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Three Teenage Boys Overdue in Idyllwild
By Phil Thompson
Three boys from the Hemet area had made arrangements with their parents to spend the night at another friends parents house Saturday night. They had told their parents that they would be driving up to Pine Cove together in the early afternoon and would call when they got there.
By 10 PM they had still not called. The weather conditions although clear, was in the thirties with lots of fresh snow on the ground.
As the parents of the teens became more and more worried, one of the brothers disclosed to one of the parents that the missing teens did not plan on driving up to Pine Cove by the road but up one of the two dirt,
non-mantained control roads that come up to Idyllwild area. Glen Henderson got a Sheriff's helicopter dispatched about 10 PM. I met Glen at the start of the control road that ends up at the lower end of The Idyllwild Arts campus with our Black & white 4-wheel drive. We found fresh car tracks once we hit the snow on the steep dirt road and thought that it must be them. We had about 1.5 Ft of snow on the road by the time we got to the school campus. We keep in communication with one of the parents just in case the boys showed up.
The helicopter had followed the other road (Bee canyon) to about the four thousand-foot level where they ran into thick fog, they returned to base.
Glen and I drove back down to Hemet and started driving up the Bee Canyon control road. About half way up and about 2 AM in the morning we got a call from the parent that the missing boys had walked out after leaving their truck stuck in the snow. The boys although very tired and just a little embarrassed were fine.
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