Loving Caretakers of a Canyon Leave an Epitaph Written in the Ashes : Victims: Amy and Donn Yarrow gave up a lot of comforts to live on their remote ranch. In the end, it appears, they had no escape.

They were the genuine article, Amy and Donn Yarrow. True mountaineers who loved the outdoors more than most people will ever understand.

Where others in the rugged Malibu canyons built fancy homes overlooking the spectacular ocean panorama, the Yarrows spent half a century in several modest trailers discreetly hidden among the trees and chaparral near the top of Carbon Canyon.

The elderly couple refused to string unsightly power poles across their 80-acre ranch, instead drawing electricity from car batteries charged by solar panels on a sunny knoll.

They shared the trickle of water from their well with wildlife, scattering drinking troughs around their land for the deer, coyotes and occasional mountain lions that roam the Santa Monica Mountains.

Instead of slashing a paved driveway across their beloved homestead, they traveled in and out on a zig-zagging, 7-foot-wide dirt trail that was almost invisible beneath the canyon’s dense canopy of brush.

And it was on that trail that Amy and Donn Yarrow died about 3 p.m. Tuesday when a wind-whipped firestorm swept down from Saddle Peak and apparently incinerated them as they ran for their lives.

Officials had not formally identified the bodies Friday afternoon. But in Carbon Canyon, where neighbors look out after each other, people knew.

When she learned that Santa Ana winds were pushing the flames their way, Amy Yarrow, 67, had rushed home from her job at a Santa Monica manufacturing plant to help get her husband out. Donn Yarrow, his hip broken from a recent fall, rarely drove.

Amy Yarrow was apparently at the wheel of the couple’s battered four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup when the fireball hit. Her husband, friends speculated, probably got out to move something off the trail and was next to the passenger side door when he died.

That’s where a sheriff’s helicopter pilot found them at dusk Thursday. Authorities airlifted their charred bodies out Friday morning. The trail was too steep and too narrow for coroner’s investigators and sheriff’s homicide detectives to drive.

“I’ve never known anybody like them,” said Shawn Rhodes, who rushed to the end of Mansie Lane as soon as he heard that fire victims had been found. “If anybody could survive, it’s Amy and Donn.”

It was the 33-year-old Rhodes who each year brought a small bulldozer onto the mountain to repair washouts and landslides on the trail. Amy Yarrow would follow behind the bulldozer, making certain that it did not cut too deeply into the hillside or damage the foliage.

By the time Rhodes arrived Friday in his 1960 GMC four-wheel-drive truck, the authorities were gone. So he plunged down the trail toward the Yarrow’s ranch, edging along 100-foot drop-offs and dodging blackened rocks that had tumbled off nearby cliffs. Near a stream where Amy Yarrow had carefully marked the trail with small rocks, a burned tree blocked the way.

Around a bend, he found the charred shell of their Toyota. The Yarrows had made it only 100 yards from their home when they died.

“Oh, my god. Poor Amy. Poor Donn,” cried Rhodes. “They didn’t deserve this. I’d like to kill the guy who started this fire. This is not fair.”

The Yarrows’ trailers were gone--reduced to unrecognizable scraps of molten aluminum and twisted metal. The remnants of a book collection formed a heap of white ash in the back of a burned-out van. A lifetime’s collection of tools lay in one pile, the tool box still warm to the touch.

Donn Yarrow had been a professor of philosophy at one time, said a neighbor, a lawyer who works in Century City and asked that his name not be used. Other friends described him as a voracious reader who spent his days on the mountain with books.

Some days, he accompanied his wife to her job in Santa Monica, where she worked part-time assembling gauges and was helping write a factory instruction manual. He would wait outside in their camper truck.

But on Tuesday, when an arsonist’s spark ignited the hills above Malibu, he had stayed home. When his wife saw smoke billowing above the coastline that morning, she raced out the plant’s door.

“She dropped everything. She knew instantly what it was. She was running as fast as she could to save her husband,” said her employer and friend for three decades, Harold Hutchinson.

Before coming to work at the plant, Yarrow had spent more than 30 years as a window clerk and mail sorter in Santa Monica post offices. During stormy weather, she sometimes camped in the parking lot in her truck to avoid being stranded in the canyon.

Friends said the independent-minded Amy Yarrow was a sail-plane enthusiast who enjoyed the freedom of gliding silently with nothing more than a breeze keeping her aloft. Earlier this year, they said, she drove her husband on a cross-country trip to Vermont.

But back on the mountainside, Shawn Rhodes pulled one of Amy Yarrow’s cookie tins from the debris and carried it to the scorched truck. From inside the cab, he retrieved a few small bones from beneath the springs of the seat that investigators had overlooked.

“This may seem weird, but I want to give them a decent burial,” Rhodes said. “Amy and Donn deserve it.”