Snowboarder vanishes for days at California resort. Tracks in snow lead to ‘miracle’
Two days after a snowboarder went missing at a California mountain ski resort as a storm rolled in, he has been found, rescuers say.
The 35-year-old man was last seen at Mountain High Resort in the San Gabriel Mountains on Sunday, Jan. 26, at about 1:30 p.m., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release.
He was snowboarding with friends “when he took a wrong turn,” KCAL News reported. He found himself about 4 miles from the resort.
But with the storm, the snowboarder had a difficult time finding his way back, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Basically, he was just moving around to try to stay warm and trying not to freeze,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Casey Cheshier told the newspaper.
During the day, he drank stream water, while at night he found big trees to hunker down beside to stay warm, Cheshier said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Meanwhile, a slew of agencies scoured the area, searching for the missing man, the Palmdale Sheriff’s Station said in a Jan. 28 Facebook post.
Then, Tuesday, Jan. 28, the storm started to clear.
Cheshier told the Los Angeles Times the snowboarder started “walking around as much as possible to leave tracks.”
At the same time, “the air cleared enough” to let a helicopter with LASD to search an unchecked area, Palmdale deputies said.
The crew spotted “fresh tracks in the snow” and eventually found the man south of the resort at about 9:40 a.m. on Tuesday, according to Sierra Madre Search and Rescue and Palmdale deputies.
Those tracks led rescuers to the missing snowboarder, who was “waving them down from a clearing,” Palmdale deputies said.
Cheshier told KCAL News the snowboarder “was pretty emotional.”
“He had been out there for a long time. He was pretty tired, very cold and just happy to be found,” Cheshier told KCAL News. “He survived, that’s all that matters.”
When he went missing, the snowboarder was not dressed for the weather, wearing only a hooded jacket, Cheshier told KCAL.
“He’s not dressed appropriately, he didn’t have a proper (waterproof) shell … just a cotton hoodie,” Deputy Orlando Martinez, a coordinator for the sheriff’s Antelope Valley search and rescue team, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a miracle. ... Not a scratch on him.”
The snowboarder, who was “in good spirits,” was airlifted from the area and taken to a hospital, the LASD Special Enforcement Bureau said in an Instagram post.
Mountain High Resort is about a 70-mile drive northeast from Los Angeles.
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 11:57 AM with the headline "Snowboarder vanishes for days at California resort. Tracks in snow lead to ‘miracle’."
