By John Johnson So what’s it like to be lost in a canyon for four days and dehydrated to the point of death? For rescued hiker Kyndall Jack, it meant trying to eat stones and dirt thinking they were food; sucking on twigs thinking they’d provide water the way straws do; and fending… …read more
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One of two hikers who got lost in a Southern California mountain wilderness says she remembers nothing but hallucinations between the night she disappeared and her rescue four days later.
At a news conference Monday after she was released from the hospital, Kyndall Jack said that for most of the ordeal, she didn’t realize she was missing, or that she had been hiking with her friend Nicolas Cendoya.
Jack said she began hallucinating the night she went missing in Orange County’s Cleveland National Forest on March 31. The 18-year-old said the last thing she remembered was fighting off animals with Cendoya, and believes that actually happened, but couldn’t be certain.
In the following days, she hallucinated she was being eaten by a python, and tried to eat rocks and dirt.
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One of two Southern California teens lost for several days in a rugged mountain wilderness was released Sunday from a hospital after being treated for dehydration and minor injuries, and recounted his struggles with fear and hallucinations before his eventual rescue.
Nicolas Cendoya told reporters at a brief news conference outside Orange County‘s Mission Hospital that he knew from the first night he and classmate Kyndall Jack got lost during what was supposed to be a short Easter day hike that death was a strong possibility.
As the night grew dark in the Cleveland National Forest on March 31 and the pair called 911 on a dying cell phone, Cendoya said he told Jack “If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die.”
But Cendoya said he never gave up hope that he would be rescued, and as he wandered in chest-high brush reflected on what he considered recent selfish behaviors, like focusing too much on himself and not enough on his family.
“I didn’t cry. I didn’t fear it. I just embraced everything. I said `This is what I deserve,”‘ Cendoya said. “I just knew I would get through it. I knew this wasn’t my time to die. I knew that I needed this, to become the person that I’m supposed to be.”
As the days passed without food or water, Cendoya grew so weak he said he began having “lucid dreams, lucid hallucinations, every single day.”
He said he felt the presence of God and of his best friend who died last year. He began struggling to tell the difference between sleep and waking, and eventually between life and death.
“I honestly felt that I was in the afterlife,” Cendoya said.
He was airlifted to the hospital in serious but stable condition.
Jack was discovered Thursday clinging to a rocky outcropping no bigger than a yoga mat on a near-vertical slope. She was being treated at University of California, Irvine Medical Center for dehydration and hypothermia.
The two got lost after wandering off Holy Jim Trail, a popular path in the Cleveland National Forest, where the dangers of 720 square miles of rugged mountain wilderness run up against the planned communities and shopping malls of suburban southeast Orange County.
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By Evann Gastaldo 
Rescuers followed Kyndall Jack‘s faint cries for an hour and a half yesterday before finally locating the 18-year-old hiker , who had been missing since Sunday. She was holding on to a rocky outcropping about the size of a yoga mat, on an almost vertical slope, the AP reports. She first… …read more
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At first, the rescuers couldn’t believe their ears: After four days of grueling searching, they suddenly heard a faint female voice calling for help.
Over the next 90 agonizing minutes, the cries for help — and first faint, and then louder — led the search and rescue crew across a canyon, into a drainage and up several waterfalls to a near-vertical slope where lost hiker Kyndall Jack was clinging to rocky outcropping no bigger than a yoga mat.
The 18-year-old, who had been missing in Southern California‘s Cleveland National Forest since Sunday, had no shoes, was having trouble breathing and was severely disoriented from dehydration when she was found Thursday. The first thing she asked was what year it was, said Los Angeles County Reserve Deputy Fred Wenzel, who reached her first. Then, she asked for her mother.
“She was filthy from head to toe, her lips were black with dirt, her eyes were barely open and she had on no shoes,” said sheriff’s Deputy Jim Moss, a paramedic who was dropped to her by helicopter and airlifted her to safety in a harness. “She was just kind of clinging to the ledge on the cliff side, going in and out of consciousness.”
Her rescuers were afraid to give her water, despite her extreme dehydration, because she had so much dirt in her mouth she could choke, Wenzel said.
“She was limp and almost lifeless. I was just holding her as the crew chief brought us up and just holding onto her, bringing her in,” Moss said of the airlift.
“She wouldn’t have made it much longer. She’s really lucky.”
Jack’s dramatic rescue brings a happy end to a saga that gripped Southern California since Easter, when Jack and her friend, 19-year-old Nicolas Cendoya, called 911 to report that they were lost and out of water after wandering off the trail during what they expected would be an easy day hike on the Holy Jim Trail.
The popular trail is in the Cleveland National Forest, where the dangers of 720 miles of rugged mountain wilderness run smack up against the planned communities and shopping malls of suburban southeast Orange County. Jack and Cendoya, who was rescued late Wednesday after being spotted by hikers, parked their car off a dirt road just a few miles from an upscale neighborhood where on Thursday children bounced …read more
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By John Johnson It’s a happy ending for two teenage hikers who got lost in a California canyon on Easter Sunday. Rescuers today heard the yells of Kyndall Jack, 18, and found her clinging to the side of a cliff in Cleveland National Forest, reports ABC News . After being airlifted to safety, she… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Dehydrated and disoriented, one of two teenage hikers missing in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest has been found, as crews searched for his female companion.
Nicholas Cendoya, 19, was discovered by another hiker shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday night and airlifted to a hospital.
He was talking to paramedics but struggling to answer questions about what had happened and where the second hiker, 18-year-old Kyndall Jack, might be.
“He was extremely confused and disoriented,” said sheriff’s Lt. Jason Park.
Only minimal searching had been planned for the night, but an intensified hunt with renewed hope was under way late Wednesday night for Jack after Cendoya was found.
Sheriff’s investigators planned to talk to him at length once he was recovering at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. They hoped to get more direction on where to look for Jack, who was hiking with Cendoya Sunday when the pair made a 911 call from a dying cellphone and set off the search.
The hiker who came across Cendoya went for help and found a firefighting training crew not involved in the search that just happened to be nearby, Park said.
They found Cendoya about a half-mile south of where much of the search had focused. He was surrounded by so much vegetation that the helicopter rescue crew had trouble keeping track of him once they’d found him.
“When the rescuer was lowered he lost sight of him,” said Division Chief Kris Concepcion of the Orange County Fire Authority. “That’s how thick the brush was.”
Several dozen searchers with help from helicopters had been combing the rugged hills of Trabuco Canyon in the national forest.
Two volunteers got lost themselves and had to be airlifted out Wednesday afternoon.
They were searching the area because the Sunday 911 call was traced to a nearby cell tower, Orange County Fire Authority Capt. John Muir.
Muir said earlier that Cendoya and Jack’s “probability for survival is good” with mild weather both day and night.
The two were …read more
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Sheriff’s officials say one of two hikers missing for three days in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest has been found alive.
Orange County sheriff’s Lt. Jason Park said another hiker found 19-year-old Nicholas Cendoya then told a rescue crew where to find him.
Park says Cendoya was conscious and talking.
The second hiker, 18-year-old Kyndall Jack, remains missing.
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KCAL
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The search for a young man and woman who vanished in Orange County’s Cleveland National Forest was to resume Wednesday morning, with the search growing more urgent with every hour since the teens were last heard from on Sunday night.
Parents of Nicholas Cendoya, 19, and Kyndall Jack, 18, hoped for a sign of their kids somewhere in the wooded area as experts and volunteers continued the hunt, sheriff’s Lt. Erin Guidice said.
Searchers were concentrating on an area of the Holy Jim Trail where a bloodhound picked up a scent during an overnight search, Guidice said. T
he Costa Mesa teens called authorities Sunday night saying they were lost about a mile from their car in Holy Jim Canyon, but their cellphone lost power soon afterward.
Friends who joined the search told KCAL9 that the couple is very active.
“They’re very fitness-oriented, so it’s not really a shocker that they’d be hiking but it’s a shocker that they’d be missing because of it,” Daniela Conderes told the station.
The rocky, tree-shaded dirt trail leads to a waterfall on a 2.8-mile round trip and is popular with day hikers. Its difficulty is listed as moderate to serious on a U.S. Forest Service website.
However, the lost hikers “did not keep to the trail,” Guidice said. The area has heavy brush and a creek running through it, she said.
Temperatures were moderate Friday, following an overnight low in the 50s. The area is in a section of the national forest in the Santa Ana Mountains, which lie along the border of Orange and Riverside counties southeast of Los Angeles.
The trail ranges in elevation from about 2,000 feet to about 4,000 feet.
KCAL
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Authorities say two teens who got lost while hiking in Orange County’s Cleveland National Forest on Sunday still haven’t been found.
Sheriff’s spokeswoman Gail Krause says 19-year-old Nicholas Cendoya and 18-year-old Kyndall Jack hadn’t been found by sunset on Monday.
The Costa Mesa teens called authorities Sunday night saying they were lost about a mile from their car in Holy Jim Canyon, but their cell phone lost power soon after.
Reserve deputies searched for the hikers on the ground, but officials say fog prevented the use of helicopters Sunday night and Monday morning.
The search is centered on an area of heavy brush near Trabuco Creek Road, and some deputies will patrol the area overnight.
Authorities found a vehicle belonging to one of the hikers.
