‘By God’s grace:’ Lost hiker’s distress call puts emergency crews in the right spot to rescue motorcyclist

LOS ANGELES (KCAL/KCBS) - In California, a lost hiker triggered a series of events that likely saved the life of a motorcycle rider who crashed in a remote area.

“Well, we kind of have a saying around here. We’re not here for this one. We’re here for the next one. We say it all the time,” Mike Leum, a reserve deputy of the Montrose Search and Rescue team, said.

Never has that been more immediately true for the Montrose Search and Rescue team than it was Sunday at about 7:30 p.m. They were headed up here on the Angeles Crest Highway after getting an iPhone SOS from a solo hiker with no idea where he was.

“He was completely lost, like 15 miles away from where he thought he was. He had been hiking for over 12 hours. All, all of it in the wrong direction,” Leum said.

Three units hit the road with the urgency rising as night fell when another call came in. They learned of a motorcycle-car crash about five miles ahead of them.

Leum and fellow reserve deputy Sean Morrisroe got there first.

“It was very dark, very chaotic, debris all over the road,” Morrisroe said. “Right away I saw his left leg, a very traumatic injury, bloody, and we knew right away he needed a tourniquet. So, I applied the tourniquet, twisted it down; it was still bleeding, twisted down some more.”

Time was running out as the motorcyclist’s leg was partially amputated and he had massive blood loss.

“Yeah, it was just by God’s grace that we got that call out for that hiker and we were five minutes away from the accident because he didn’t have 15 minutes, definitely not 20,” Morrisroe said.

Had they not been there, they said a Los Angeles County fire crew would have first responded by car from 35 minutes away.

Instead, Montrose was able to call for the Los Angeles County fire chopper. Jay Balagna and his partner cleared a turnout for the landing:

“That person’s bleeding was so extreme that without that tourniquet being applied as quickly as it was, things could have been a lot different,” Balagna said.

Once the biker was on a four-minute flight to the hospital, the crews continued on the original call. They found the lost hiker off the Rincon Red Box Fire Road, where he told them he’d started hiking that morning in Sierra Madre.

He was dehydrated but otherwise OK.

“There’s a whole lot of issues with his lack of preparedness. And he felt bad. And he was very apologetic,” Leum said. “And I told him, I was like, dude, if you hadn’t hit the SOS, 911, we wouldn’t have been activated. We wouldn’t have been in a place where we were able to save that motorcycle.”

Whether it was luck, fate or divine intervention, the volunteers said one or all of those led them to two people in danger Sunday and reaffirmed that whenever they show up for work they are exactly where they need to be:

“Well, I feel like we were put there for a purpose,” Leum said.

“The fact that we were on our way to that lost hiker and happened to be just short of them on the same road was miraculous, absolutely,” Balanga said.

In another twist, it turned out the motorcycle rider was a co-worker of one of the search team members.

She was able to visit him in the hospital and said he was overwhelmed by the sequence of events that saved him.