Montrose Search and Rescue – Saved From Death, Eternally Grateful

One March evening in 2012, a late snowstorm had blanketed the San Gabriel Mountains. Tracy Granger, 56, was driving from Pasadena to her home in Palmdale, taking the Angeles Crest Highway. As she rounded a curve in the darkness, she hit a patch of ice, and broke loose. Her pickup truck spun toward the road’s edge, and she knew she was going over the side. The truck plummeted violently 350 feet down the sheer mountainside, finally stopping, deeply imbedded in brush. She had whacked her head hard, broke her neck, pelvis and several ribs. Her body had been slammed about, but she was still conscious, sitting in the driver’s seat, looking up the cliff toward the highway where through the heavy brush she could see the lights of passing cars.

She knew she had to get up to the highway or she’d never be found. Opening the truck’s door, she painfully pried herself out, only to make an agonizing fall into the snow, where she lay immobile. She was now in the snow, in freezing cold, critically injured, in just a light sweatshirt. Tracy reported later that as she faded into unconsciousness, she reached out to her husband telepathically, saying out loud, “Lee, I’m overdue. Something has happened. Figure it out.” Apparently it worked, and her husband called the sheriff’s station.

The Montrose Search and Rescue team was called out, knowing only that Tracy had disappeared somewhere between Pasadena and Palmdale. They were also faced with the dilemma of looking for a white vehicle in the white snow. They began to drive the Crest looking for any sign of her. As daylight broke, a helicopter joined the search. At 9:30 a.m., one of the MSR members spotted something from the rescue truck, perhaps the faint traces of tire tracks headed off the edge of the road. He scanned the terrain below and was barely able to see the white vehicle buried in the snow-covered bushes.

Knowing Tracy had been there all night, he grabbed his medical bag and, with no ropes, plunged over the side. After a controlled slide down the sheer face he reached Tracy, lying in the snow. She had succumbed to hypothermia, but the rescuer could detect a very faint pulse. He called up to his partners, “She is still alive!” They grabbed more medical gear and jumped over the side, also without ropes. The three MSR rescuers began first aid. Within 10 minutes, the big rescue helicopter had slid into the narrow canyon, and Tracy was winched up. Tracy Granger was deep in severe hypothermia, her body temperature at 85 degrees. She flat-lined three times but came back, due largely to the first aid given by the rescue team. Amazingly she recovered.

It’s these kinds of rescues the MSR team lives for. For Tracy had not only survived her brush with death, but she also was determined to show her gratitude to her life-saving rescuers in an unusual way. When the rescue team visited Tracy in the hospital a month later, she vowed to return with them to the scene of the accident to bring attention to the heroic rescue they had performed. Sure enough, in August 2012, only five months after her accident, the still-healing woman accompanied the MSR team up the Crest to the accident site. As news cameras recorded the event, Tracy Granger rappelled down the hillside, along with the team that had saved her life, to visit the exact spot where she had almost died. There she found two things: a shirt she had been wearing that night and the chilling realization that had her truck not stopped where it did, there were hundreds more feet to fall. There were tears and hugs as she posed for photos with her rescuers. She was intensely grateful to the team.

In November 2012, those same 11 members of MSR team were awarded the Sheriff Department Life Saving Award, and honored for the “Rescue of the Year.” And Tracy Granger was there to hand out the awards to the heroes who had saved her life.