EISPIRATEN

shreddy wrote: ↑I assume another one up above the falls? Airlifted for a broken nose:

http://www.altadenablog.com/2013/03/one ... -nose.html

On the day a girl who died in a hike in the San Gabriel mountains was remembered at a memorial service, two women had to be rescued after falling on the same trail.

Rescue crews worked on Saturday to rescue the women on the Eaton Canyon trail.

One woman in her 40s fell at the first waterfall at Eaton Canyon Park, said Lisa Derderian, a spokeswoman with the Pasadena Fire Department.

She had a minor nose injury and felt dizzy, so search and rescue crews called in a helicopter to hoist her out.

At same time, a call came in of a woman in her 20s who hurt her ankle closer to the Nature Center and parking lot.

She was taken to a hospital.

Rescuers search for missing hikers in Eaton Canyon
By Brian Day Staff Writer
twitter.com/sgvcrimesgvtribune.com
Posted: 04/05/2013 09:32:54 AM PDT
April 5, 2013 4:34 PM GMTUpdated: 04/05/2013 09:33:51 AM PDT


ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST -- Search and rescue officials searched Eaton Canyon Friday in response to a report that five hikers who headed into the area for a day hike and rappelling trip Thursday morning never returned, authorities said.

Los Angeles County sheriff's officials received a call about 7 a.m. Friday from a man reporting that his daughter had gone to Eaton Canyon with four others about 8 a.m. Thursday, Sgt. Booker Hollis said. They never returned from what was planned to be an eight-hour outing.

The hikers were all believed to be in their mid-20s, the sergeant said.

Flights by search helicopters were limited due to fog in the area, he said. Rescuers on the ground were focusing their search in the area of the waterfalls in Eaton Canyon, where mishaps are common.

HikeUp wrote: ↑Sounds like maybe some canyoneers are missing in Eaton?

AW wrote: ↑

HikeUp wrote: ↑Sounds like maybe some canyoneers are missing in Eaton?

All found safe
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local ... 34251.html

Fatal attraction at the falls

May 2, 2013

It was late in the day when several twentysomething hikers happened upon veteran Los Angeles County rescuer Richard De Leon. Next to him was another young man, whose broken body had just been retrieved from the rocky floor of Eaton Canyon.

“Where you coming from?” De Leon asked the group, knowing all too well the answer.

“The second falls,” they confirmed. “But we’re fine.”

De Leon motioned to the man now being photographed by coroner’s officials. “So was he about an hour ago.”

The hikers assured De Leon they weren’t like that guy. “We know what we’re doing,” they insisted.

“So did he,” the rescuer said, hoping to drive home his point but knowing that he might as well have been lecturing the rocks.

Every day in the mountains above Pasadena, this sense of youthful invincibility collides with a stretch of treacherous terrain that leads to a waterfall tucked into Eaton Canyon. Unlike an easy hike that starts at the county-operated nature center and ends at a lower waterfall, there’s no trail to speak of to reach the upper falls—just an obstacle course of crumbling rock, tree limbs and narrow ridgeline paths with sheer cliffs on both sides.

In just the past two years, five people have fallen to their deaths there, the most at any single site in the county’s sprawling recreational landscape. The most recent, in March, was a 17-year-old Alhambra girl, who was a standout in academics and athletics. Already accepted to Cornell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, high school senior Esther Suen sustained fatal head injuries after she plunged 200 feet. A teenage companion also fell, but he survived.

Although the problem is not new, De Leon, who is team captain of the Sheriff’s Department’s search and rescue team in Altadena, says the frequency of people being stranded and injured is on the rise because of social media postings that draw inexperienced hikers to the place and the destruction of other Angeles National Forest trails from the massive Station Fire a few years back.

“By the second or third rescue of the day,” De Leon says, he gets frustrated with the risk takers. “I start thinking, ‘Will you people just stop!’ ”

How to get them to do that, however, has turned into a test of competing strategies and wills among the government agencies that share responsibility for the area, including L.A. County and the U.S. Forest Service, which is responsible for the wilderness land that hikers use to reach the second waterfall.

In 2011, a series of multi-jurisdictional meetings were convened that included representatives from Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich’s office, the county’s parks and sheriff’s departments and the Pasadena fire department. From that effort came an online public service announcement featuring four uniformed sheriff and fire officials, who stressed that getting to the second waterfall “isn’t worth losing your life.”

But many at the table had wanted more. Some in the law enforcement contingent wanted to start charging reckless hikers for the substantial costs of rescues. Others suggested fencing off access points. At a minimum, though, most everyone agreed that the forest service should post a strongly worded warning sign where hikers, who’d easily reached the first waterfall, begin the mile-long trek to the second one. That is, most everyone except the forest service.

Ranger Mike McIntyre, who oversees the area, told the group that forest service lawyers wanted no warning signs placed on the agency’s land, in a spot where there’s not even a trail. Doing so, he said, could open the forest service to legal liability; attorneys representing injured hikers might argue that, if agency officials knew there was a risk of injury, then they had an obligation to make the area safer.

Now, in the wake of Suen’s death, the group is headed back to the table, this time with an even greater urgency to push the forest service to act, especially with the busy summer season approaching—or, as the Los Angeles Daily News put it in a recent editorial calling for better signage and more patrols at Eaton, the “dying season.”

Said Sussy Nemer, a senior deputy to Antonovich, whose district includes Eaton Canyon: “We’d like to see all the county agencies and the City of Pasadena work with the forest service to increase the signage near the second waterfall and put in place some kind of physical barrier to prevent hikers from even getting up there.”

Nemer said her office also hopes to recruit the area’s new state and federal elected representatives, “who could serve as allies in our cause.”

Russ Guiney, the director of the Los Angeles County’s Department of Parks and Recreation, said he’s under no illusion that more warning signs or even a fence would end the risky adventurism that’s luring the mostly younger crowds to dangerous heights. But like the county’s warnings signs in the lower canyon, he said, it might stop some in their tracks, which would represent a significant contribution to life and limb.

“I think if I was the forest service, I would want to do more,” Guiney said. “I’d think we had a moral obligation. Certainly, we in the county feel that we have a moral obligation….What people deserve and expect is a fair warning.”

Guiney also said that his office would continue to monitor—and counter—such social media sites as YouTube and Yelp, where people have romanticized the second waterfall and downplayed the dangers.

Forest service ranger McIntyre said in an interview that, at the moment, he doesn’t foresee a shift in strategy from his agency. “We’re doing what our lawyers are telling us to do,” he said.

People mistakenly come to Eaton Canyon thinking it’s an urban park, along the lines of Griffith Park, he said. “But the forest is a wildlands area,” he said. “I’m not saying the forest is dangerous but it comes with inherent risks. We need to make people better prepared, and they need to know their limits.”

Michael Leum, who oversees all of the Sheriff’s Department’s search and rescue teams, says to count him among those who’d like to see the forest service take a more active role in Eaton’s safety issues and not treat them “like Kryptonite.” Since the forest service says it has no trails beyond the first waterfall, Leum said, “they believe there is no need for maintenance or signage, regardless of the fact that hundreds of people go up there.”

Leum said that if he had his way, he’d want the agency to “install safe ingress and egress into the area.”

The status quo, he said, only guarantees this: “People are going to get hurt and killed in that canyon.”

Hikin_Jim wrote: ↑Interesting info; thanks for posting it. I've never been interested in pursuing the route. There's just something about "falling to one's death" that persuades me to hike elsewhere.

HJ

The phrase being used in the media to describe this latest threat to our safety and existence is “Urban Wilderness.” Because these canyons are usually only a few minutes away from a 7-11 or In-n-Out, they say, to inexperienced hikers they seem to be safe and controlled environments and not the untamed wilds. Those who don’t have much wilderness experience may expect the trails to be some sort of outdoor Disney Land – maintained, free from every danger except sunburns, and constantly patrolled by well-paid rangers in sparkling uniforms. They then come out onto the trails without the proper gear or preparation, take risks they shouldn’t, and quickly get themselves in over their heads.

Sean wrote: ↑ Frankly, I don't see the wisdom in this view. It assumes that some inexperienced hikers are so idiotic that they cannot see with their own eyes that they are engaging in risky behavior. And apparently such people have achieved such stupidity simply because the wilderness exists too closely to the city. This notion doesn't make sense to me.

The Altadena Mountain Rescue Team, along with search and rescue teams from Sierra Madre and Montrose, rescued two hikers on Tuesday, June 25, in a complex technical rescue that lasted until the early morning hours.

According to a release from the Altadena Sheriff Station, members of the Altadena team were called out to a rescue in Eaton Canyon at about 6:36 PM. Two hikers, trying to find a waterfall, wandered off the trail at Acrophobia Ridge toward Power Line Trail. The release said that family members of the hikers contacted the Downey police department when the hikers did not return home, and Downyey notified the Sheriff's Department.

Montrose and Sierra Madre teams were called to assist at about 8:20 PM, according to the release, "as the position of the hikers was extremely precarious and dangerous. The expertise of all three teams was needed to handle the sophisticated operation that used harnesses to pull the hikers off the ridge and to safety. The operation ended in the early morning hours. There were no reported injuries. "

A male hiker was rescued Saturday afternoon after falling from a trail in Eaton Canyon.
The victim who fell about 35 feet was airlifted just after 3 p.m. to Huntington Memorial Hospital, a deputy at the Altadena Sheriff's Station said. The severity of his injuries was not known.

Another hiker who witnessed and took photos of the rescue near the large waterfall said that the victim was not hiking alone.

"My boyfriend and I were hiking up and spotted the man about a hundred yards before the waterfall," the woman said, adding that the victim's friends were with him and he was "partially bent backwards over a rock, and his arms and chest were covered."

It approached very quickly, and very low, and gave no warning bell or siren to warn the 50 or so people (including families with small children, and elderly) that they were approaching the popular destination. Suddenly there were rocks, branches, and debris flying very quickly, hitting heads, and one man whose back was gashed open. The dust made it difficult to breath and see. We ran over the rocks to get to cover and waited out the hovering helicopter. The injuries of those at the water seemed to be minor, but it's possible other hikers were injured from the wind and flying branches.

A few minutes later the helicopter returned, and lowered down a rescue worker to assist. It circled back a few times, making it dangerous to begin the trek back to the road, so the crowd waited out the rescue. It then came back and hoisted up the forestry service worker, and then later the stretcher with the injured hiker. These are what the photos show.

Upon reaching the exit at Crescent Drive, there were four fire trucks, and a new ambulance was just arriving, although it was 30 minutes after the hiker was lifted out. It is likely that it was for someone else.

HikeUp wrote: ↑ Eyewitness bitches about the "surprise" appearance of the helo, blowing stuff around and injuring bystanders...