

What had been a short hike, literally within sight of their homes, had now turned into a deadly fight for their lives.

Next week I’ll tell what became of this trio of CV kids.

  mike lawler