Montrose Search and Rescue – The Missing Fisherman

Last year I wrote several thrilling stories from the Montrose Search and Rescue team, one of the premier SAR teams in the nation. I recently connected with Sue Lapham, who joined the team in 1981, one of the first women to do so. She has offered up many more stories from her own files.

This one concerns a fisherman who went missing in April 1996. Russell and Cynthia, along with their two dogs, were fishing the deep pools of the Arroyo Seco just below the Switzer Picnic Area of the Angeles National Forest. They separated, Russell and the dogs heading downstream a few hundred yards to fish the pools there. The dogs returned after a while, but Russell did not. Darkness would be coming on soon, so Cynthia slowly headed back to their car, hoping Russell was right behind her.

It was now getting dark and she was beginning to panic, so she called the authorities.

The MSAR team members were just sitting down for their monthly meeting when they got the call. They cancelled the meeting, grabbed their gear and headed up the mountain. They met up with Cynthia, and the team headed down the canyon. This should have been an easy search. It was a full moon and the canyon was lit up. The temperature was mild and Russell was a smoker so he had matches to start a fire. The area he had gone missing in was small, between the area Cynthia was fishing and a couple of miles downstream.

The MSAR searched all night, splitting up and looking up the side canyons. They weren’t finding any footprints from Russell. It was now early morning of the next day, and the MSAR put out a call to the Altadena SAR and the Sierra Madre SAR teams to start searching the canyon from the city side. At dawn, a helicopter joined the search and the MSAR put out a call for dog teams to come in. The dogs picked up Russell’s scent in the area the couple had been fishing but nowhere else. The searchers could see the bottom of the deep pools, and no bodies were visible. Now a total of eight SAR teams were scouring the canyon. As well, Russell’s friends and co-workers were being interviewed. As darkness fell, it was beginning to look hopeless.

On the afternoon of the third day, a team member found Russell’s tackle box floating in plain sight on the edge of a pool that had been searched a hundred times. A diver was brought in by helicopter to scour the bottom of the small but deep pool (about the size and depth of a backyard swimming pool). The diver couldn’t see Russell until he was right on top of the body, tucked deep in the weeds at the very bottom.

Russell had not known how to swim and he must have slipped and fallen into the deep water. The tackle box detached from the body later and floated to the surface. The coroner ruled it an accidental death by drowning. The MSAR team was disappointed to have not found Russell alive, but relieved to have closure in a very frustrating search.

Sue Lapham, the team leader on that search, provided some insight into one major clue the searchers had overlooked: “In retrospect, if I knew then what I know now about dogs and the way they communicate, I would have known then exactly where to find his body. The companion, Cynthia, and I walked the trail out of Switzer’s with both dogs the first day he went missing. When we got to the place where Russell slipped, the dogs went a little wild. Neither she nor I knew what the dogs were trying to tell us; she thought they may have smelled a coyote or another animal. 

“Since that time I have owned and cared for dogs. I now realize the dogs were trying to tell me where they last saw their master but, at that time, I could not understand. There was nothing I could do to save him, but it would have shortened the length of the search.”

Mike Lawler is the former

president of the Historical Society

of the Crescenta Valley and loves local history. Reach him at

lawlerdad@yahoo.com.

  mike lawler