Montrose Search and Rescue – Whacked Out in The Woods, or The Girl Who Partied Too Hard

In September 1993, a 19-year-old girl from Tujunga met some friends at the top of Mt. Wilson for some serious partying. In the dark of night, she parked her car near the radio towers and walked down through the trees to where her friends were. Sometime that night, the girl, “dazed and confused,” wandered off from the group. She stumbled around in the dark completely lost, falling down several times, and slowly heading downhill. It’s unclear what was going on in the girl’s head as she continued stumbling down the hill, eventually coming across a stream, the very steep Eaton Canyon Creek.

After a couple of days, she was reported missing and her car was located. A search by the MSAR, along with the Altadena and Sierra Madre teams, was organized, but the girl was off-trail, down in canyons and very hard to spot. After the girl had been missing for an entire seven days, she was finally spotted by some hikers.

A young married couple, Andreas and Katie of Pasadena, had decided on an early morning hike to Eaton Canyon Falls from another parallel trail, cutting cross-country following a ridgeline. They traversed the ridge, hit the creek, and began to follow it down to the falls. As they rounded a bend in the stream they were confronted with a bizarre sight.

Andreas said, “All of a sudden we rounded this one bend and there is this apparition!” The lost girl was completely naked, but so dirt-soaked that she literally “matched the landscape.” The young couple gave her some of their clothes and some candy they had in their pockets.

The lost girl was shaky but able to tell her strange story to the couple. She told them she had been partying with friends, had wandered off, and had been crawling down the creek bed for days. She had lost her clothes and shoes three or four days before. The stream is extremely steep, with several unclimbable waterfalls, and she described how she threw rocks off the top to make sure the water below was deep enough then leaped over the edge into the pool below. She described falling several times, being disoriented and even unconscious. She had no food the entire week and she had traveled about 10 miles.

Andreas carried the girl uphill to a clearing where rescue teams would be able to see her. Leaving his wife Katie with the girl, Andreas scrambled quickly back the way he had come, at one point accidentally sliding off the ridge into some cactus below. He found the authorities and a helicopter was dispatched to his described clearing.

Unfortunately, Los Angeles County had been going through some ill-timed budget cuts at that time and the MSAR big rescue chopper had been grounded. A smaller fire department helicopter tried to pull the lost girl off the clearing, but their winch wasn’t long enough to reach her. After several hours of waiting, another larger chopper was pressed into service and the lost girl was winched up. She was flown to a hospital where she was treated for dehydration, scrapes, bruises and a broken wrist – not bad considering her ordeal – a very lucky girl.

The reason for her walk in the woods was unclear. The girl was too disoriented to answer questions from deputies just after her rescue. A hospital spokesman said the girl told them she had gone off on her own “to think.” Whatever the reason, she had made an amazing journey, seven days outdoors, traveling down the face of a sheer mountainside, no trail, no food, half the trip done naked and with no shoes. When found, she was very nearly all the way down the mountain. An epic journey worthy of a novel – if only she could remember it!

Andreas and his wife were philosophical about their part in the rescue. Andreas said, “Somehow Katie and I were called to get up that morning and go hiking. It was very spiritual.”

  Mike LALWER