Montrose rescue team saves motorcyclist while looking for lost hiker

A remarkable twist of fortune in an unfortunate situation led to two lives being saved in one night this weekend.

The Montrose Search and Rescue Team said they headed up the Angeles Crest Highway on Sunday after receiving an iPhone SOS message from a solo hiker who had no idea where he was. 

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

Three units hit the road, urgency rising with nightfall, when another call came in. A motorcyclist had collided with a car about five miles ahead of them. 

Leum and Reserve Deputy Sean Morrisroe arrived at the scene first. 

"It was very dark, very chaotic, debris all over the road," Morrisroe said.

The deputies said the biker lost a lot of blood after his leg was partially amputated, and time was running out to save his life. They quickly tied a tourniquet to stem the bleeding.

"He was getting very pale and cold," Morrisroe said. "It was just by God's grace that we got the call out for the hiker, and we were five minutes away from the accident."

The deputies said that had they not been there, a Los Angeles County Fire Department crew would have responded from 35 minutes away.

"He didn't have 15 minutes, definitely not 20," Leum said.

Instead, the team was able to call for the LA County Fire helicopter.

"That person's bleeding was so extreme that without that tourniquet getting applied as quickly as it was, things would have been a lot different," said Jay Balagna, a member of Montrose Search and Rescue.

Once the biker was loaded on, the helicopter crew flew four minutes to the hospital.

The search-and-rescue teams continued onto the original call, finding 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 fine. 

"There's a whole lot of issues with his lack of preparedness and he felt badly, and he was very apologetic," Leum said. "I told him, '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 motorcyclist."

Luck, fate or divine intervention, the volunteers at Montrose Search and Rescue said whatever happened led them to two people in danger on Sunday. They said it reaffirmed that whenever they show up for work, they are exactly where they need to be.

"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," Balagna said.