Montrose Search and Rescue – Plane Down in Dunsmore Canyon

On a very foggy morning in June 1969, three 13-year-old boys set out on a hike up Dunsmore Canyon. At the same time at Van Nuys Airport, four young college students, one of them an inexperienced pilot, climbed into a single engine plane for a sightseeing flight to the Grand Canyon. They didn’t comprehend that a thick fog bank barred their way over the San Gabriel Mountains.

The three boys had just begun their ascent of the rocky canyon. The fog was extremely thick. They could see only a few feet ahead. At 8:55 a.m., they heard the sound of an airplane getting louder and louder as it approached. The plane went right over their heads, maybe 100 feet above, and for just a second they could see the misty outline of the plane. The engine sound continued up the canyon ahead of them, then suddenly went silent, followed immediately by a bang, like a car door being slammed.

The boys ran back down the canyon to Markridge Road and found a fire department call box. Both County and Glendale fire units responded and began to pick their way up the rough fire roads on the canyon floor and on the ridges above. They had no idea where the plane had crashed and the fog was so thick they wouldn’t be able to spot the wreckage unless they were right on top of it.

By noon the Montrose Search and Rescue team was called and 12 members responded immediately. As they arrived, a lone Glendale fireman climbing through the brush high at the top of the canyon heard a faint cry for help above him. As he gazed up, the fog parted for just an instant and he spotted a plane’s wing. The fireman radioed his position and began crawling up the near vertical mountainside, followed soon after by other firemen and the MSR team. The last push was an 80-degree climb for 800 feet.

Reaching the crash site, the fireman in the lead found the mangled fuselage with three people inside, all dead from massive injuries. The plane had apparently hit the mountain higher up and then rolled several hundred feet before precariously coming to rest. A few feet from the cockpit, a lone survivor lay on the ground, bloody, delirious and going into shock.

The team tied-off the teetering wreckage to a tree to prevent it from sliding farther. Using ropes they raised a steel litter up to the crash site to carry the man down. They strapped him in for the long descent. The fog was so thick here they couldn’t see each other, and had to shout commands to one another as they lowered the survivor down the vertical slope.

One of the MSR team members on the ropes was a doctor, and he became alarmed at the victim’s condition. Blood was caked on the man’s face, he obviously had internal injuries and many broken bones, and he was fading in and out of consciousness. He needed to get to a hospital quickly or he would die there in the canyon. The MSR team leader radioed a nearby sheriff patrol helicopter to attempt a treacherous zero-visibility landing. Observers were able to guide the copter to a miraculous landing on a clearing in the canyon, and the men bearing the injured man gingerly descended to the waiting helicopter. The copter was one of the old bubble cockpit-style helicopters with no cabin for the injured man. The team wrapped the victim in blankets and strapped the litter to one of the helicopter’s landing skids for the 10-minute ride to one of the few hospitals that had a landing pad back then (Verdugo Hills Hospital had not opened yet).

MSR team members stayed at the crash site with the dead bodies until FAA investigators got up the mountain. Just before sunset, they carried the three dead bodies back down the canyon to waiting coroner vehicles. The lone survivor with multiple internal injuries, a broken back, leg and jaw, had been saved from death by the Montrose Search and Rescue team.

  mike lawler