THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM : Dozens Find Rustic Homes Intact Amid Ruined Countryside : Damage: Firefighters leapfrogging along canyon roads are unable to beat back flames to save other houses, some custom-built.

As far as Michael Judge could see, the canyons around his ridge-top home at the foot of Boney Mountain were blackened and barren, marked only by the skeletons of trees and by smoke rising from hot spots.

“It’s Rod Serling. It’s really ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ” said Judge, 50, as he stood outside his small rental home Thursday morning. A firestorm Wednesday had blown out a bedroom screen and charred tar paper on the roof but left the structure intact.

“It came so close, I can’t believe it,” he said. “The fire leaped around and over.”

Judge was among dozens of residents near Yerba Buena Road in the Santa Monica Mountains who returned Thursday morning to find the earth scorched to within feet of their homes.

Even if the houses were untouched, residents found themselves without power and phones. Most were also without water from their wells, because firefighters had used it to stave off flames or because electricity was needed to power the pumps.

On Wednesday, firefighters had beaten down flames around some homes as the blaze swept from one ridge to the next.

But scattered among the still-standing houses were the remnants of at least two dozen homes and as many trailers, barns and toolsheds that burned along Yerba Buena Road, Cotharin Road and private dirt roads that wind steeply up canyon walls.

Two homes that burned sat on a ranch owned by country singer Dwight Yoakum. Across the street, a brick and stone chimney and charred box springs marked where a home had been. Next to it stood a leafless pomegranate tree, with oozing fruit still clinging to it.

Seven structures were destroyed at the crest of Cotharin Road on an elaborately landscaped estate owned by set designer Tony Duquette.

And several miles away, three homes at Trail’s End Ranch also went up in flames when the fire swept toward Mulholland Highway just after midnight Wednesday.

The ranch had been owned by Donald Scott--the millionaire who was fatally shot by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy a year ago during a drug raid on the property.

Scott’s widow, Frances Plante Scott, said the only thing left standing of the homes were three chimneys partly built of stone from a nearby creek.

“It reminds me of the Alamo in Texas. I feel just like the last one standing in the Alamo fighting,” said Scott, while standing on the porch of the Neptune’s Net restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway.

Architects Cory Buckner and Nicholas Roberts lost the stucco home they had designed together on a private road off Yerba Buena Road.

Buckner said she knew the 5-year-old home would be lost when she saw the flames jump from the canyon next to them.

“I didn’t see how anything could be saved up there,” she said.

But nearby homes were saved.

On Thursday, Buckner said firefighters did not stay to try to protect hers.

“I am angry at the Fire Department,” she said. “They could have at least backed up (to the home). It was possible.”

But Ventura County Fire Capt. Norman Plott, who toured the area counting the number of buildings lost, said firefighters didn’t go to Buckner’s house because of vegetation hanging over the long road and a lack of space to turn an engine around.

In all, seven strike teams with 35 fire engines leapfrogged from home to home as flames swept through the mountainous area, Plott said.

Along Mipolomoc Road, which was overrun by two firestorms, the heat became so intense in spots that it burned even the skeletons of trees. Where brush had once been 10 to 15 feet high, the hillsides were completely bare.

Judge said that because it burned so completely, he could see roads and distant houses usually obscured by the dense brush.

“I never really knew the topography of the land,” said Judge, a professional photographer and former art dealer.

“It’ll come back. I gotta believe it’ll come back,” he said. “Nature has a way of repairing herself.”