Incident On the Angeles Crest
Incident on the Angeles Crest
UP FRONT
David Edwards
IT STARTED OUT AS SUCH A GOOD SUNday for Stan Teliczan. The 41-year-old video-production technician was up early, nosing his newly rebuilt Yamaha Turbo Seca out of the gray L.A. basin towards the Angeles Crest Highway. He wanted to get to Newcomb’s Ranch, a roadside cafe, before wheezing RVs and laboring passenger cars clotted the twisting, climbing canyon road.
“I broke out of the marine layer into brilliant sunlight and fresh, fresh air,” Teliczan remembers. “I edged over a bit for a few crotch-rocketeers running their motors in rev bands my tach doesn’t even indicate-getting a nod and a wave in return. Breakfast at the Ranch, strolling amongst the 150-plus bikes, eyeballing the exotic, the unusual, chatting with riders.”
After eating, Teliczan tooled farther up the highway, above 7000 feet, just to see how his Seca’s rebuilt turbo handled the thin mountain air. Satisfied, he turned around and headed back down the hill. Towards trouble.
“One moment it was a perfect Sunday-morning ride, the very next I was in the middle of Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon, set in the San Gabriel Mountains,” Teliczan says. “At the exit of a tight, 180-degree uphill turn the locals call ‘Panorama,’ motorbikes were strewn everywhere. Bits of shrapnel in the form of fairings and frame pieces littered the highway. Bodies were scattered about. One person was lying on his back in the middle of the road, unmoving, massive amounts of fluids pouring from his body. Other riders lay in the road or at the side. It was like a bomb had gone off in the middle of a GP pack.
“Someone knelt next to the body on the centerline, screaming for him to please be okay. Others were yelling, some in pain, some in surprise. For all this agony to be here in the middle of this beautiful wilderness on this beautiful day was simply unbelievable,” Teliczan says. “A rider ran up to me yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘Go get help! He’s hurt really bad!”’
Teliczan sped back to Newcomb’s, instructed a waitress to call 9-1-1, then returned to the accident scene.
“Shock was starting to set in,” he recalls. “The injured were slipping in and out of consciousness. The rider in the middle of the road was still lying there, his helmet now off and his leathers opened up. A friend was on his knees next to him, imploring him please, for God’s sake, to hang on. Running over, I asked if the downed rider had a pulse. The friend said he thought so, but very faint.
“Then I heard a wonderful sound,” Teliczan says, “the rotor beat of Rescue 5, the L.A. County Sheriff Department’s air-lift helicopter, clawing its way through the thin air. The chopper alighted in an angry sandstorm and the crew leapt out, met by a Forest Ranger. Minutes later, ground-based rescue arrived and everyone spread out, probing, taking vitals, performing triage. The center-stripe rider was a goner, covered with a tarp. I became involved with the first-aid of a rider whose only external injury seemed to be that one of his feet was on backwards. He let loose with excruciating screams of agony each time his leg was moved. Others shaded him and held him while he was moved to a body-board. As I handed his I.V off to a crew member, I said a silent prayer of good luck.”
Rescue 5’s huge turbine engine spooled up and the big Sikorsky jumped off the highway with its cargo of injured, beating its way down the mountain to a trauma center in the L.A. megalopolis. Before leaving, Teliczan surveyed the scene once more.
What the hell had happened?
“This is where it gets really stupid,” Teliczan says. “Near as I can tell from talking to the shell-shocked survivors, a group of young, hot-shot riders left the Ranch intent on doing some serious knee-scratching up the mountain. When the group arrived at the Panorama, apparently several members were vying to be the first out of the corner. Contact was made between machines and the accident evolved. Centrifugal force pushed the mishap outwards, across the double-yellow line, towards a sandy shoulder.”
Bad enough at this point that the cluster of riders was out of control, headed toward multiple fractures, road rash and bent bikes. It got worse.
A downhill rider, approaching the same turn from the opposite direction, slammed into the tumbling bikes and bodies. The score? Fatalities: 1 (massive trauma, external and internal injuries); Injuries: 3 (ranging from near critical to serious).
“As I rode back down the mountain, I became quite angry,” Teliczan says. “No logical reason for the crash, no apparent mechanical failures, no oil/dirt/sand in the road, no weatherrelated factors. Just plain old roadracing on a public street. The anger turned to tears and I flipped up my visor to help clear my vision.
“Tears? For who? The young dead rider? The innocent guy who clobbered the whole mess? For me? Sixty seconds earlier and it could have been me getting a helicopter ride—or a blanket over my face.
“I guess it might be tears for the stupidity of the whole incident. Maybe some tears of frustration that even with Willow Springs, a worldclass racetrack nearby in the desert (where anyone can race for about $100 a day and have medics standing by), motorcyclists continue to plant themselves into the landscape, leaving messy blotches on the pavement.”
In the past 10 years, 18 riders have died on the Crest. In almost every case, the accidents should never have happened. Of course, that’s of little solace for the friends and family of the rider Stan Teliczan saw die a few Sundays ago.
“If the weather holds, maybe I’ll take some flowers up the mountain next weekend, place ’em on a turn I know of,” he says. “It might brighten up the day.”
