Hill Dwellers Reflect on Their Trial by Fire

This is a truism of life in the Santa Monica Mountains: As surely as the wildflowers will explode onto the hillsides each spring, so too will wildfires eventually devour those hillsides--and anything else in their path.

As Wednesday dawned and a cool sun poked through gauzy smoke, residents of mountain hamlets such as Monte Nido, Cold Canyon and West Saddle Peak repeated these thoughts almost like a mantra and agreed that, this time, they were lucky.

Mother Nature is the boss here, and residents know she can be unforgiving.

Once-verdant hillsides were left stripped and gray by the fire’s fury, but in these neighborhoods the blaze spared all but a few homes. And residents who banded together to face the flames figure they are at least partly to credit.

Dozens of homeowners refused to leave their property, dousing their roofs with water, calmly clearing thick brush and quickly helping neighbors haul out whatever they could--horses, photographs, furniture.

“I had absolute strangers hauling my stuff out,” said Cold Canyon resident Don Wallace, a deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman and a former Los Angeles city firefighter. “I don’t know how I’m going to get it back.”

Earlier, a Simi Valley man who was passing through the fire area saw Wallace’s wife struggling with a horse she was trying to evacuate. He stopped to assist her and ended up staying 14 hours to help Wallace and others clear brush and water down the ground.

“He worked his butt off,” Wallace said.

The enclaves are nestled in the small valleys and along the walls of steep canyons that crisscross the Santa Monicas east of Las Virgenes Road and south of Mulholland Highway. They are between five and seven miles southwest of the hills in Calabasas where Tuesday’s fire started about 11 a.m.

The communities are a mix of small ranches built in the 1930s and 1940s as weekend retreats and million-dollar Architectural Digest homes. Residents say their wildly different backgrounds converge with their shared love of the area’s beauty.

On Tuesday, many residents found themselves cursing the same rugged terrain that drew them to the area in the first place. Under a sun turned blood-red by the oppressive smoke, residents did what they could in the face of nature’s power.

Tom McGuire, who lives next to the landmark Saddle Peak Lodge restaurant, moved his family out of the area and then returned to spend the night in his house. He watched as firefighters shot flares and lit backfires along the property line to meet the flames that were slowly marching down the ridge. He fled.

“The firefighters did a fabulous job. They calculated it perfectly and it worked perfectly,” McGuire said Wednesday morning. “Then all of the sudden, the wind shifted and we were completely engulfed in smoke. That’s when we decided it was time to go. You’re at the mercy of the wind, ultimately.

“It’s just a miracle that this whole valley was saved,” he said.

Indeed, with firefighters spread thin, many of those who stayed literally cast their fate to the wind.

With each new gust, the wind knocked flames in unexpected directions. Residents of Monte Nido, which means “mountain nest” in Spanish, watched anxiously through the night as fire crept down steep hillsides toward the hodgepodge villages that cling to canyon walls and crowd valleys.

But it was hard to cheer changes in the fire’s direction, said longtime Monte Nido resident Don Wood, because then it would be threatening someone else’s house. If not his then a neighbor’s. If not someone he knew, then a friend of a friend.

Cathy Ikkanda’s home in Monte Nido was spared, but her brother’s in Las Flores Canyon just over the ridge burned to the ground. She said he and his wife took what they could, threw their silver in the swimming pool and drove headlong along Las Flores Canyon Road into a wall of flame to escape.

“I feel pretty lucky,” she said.

That the flames near Monte Nido marched down the hill was a good sign, Wood said. Firefighters were able to establish lines and light backfires to stymie the advance. Had the firestorm come howling through adjacent canyons, Wood said, there would have been little hope for Monte Nido.

Wood is no stranger to fires. Shortly after he moved to Monte Nido in 1970, he packed up his television and clothes and left his house behind when a brush fire threatened it. He returned the next day to find his house intact--but only because neighbors who stayed behind fought the flames off.

He has since ridden out every fire at home. “This time, we just took some photos and put them in the car,” he said. “Just in case.”

For the most part, the fires were taken in stride. Monte Nido resident Art Woodward said the Indians who once lived in these valleys decided on new camps by lighting fires and letting them burn.

Where the flames did not burn, they set up camp.

But things are not so simple anymore. Where and how homes are built is decided now by complicated geology tests and intense scrutiny by the political machine. As a result, homes are sometimes built in places the Indians would have forsaken.

Just below the summit of Saddle Peak, the highest point in the Santa Monica Mountains, homeowners in the gated community of West Saddle Peak pride themselves on breathtaking views that span from Catalina Island to the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

But those gates could not keep out the wind-whipped fire that washed over the ridgeline like a tidal wave. At least five houses were engulfed in the fire’s inexorable march to the sea. One woman, whose new house is a month away from final inspection, grabbed her approved plans as she fled.

Her house was spared.

Farther up the road, Michael Leigh arrived home from a business meeting to find fire licking literally at his doorstep. Windows popped from the intense heat and his porch was alight.

He grabbed a hose and battled the flames until a firetruck doused his home. “I think I would have lost it if it wasn’t for them,” Leigh said, tired from a fitful night. “I guess I am very, very lucky.”

More so because earlier in the morning, a neighbor grabbed Leigh’s dogs and put them in a kennel. That neighbor’s home burned to the ground.

With the danger largely passed Wednesday, residents contemplated the fire’s fury. They know they are at the mercy of the rugged terrain they call home. It is a dichotomy they embrace.

“It’s just a form of death and renewal,” said Dick Callahan, who moved back to Monte Nido just two days before the fire after being away for 10 years. “What a strange twist of fate. Welcome home to Monte Nido.”

And Leigh predicted: “In three years time it will all be back to normal and this will all be just a distant memory. But what a night!”

Times staff writer Abigail Goldman contributed to this story.

Sizzling Race to the Top

The steeper the hill, the faster a fire will burn, partly because the fire heats everything ahead of it, creating its own kindling. A brush fire can easily reach 2,000 degrees.

An Uphill Battle

1) Fire begins at base of hill.

2) Rising heat warms and dries out hillside.

3) The pre-heated area burns much faster as the fire travels uphill.

*

Meltdown (Degrees in Fahrenheit) 400 Glass: depending on the speed of the heat, could break at 400 450 Paper: variable; could ignite at 400 400-600 Wood: after long exposure at temperatures of 150-200, wood could ignite as low as 250 1,050-1,200 Aluminum: melting point, depending on alloy 1,945 Gold: melting point 2,000 Typical brush fire temperature 2,600-2,700 Steel: melting point depending on alloy *

Slope Determines Speed Slope: Speed compared to ground-level fire 30%: 2 times faster 55%: 4 times faster 70%: 8 times faster Sources: Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Cal State Northridge Department of Physics and Astronomy and U.S. Forest Service

researched by STEPHANIE STASSEL

Communities in the Fire’s Path

As the Old Topanga fire swept through secluded mountain hamlets, residents pitched in to help each other face down the fire. Ultimately, only a handful of homes were consumed.

Researched by AARON CURTISS