YOSEMITE WEATHERS A CLOSE CALL : SEARCH FOR LANDSLIDE SURVIVORS CONTINUES.

Byline: Ron DeLacy Modesto Bee

Considering the monumental forces involved, the preliminary list of casualties was incredibly light:

One man dead, one woman critically injured, one woman with moderate injuries, two people with minor injuries and about 10 people treated for dust inhalation.

They were caught Wednesday night in the chain reaction launched 3,000 feet above Yosemite Valley near Glacier Point. A giant slab of granite - estimated at 300 to 400 feet wide - broke loose and roared downward, aiming at one of Yosemite's most popular areas, pushing hurricane-force wind ahead of it.

The boulder crashed into powder and rocks on a cliff ledge, and the wind it had created kept going, cutting a swath of toppled trees 100 yards wide and maybe three times that long.

``It literally exploded,'' said Assistant Chief Ranger Don Coelho, commander of the rescue operation. ``The dust cloud was so big that it was like driving through the worst fog you could imagine, but the dust cloud was made of granite.''

The damage was heaviest at an area called Happy Isles, near the foot of the John Muir trail that carries hundreds of visitors daily to and from Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, Half Dome and Tuolumne Meadows.

The Happy Isles Nature Center was only slightly damaged, park rangers said, but a small snack shop near it was almost destroyed. It was there that rescue workers Thursday morning pulled out the only body found so far - Emiliano Morales, 20, of Montebello.

He had been crushed by a fallen tree.

Hunter Sharp, the deputy incident commander, said Morales' body was found Wednesday night, several hours after the avalanche - but darkness, dust and the danger of more slides postponed the effort to retrieve the body or search for more victims until daybreak Thursday.

Smaller slides were busting loose every 15 minutes or so, Sharp said, making the search by 30 rescue workers ever more difficult and dangerous. At 5 a.m. Thursday, another big granite slab - perhaps several hundred tons - fell from the side of the original break.

So all day Thursday, as rescue workers in surgical masks poked through fallen trees covered by 6 inches of granite dust, a spotter on the Happy Isle bridge blared an air horn whenever he saw fresh puffs of dust on the cliff wall, which meant more rocks were coming down.

Some of the secondary slides loosened boulders the size of cars. Most were smaller, Sharp said, ``but the smaller stuff can still kill you.''

Accordingly, a shuttle bus and bicycle road leading to the avalanche area was closed, and Park Ranger Ron Hamann manned a checkpoint there overnight Wednesday and all day Thursday, keeping people from hiking in and taking names of people hiking out, their eyeballs peeking out behind faces covered with dust.

Those names would be compared to a list accumulated at park headquarters, where telephone lines were full of people calling from all over the United States, saying their relatives or friends were in Yosemite and hadn't been heard from since the slide.

The ``missing'' list ran well into the hundreds, Sharp said, but there was no way of guessing how many of those people might have been in the Happy Isles area when all hell broke loose.

Nobody in the park had reported anybody they knew who was in the area and hadn't been found, he said.

But Sharp wouldn't discount the possibility that more victims - dead or alive - might still be found. He said the ``primary search,'' around the Happy Isle buildings and in the piles of downed trees, will continue for several days - ``until we're reasonably assured we've searched it thoroughly.''

The base of the cliff, where new rocks and dust are piled 50 feet high, will be the last area searched. With more material still falling there as the slides continue, it's especially dangerous - and not an area likely to produce anybody still alive.

Otherwise, life goes on. Apart from the Happy Isles area, the John Muir Trail and several dozen dust-covered sites at Upper Pines, the closest campground, Yosemite remains open. The buses run, the vendors vend, people float on the river, ride their bicycles, drive their cars and snap their pictures.

And the geological hiccups continue, the huge wall of granite surrounding the valley occasionally shedding rocks and boulders - mostly unnoticed because Yosemite's visitors use such a small amount of Yosemite.

Though common, the rock slides rarely result in death.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) Search-and-rescue workers look towardWashburn Point on Thursday as an air horn signals a secondary slide.

(2) Tom Sorensen wipes granite dust off his truck following a fatal rock slide at Happy Isle Nature Center in Yosemite National Park.

(3) Dust rises from the Yosemite floor Wednesday after a half-mile-wide rock slide sent boulders down a cliff.

Associated Press