Somewhere in the darkness of that second night on the mountain 25 years ago, Cindy Moyneur England made peace with dying.

The shrieking wind blasting around Mount Baldy and surrounding peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains screamed death at her. Numbing cold ground it into her bones.

She’d said her prayers and would accept her fate.

It was the welfare of others that worried her.

She thought about her parents, who would have to bury their daughter at 36. Her family had just celebrated Thanksgiving Day back home in Orange County not 48 hours earlier.

She thought about her patients, the people who counted on her for physical therapy that made their lives more livable.

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And what would happen to the boy?

He had started to hallucinate hours before. Now he slept fitfully, crunched in a tight ball with her, fetal shapes hunched like bobsledders inside the hollow of a log barely big enough for one person. Ryan McIntosh was only 11. Could he survive?

England hung on.

Before noon the next day, when she was too weak, too dehydrated, too frozen to stand, rescuers arrived to save them both.

England got what she calls her second chance at life and didn’t let it go to waste. She has used it to save hundreds of other lives, doing search and rescue in the forests and mountains of Southern California.

Today , she’ll celebrate the 25th anniversary of her own rescue with a climb of Mount Baldy, retracing the steps that nearly killed her on what started as a routine hike of the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains.

This time on the trek, she’ll be joined by her husband and members of the search and rescue teams she became a part of not long after her ordeal.

And she’ll remember what she went through to get there.

“It sounds a little corny,” England says, “but I’m just so grateful.”

A WRONG TURN

Back in 1991, England was known only by her maiden name of Cindy Moyneur – raised in Fullerton, a Catholic school girl who stopped attending church in college but never lost her faith in God.

She was single, living in Anaheim. A trim and fit physical therapist, she liked the outdoors and took a course in mountaineering. She had hiked to the 10,064-foot peak of Mount Baldy – formally known as Mount San Antonio – several times.

So England eagerly joined friend Chris Jordan, his two adolescent daughters, a girlfriend of theirs and their cousin Ryan McIntosh on an annual climb up Baldy the day after Thanksgiving.

Weather forecasts promised a sunny day with temperatures in the 50s and no snowfall predicted anytime soon. England wore bike shorts, a T-shirt beneath a windbreaker, and knee socks tucked into a pair of Koflach plastic boots.

The hiking party stopped around 1 p.m. for a lunch of leftover turkey sandwiches along a trail in the shadow of Mount Harwood, east of Baldy. After eating, the girls wanted to turn back. Jordan escorted them, so England and his nephew could finish the trek to the summit, about two miles away.

Jordan, a surgeon, took the heavier backpack with the food and water from England and gave her a lighter one. The day pack held a whistle, a signal mirror, a space blanket and three matches coated with wax; but nothing to eat or drink.

They figured to meet up again before the ski lift to get them back to their parked cars closed. Ryan, dressed in jeans, leather tennis shoes and a T-shirt and windbreaker, also had hiked Mount Baldy before.

By the time the pair reached the summit, fierce winds began whipping up the light snow on the ground. Frost swirled around in a fog under a graying sky. They chatted briefly with a couple headed down, high-fived and turned to go.

They took the wrong trail.

Instead of descending along the south-facing side of Baldy, they traveled north toward Mount Dawson, a misstep England didn’t realize until the trail began climbing. By then, Ryan, all of 70 pounds, was too exhausted to retrace their steps.

England found a spot where they could gather fuel for a fire, building a windbreak around it with rocks and tree limbs. She figured a search party would find them soon enough and, as darkness fell, told Ryan it would be an adventure.

They talked, never expecting to spend the night. When nobody came, they prayed, hoping to be found.

BITING COLD, SLEEPLESS NIGHT

They were right to think that a rescue party had been dispatched; volunteers began a search before dusk that Friday night. Conditions turned brutal – 100 mph winds that dropped temperatures to 33 degrees below zero.

And an unexpected snowfall.

Someone did spot a campfire. But the gale-force winds prevented reaching that ridge. Unable to stand on their feet, searchers would tell of crawling in the snow, dragging their packs behind them. It took three hours to go 100 yards.

England and Ryan stoked their fire throughout a sleepless night with branches, leaves and pine cones she retrieved in the dark even as manzanita scrub tore the skin off her legs. The aluminized blanket they had was too old to be useful, shredded in its package. Two of their three matches had gotten wet.

At one point, the lost hikers thought they saw a light in the distance and threw all the branches and twigs they had collected onto the fire to be more visible. Flames reached as high as England’s 5’6” frame, but no one came.

They didn’t panic, figuring the morning would bring rescue.

Early on Saturday, a helicopter made several passes over the spot where the two hikers stayed put. They flashed a signal with the mirror; shook the torn space blanket. The fire extinguished, but they were certain someone had spotted them.

They allowed themselves to speak of their hunger. Ryan wanted French toast; England’s thirst made her wish for a gallon of lemonade.

Hours passed, nothing came but despair. They couldn’t hike back the way they came because snow now covered the trail. England felt an urgency to do something because Ryan was seeing things that weren’t there – a phone booth, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a cabin. Scariest of all, he looked at her and asked, “Who are you?”

They left their spot to tramp toward a ridge called Devil’s Backbone, where England thought she could find a way down. They left no “X” or “SOS” marked with rocks. So when two small helicopters bounced in the air over the spot they had deserted, there was no sign of hikers.

The lost pair saw the copters but were too far in the trees, with snow drifts as high as England’s knees, to return before their would-be rescuers buzzed away.

By the time night fell again, six teams of 10 rescuers from around the Southland had covered 30 miles of snow-covered trail. One rescuer unknowingly got 300 yards from them before the wind tossed him and he retreated on a sprained knee.

With no fire for warmth their second night in the wilderness, England and Ryan wedged inside a log. In a crazy way, it reminded England of the ride at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Hypothermia, which sets in as body temperature dips to 95 degrees, threatened them. To quench her thirst, England had sucked on snow, a no-no because it lowers body temperature even more.

As Ryan slept, England heard the wind whip in the distance before it would arrive to rock their shelter. Over and over. She checked her watch all night.

Time dragged as time was running out.

It took an excruciating half-hour for England to pry herself from the log the next morning, a Sunday. She had to crawl into the sun, unable to move her frozen legs and feet. Her back ached. She felt nauseous and could barely talk. Ryan, more energetic and lucid, sat beside her.

Finally, around 11 a.m., they heard a hand-held radio crackle below them. Rescuers, by now thinking they would recover bodies, had spotted Ryan’s tracks in the snow. “Over here! We’re here!” the hikers yelled at members of the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team.

Her mom, Connie Moyneur, had remained glued to news reports back home in Yorba Linda; her dad stationed himself near Mount Baldy, a guest in the home of a local fireman. News footage shows him waving his arms in joy as England exits a helicopter. (He died earlier this year.)

Ryan’s parents, Jon and Barbara McIntosh, had secluded themselves away from the media circus that morning before their son was found. At the hospital, Barbara McIntosh told reporters: “I’m shocked that they found him alive.”

REPAYING THE DEDICATION

Both suffered frostbite on their feet. Ryan lost two toes. England, whose body temperature was recorded at 89 degrees at the hospital, lost the tip of her left big toe. Both fully recovered.

Months later, doing physical therapy on an Orange County man with a bum knee, England learned that he was one of the volunteers on the search. Rick Buhite told her how he would never give up on someone after that. His dedication inspired England to undertake the months-long training to do search and rescue.

As required, she became a reserve sheriff’s deputy and joined the San Dimas team while living in Orange County. She is now the training officer for the Montrose Search and Rescue Team, whose territory includes the Angeles National Forest.

England moved to the San Gabriel Valley 17 years ago when she married husband Keith England – a retired pathologist. They first came across each other in Yosemite National Park, but their romance didn’t begin until a year later on a group climb of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

The Englands live in Pasadena with their two dachsunds, Buttercup and Diva. She works part-time as a physical therapist, but is on call 24/7 for search and rescue.

Just this week, on the eve of Thanksgiving Day, she had to respond to a call. The physical demand is not the hardest part, England says. It’s the heartbreak when a family learns a loved one won’t be coming back.

That nearly happened with Laurel Granger, a woman from the Palmdale area, whose Ford truck skidded off a wet Angeles Crest Highway in March 2012. Granger had been on her way home from Pasadena to Juniper Hills.

With what turned out to be a broken pelvis and other injuries, Granger managed to crawl out of the smashed and overturned truck. She spent the night exposed to the elements, in and out of consciousness. England was paired up with Jason Johnston, the rescue worker who spotted Granger the next morning.

England and other rescue workers visited Granger in the hospital and then, months later, accompanied her to revisit where she had been found. The two women continue to stay in touch, calling and texting.

“I’m deeply grateful. And I’m definitely on special time,” says Granger, who recently became a full-time school teacher. “There’s something here for me to do and I hope that I’m doing it.”

England knows that feeling.

A Bible rests on the granite-topped island in her kitchen. She attends services regularly now, at Baseline Community Church in Claremont. Getting lost in the mountains and nearly dying led to a new way to live her life.

“I believe that God had everything to do with my surviving that,” she says. “I mean, I believe in miracles now.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7793 or twalker@ocregister.com or on Twitter @TellTheresa